The Political Insider

A firefighter in Los Angeles is allegedly milking the system by raking in well over $300,000 in overtime for 2017, a feat that would require him to have worked more hours than there are in a year.

Donn Thompson is no stranger to controversy, having been highlighted as a major overtime earner for over two decades.

Transparent California, which hails itself as “California’s largest public pay database,” reports that Thompson received $307,542 in overtime, with total earnings of $424,913.

He’s third on the list!

Still, Eric Boehm at Reason writes, “To earn that much in overtime pay, Thompson would have had to work more hours than actually exist in a single year.”

That is … ahem … difficult to do.

How has Thompson been getting away with it? It hasn’t exactly been an under-the-radar mystery what’s going on in Los Angeles.

The LA Times reported in 1996 that Thompson was hauling in over $219,000 in overtime over three years in what they called “paycheck generosity.”

That’s an interesting way to phrase ‘fleecing taxpayers.’

That same Times report said the overtime abuses were so well known, officials as far away as Houston knew what was happening.

“We’ve all heard about what they have going there,” one fire official is reported to have said. “I don’t know of any other department that has it quite that lucrative.”

Thompson has defended his overtime pay in past reports.

“The first thing (people) think of is firefighters sitting around at the station, but they’re not just handing out free money over here,” he said. “I’m working hard.”

You kind of have to be in order to work roughly 25.4 hours per day, an estimate of what it would take to earn Thompson’s $300,000+ in overtime.

“I basically lived at the fire station,” he added.

According to Transparent California, the LAFD earned nearly $200 million in overtime pay, which amounts to 31 percent of their total budget in 2016. That dwarfs other large municipalities in budgetary percentage, more than doubling Orange County and San Diego (12%), and amounting to over six times that of the aforementioned Houston fire department (5%).

“This is what happens when a state is governed by unions, as California is: California unions elect public officials, who then sign rich contracts with the unions, who then elect public officials,” writes Daily Wire editor-in-chief, Ben Shapiro.

“We can love our firefighters, but these deals are destroying localities.”

Union officials don’t give a rip about localities, they simply seek to line the pockets of those who in turn help line their pockets. Thompson and the LAFD are taking this backscratching to extreme levels. (RELATED: Supreme Court to Hear Case on Public Sector Unions).

Have you seen union corruption like this in your city? Tell us about it in the comments section below!