Somebody's Got to Say It: Cut the SFFD's Budget

San Francisco is staring down an 877 million dollar budget deficit. In December, Mayor Lurie ordered 400 million dollars in cuts across city departments, with most facing reductions of 15% or more. Libraries, parks, public health, and social services are all on the chopping block. But one department was explicitly exempted from cuts: the San Francisco Fire Department.

The SFFD's operating budget for FY 2025-26 is 548.7 million dollars. For FY 2026-27, the department has submitted a request for $557.1 million, an increase driven almost entirely by salary and benefit growth under collective bargaining agreements. The firefighters' union contract expires June 30, 2026, and negotiations are underway. The police union has already secured a tentative 14% raise over four years; SPUR warns that if fire follows suit beyond cost-of-living adjustments, it would add $58 million to the deficit.

Meanwhile, on June 2, San Francisco voters will consider Proposition A, a 535 million dollar earthquake safety bond that includes $100 million for fire station seismic upgrades. This comes on top of 1.44 billion dollars in earthquake safety bonds voters have already approved in 2010, 2014, and 2020, with hundreds of millions allocated to fire stations. In 2024, voters also passed Proposition H, rolling back firefighter retirement ages from 58 to 55, at a starting cost of $3.7 million per year, increasing annually through 2041.

Every other department is being asked to do more with less. The fire department is being asked to do less with more. And at no point in this process has anyone in city government asked the basic question: does San Francisco need to spend this much on its fire department?

The answer, based on the department's own data, is no.

Before going further, I want to be clear about what I'm not saying. I'm not saying firefighters aren't brave. I'm not saying we don't need a fire department. I'm saying that San Francisco's fire department is overbuilt for the actual risks it addresses, that its staffing model belongs to the 1970s, and that the firefighters' union has leveraged its political position to extract extraordinary compensation while undermining street safety, housing production, and pension reform. The people who will pay for this are the San Franciscans who can least afford it.

SFFD is primarily an ambulance service

Let's start with what the SFFD actually does. In 2024, the department logged 364,655 unit dispatches. Of those, 246,015 were medical incidents, or 67%. Actual building fires accounted for 239 incidents that year.

This isn't unique to San Francisco. Nationally, only 4% of fire department runs involve any fire at all, according to the U.S. Fire Administration. But San Francisco's response is unique in its expense. The city maintains 44 fire stations across 49 square miles, more firehouses per square mile than any comparable American city, according to the SF Controller's Office. Each station runs 24/7 with minimum four-person engine crews, and 19 stations also maintain full truck (ladder) companies. The department keeps 354 uniformed positions filled every single day, across three rotating shifts of 400+ members each.

All of this for 239 building fires a year.

The need for fire department response is very unevenly distributed across the city

That 239-fires-per-year figure divided by 44 stations gives you an average of 5.4 building fires per station per year, about one every ten weeks. But even that overstates how much fire most stations see.

The SF Board of Supervisors' own management audit found that just two downtown engine companies, Engine 1 and Engine 3, handle more calls than ten outer-neighborhood engines combined. Station 3 in the Tenderloin logged 16,422 total responses in 2024, including 984 fire incidents. Engine 3, with roughly 10,600 runs per year, is the busiest engine company in the department and one of the busiest in the country, exceeding even FDNY's highest-volume companies.

Meanwhile, eight stations around Twin Peaks and the ocean average three calls or fewer per day, roughly 1,000 per year. That is a 16-to-1 ratio in total call volume and a 100-to-1 ratio or more in actual fires. The quietest stations in the Sunset, Richmond, and Parkside, neighborhoods of newer, better-built housing stock, may see a handful of structure fires per year at most.

Yet every single one of these stations maintains identical 24/7 staffing. At approximately $12.5 million per station per year, the city spends the same amount to keep fully staffed fire crews standing by in neighborhoods where they will fight an actual fire once a quarter as it does in the Tenderloin, where Engine 3 runs 30 calls per shift.

Nearly all of the budget is labor

Eighty-nine percent of the SFFD's budget goes to salary and benefits: $389.6 million in salaries (including $63.1 million in overtime) plus $99.3 million in mandatory fringe benefits. Just 11% covers everything else: equipment, apparatus, facilities, training, and capital.

A starting firefighter in San Francisco earns $93,846 in base pay. At the top step, that rises to $143,208. Factor in average overtime of eight hours per week, and total compensation reaches $186,168. The top 10% of earners clear $242,111. In extreme cases, individual firefighters have earned over $400,000 in a single year, with more than $250,000 of that in overtime alone.

By comparison, FDNY firefighters in New York start at around $54,000. Chicago firefighters start at $62,000. San Francisco firefighters have the highest average salaries in the Bay Area at $136,656 versus a $127,654 regional average, while working the fewest hours: a 48.7-hour workweek compared to the 55.7-hour peer average.

And there is no shortage of people willing to do this work. In the most recent recruitment cycle, 747 people applied for the H2 Firefighter position, competing for a class of roughly 50 recruits, a ratio of 15-to-1. NBC Bay Area has reported a waitlist of some 4,000 people who want the job. When the supply of labor exceeds demand at the current price by that margin, the price is too high. This is Econ 101.

Most firefighters don't live in San Francisco

Seventy-one percent of San Francisco firefighters live outside the city, according to SF Department of Human Resources data. That is up from 66% in 2010 and trending in the wrong direction. Nearly 60 department employees commute from Placer and El Dorado counties, at least 100 miles away. Sixteen sworn firefighters live outside the state of California entirely.

There is no enforceable residency requirement. The union contract includes an "emergency recall" clause requiring a four-hour response, which one longtime firefighter described as "nothing enforceable."

This matters for two reasons. First, more than three-quarters of a half-billion-dollar department's labor costs flow out of the local economy. Second, as firefighter Michael Crehan told Streetsblog in 2018: firefighters who commute from the suburbs in large vehicles "see the city from the perspective of someone behind the wheel" and "use emergency response concerns as a red herring to delay" street safety projects that might slow their personal commutes. Fire station parking lots, he noted, "look like a monster truck rally."

The SFFD is obstructing street safety

This brings us to the SFFD's most consequential and least discussed policy impact: its systematic obstruction of street safety improvements.

The department has blocked, delayed, or forced the redesign of protected bike lanes and pedestrian safety projects on Valencia Street, Upper Market, Turk Street, Howard Street, Irving Street, and the Panhandle, among others. It demanded that transit bulb-outs at E.R. Taylor Elementary School be cut to less than half their original size. It vetoed a slow street on Holloway Avenue. It pushed to widen dozens of miles of new residential streets at Hunters Point Shipyard by 30% over what had been agreed upon.

In 2018, the firefighters' union asked every mayoral candidate whether they supported giving the SFFD Fire Marshal "the ability to reject any Vision Zero proposals." In 2013, then-Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White publicly and falsely claimed that pedestrians were at fault in 74% of crashes; the department later admitted the data was "misinterpreted."

Here is the arithmetic: San Francisco loses 25 to 43 people per year to traffic violence. The city loses an estimated 6 to 8 people per year to fires, based on national rates adjusted for California's lower fire death risk. Traffic deaths outnumber fire deaths by at least four-to-one.

When the fire department blocks a protected bike lane to preserve a few seconds of hypothetical response time for a truck that fights an actual fire once every three months, it is making a safety tradeoff, and the data shows it is making the wrong one. A UC Berkeley study found that street designs reducing vehicle speeds have "little to no effect on fire/EMS response times." Meanwhile, protected bike lane networks reduced fatalities for all road users by 49% in San Francisco between 2000 and 2012.

The SFFD is not protecting safety. It is protecting the primacy of large vehicles on city streets, including the personal vehicles of its members.

The union reversed pension reform at the height of a budget crisis

In 2011, San Francisco voters passed Proposition C, a negotiated pension reform that raised the firefighter retirement age from 55 to 58 for new hires. It was a modest step toward fiscal sustainability.

In 2024, the firefighters' union put Proposition H on the ballot to undo it, lowering the retirement age back to 55 for post-2012 hires. The motivation was not safety or recruitment. It was that younger firefighters were unhappy that they had to work three years longer than their senior colleagues.

Local 798 spent nearly $1.4 million of the $1.5 million raised for the Yes on H campaign. There was zero funded opposition. The measure passed 52-48. Starting cost: $3.7 million in FY 2025-26, increasing every year through at least 2041.

The SF Standard's editorial board wrote: "That they chose a moment when the city faces a nearly $800 million budget deficit to improve their lot shows their moxie and their mettle."

With a maximum pension of 90% of final compensation, a firefighter retiring at 55 with a top-step salary and average overtime can expect a pension north of $160,000 per year, for life, with cost-of-living adjustments, funded substantially by taxpayers. This is not fiscal discipline. It is a captured political system producing captured fiscal outcomes.

The fire service is blocking safer housing

The California Professional Firefighters and the International Association of Fire Fighters are the leading opponents of single-stair building reform, a change that would allow more efficient apartment buildings on San Francisco's typical narrow 25-foot lots. Current code requires two staircases in buildings over three stories. A second staircase consumes 7.5% to 12% of total construction costs for mid-rise projects and takes up significant floor area on small lots. OpenScope Studio found that single-stair buildings could allow "8 or more units on a lot that previously may have only held 3."

The state fire marshal's March 2026 report cited "near unanimous" opposition from California fire departments and recommended against allowing six-story single-stair buildings without further study. In San Francisco, then-Supervisor Aaron Peskin asked the Fire Marshal, DBI, and Planning Department in October 2024 to study single-stair equivalencies. No response was ever made public. When the AB 130 code freeze took effect on October 1, 2025, San Francisco had taken no action. The window is now closed until at least 2031.

The fire service argument is that single stairways could create conflicts between evacuees and first responders. The data does not support this. Pew Charitable Trusts research from 2025 found that modern multifamily buildings are six times safer than older apartments or single-family homes. The fire death rate in apartments built since 2000 is 1.2 per million residents, compared to 7.7 per million in pre-2000 apartments. Residents of a pre-1970 home face 17 times higher fire death risk than those in a post-2010 apartment. Pew also found that small single-stairway apartment buildings have "a strong safety record."

The San Francisco data confirms this pattern. The SF Board of Supervisors' Budget and Legislative Analyst reviewed all 252 two-alarm-or-greater fires in the city since July 2004 and found that 87% occurred in wood-frame buildings and 83% of fire-damaged buildings lacked sprinkler systems. No completed, occupied building constructed after 2000 with functioning sprinklers appears in the record of major San Francisco fires. Between 1989 and 2002, more than 1,700 SRO units in the Tenderloin were destroyed by fire. After the city mandated sprinklers in SROs in 2001, the problem, according to the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, "virtually disappeared."

Every unit of housing not built because of two-staircase requirements is a unit that might have replaced an older, more dangerous building. As Pew concluded: "The paths to improving housing affordability and fire safety are the same: allow more new apartments and condos."

The staffing model is from 1970

The SFFD's staffing model was built for an era when San Francisco had 11,000 fires per year. Today it has roughly 240 building fires. That is a 98% decline.

Yet the department maintains 2.09 firefighters per 1,000 residents, the highest ratio in the Bay Area and well above the NFPA guideline range of 0.84 to 1.30 for large departments. San Jose operates at 0.64 per 1,000. Oakland at 1.07. Los Angeles at 0.90. San Francisco has roughly double or triple the staffing ratio of comparable cities.

The union contract mandates four-person crews on every engine, with many stations also staffing five-person truck companies, regardless of call volume, regardless of whether those calls involve fire or someone having a panic attack. A 2026 SPUR report found that 68% of SFFD employees are assigned to fire suppression, while 68% of dispatch calls are for emergency medical services. The department has "far more fire engines than ambulances, even though most calls are medical emergencies," a mismatch that "drives up costs without improving operational efficiency."

What a rational fire department would look like

None of this means we should gut the department. It means we should right-size it. Here is what that looks like:

Replace trucks with squads for medical calls. Memphis runs 12 Alternative Response Vehicle squads, Ford F-350 pickups that handle EMS calls at a fraction of the cost of a 40,000-pound fire engine getting 3 miles per gallon. Sacramento, Tucson, Plano, and Tulsa have similar programs. Each Memphis squad handles 700 to 1,700 calls per year with estimated savings of $137,000 annually. San Francisco, where 70% of calls are medical, should be running dozens of these.

Reduce truck sizes. The SFFD already bought eight smaller "Vision Zero" engines from Ferrara Fire Apparatus with a 25-foot turning radius, down from 33 feet on older models. Expand this program. European fire departments use aerial ladder trucks that reach the same height while being two-thirds as long with half the turning radius. The design of 21st-century streets should not be dictated by 1970s-era apparatus.

Right-size staffing at low-volume stations. Eight stations average three calls or fewer per day. These stations do not need full four-person engine crews standing by around the clock. A two-person squad for medical calls, with mutual aid protocols for the rare structure fire, would serve these neighborhoods at lower cost without compromising safety.

Bring compensation in line with market reality. When there are long waitlists to join and the department has no trouble filling positions, the market is signaling that the price is too high. San Francisco does not need to match New York's $54,000 starting salary, but the current $94,000 starting base, which becomes $186,000 with typical overtime, is above what a competitive market would produce. SFFD firefighters earn the most in the Bay Area while working the fewest hours. Moderate reductions would save tens of millions while still offering strong compensation.

Invest in prevention, not just response. Sprinkler systems reduce fire deaths by 87%. In 96% of fires in fully sprinklered buildings, the fire is controlled by sprinklers alone. The NFPA has no record of a fire killing more than two people in a properly operating sprinklered building. Every dollar spent on sprinkler mandates, smoke alarm programs, and building code enforcement prevents more harm than a dollar spent on a firefighter standing by at a station that sees one structure fire per quarter.

End the SFFD's veto over street design. The 2025 Street Safety Act was a start. It caps inter-agency project reviews at 120 days and requires SFFD to publish written guidelines on acceptable street designs. But the underlying dynamic remains: a department whose primary mission is no longer fire suppression continues to dictate the width and design of city streets, at a measurable cost in human life.

What this saves

The math is straightforward. The SFFD budget is $548 million, and 89% of it is labor. Converting the eight lowest-volume stations from full engine companies to two-person squads would cut roughly half the personnel cost at each, saving an estimated $25 to $40 million per year. Bringing total compensation 10% closer to the Bay Area median, from $136,656 to approximately $123,000 in average salary, would save roughly $25 to $30 million across 1,700 sworn members, while still leaving SFFD firefighters among the best-paid in the state. Deploying squad vehicles for medical calls citywide would reduce fuel, maintenance, and apparatus replacement costs, and the overtime savings from a more rational staffing model could recover $10 to $20 million of the $60 million the department has spent in peak overtime years. Taken together, these reforms could save the city $75 to $100 million annually, roughly 15% of the current budget, without closing a single fire station or compromising response to actual structure fires. That is enough to close nearly a tenth of the city's $877 million deficit, or fund several hundred units of affordable housing, or fully staff the city's chronically underfunded street safety program for years.

Political power without accountability

The firefighters' union endorsement is described as "as good as gold" in San Francisco politics. In 2018, Local 798 spent over $1 million supporting London Breed's mayoral campaign, more than any other independent expenditure committee in that race. In 2024, they spent $1.4 million to roll back pension reform with zero funded opposition. The structural result is a department that faces no external pressure to reform: the union has the resources to shape elections, the public goodwill to avoid scrutiny, and the contractual protections to resist operational changes.

Meanwhile, San Francisco is cutting services that directly affect its most vulnerable residents to close an $877 million deficit. Every other department is being asked to justify its spending. The fire department is not.

Somebody's got to say it. Cut the SFFD's budget. Not because firefighters don't matter, but because the current spending level is disconnected from actual risk, the staffing model is a relic, the compensation exceeds what the market demands, and the department's political power is producing policy outcomes on streets, on housing, on pensions that actively harm the city.

San Francisco is spending half a billion dollars on a department built for conditions that no longer exist. The data on what needs to change is clear. The question is whether the city's political leadership will act on it.