Firefighters in the City of Greensboro continue to be the lowest paid among their peers in cities of similar size across NC. Over the course of an average career in Greensboro this results in a loss of $252,000 for firefighters vs their peers in other similar cities. This is having an extremely negative impact on the City’s ability to recruit and retain a talented and diverse firefighting force.

Recruitment continues to be at an all-time low and competition for a talented workforce is increasing as peer cities develop aggressive lateral transfer programs to take advantage of their competitive edge in compensation. Peer cities are aggressively increasing salaries, incentives, and recruitment efforts and Greensboro is being left systemically behind. Consider these facts:

The Facts

• More than 4% of line company personnel and recruits have left the department since January 1 of this year, with many leaving to accept lateral entry positions in competing departments within the state.
• The firefighters that have left for higher paying positions represent enough individuals to staff 5 of the 36 fire trucks that respond within the city each day
• The use of emergency mandatory overtime is becoming increasingly frequent, and the situation has become dire enough for fire administration to begin discussing brown outs (temporarily closing a fire truck due to lack of staffing).

Despite these facts, outside consultants were paid to produce an obviously flawed mid-year pay study. The consultants reported that, despite record US inflation and wage increases, the 50th percentile for base salary actually decreased within peer cities. The consultants supplied none of their raw data to support this outlandish claim and interviewed only a small fraction of the municipalities that are normally included in the annual survey.