Palo Alto’s four battalion fire chiefs will get pay raises of 15.5 percent under a labor deal the City Council approved Monday.
Three council members, Eric Filseth, Lydia Kou and Greg Tanaka, objected to the raises.
Filseth commended the Fire Department’s good work, but characterized the raises as “excessive” especially because of escalating fire service costs.
“I believe that 15 percent is an extremely generous raise for a group that’s already very well compensated,” Filseth said.
“We’ve been talking for a long time, a couple of years, about whether we really need to keep using expensive sworn firefighters to do EMT work which accounts for the majority of our service today,” Filseth continued.