The Ridgway Fire Protection District is looking to award Fire Chief Chris Miller a $15,000 salary increase in 2025, an 18% hike over this year’s salary but far less than the salary boost recommended by a consultant the district hired earlier this year.

The district’s proposed 2025 budget calls for Miller’s salary to increase from $83,200 this year to $98,200 next year, while District Administrator Katy LaSala’s salary is budgeted to increase from $57,200 this year to $67,200 in 2025.

The district’s three paid captains, who will make roughly $78,500 each this year, are not scheduled to receive a pay raise in 2025.

LaSala’s salary and, most notably, Miller’s, differ greatly from those presented by Employers Council, a Denver-based human resources and legal services firm hired by the district to conduct a compensation study.

For the fire chief role, the study recommended a median salary increase of $74,000, which would have nearly doubled Miller’s annual salary to more than $157,000. The same study contemplated a median salary increase of $4,400 for the district administrator and $14,500 for the fire captains.

The Employers Council study for the Ridgway Fire Protection District used the same market analysis that was applied to a compensation study completed for the Telluride Fire Protection District.

But the Telluride district is projected to bring in more than $11 million in general fund revenue this year, more than seven times as much as Ridgway, which projects to bring in nearly $1.5 million in revenue this year. A Plaindealer review of the market analysis for the fire chief and captain roles found it only looked at fire districts in Colorado with populations, service areas and calls for service incomparable to Ridgway.

In all instances, every fire district used in those market analyses serves areas and handles calls for service several times larger than Ridgway.

In addition, each of those districts house emergency medical services. The Ridgway Fire Protection District does not.

Miller said the Ridgway district reviewed the list of included districts and took out ones on either end of the spectrum for wages, such as Aspen, or districts that had only one paid person. They used a baseline of districts with five paid employees, he said.

“We used about everybody we could find so we could have general numbers, because most of the departments our size are volunteer,” he said.

He added: “We weren’t trying to skew the scale. And weren’t trying to do anything other than provide what information we can.”

The Ridgway Fire Protection District paid Employers Council $3,000 to conduct a compensation study a little over a year and a half after hiring its first paid chief and trio of captains. That followed taxpayers’ overwhelming support to more than double the district’s mill levy in 2022.

Prior to that, LaSala was the district’s only paid employee.

Last year, they completed a salary study for the fire captains’ raises. From that, the district’s three fire captains received a 20% bump in their 2023 annual salaries, from $55,000 to $66,000 in 2024. With overtime, captains will make about $78,500 each by the end of the year.

Miller and LaSala each received a 4% cost of living adjustment increase from their 2023 salaries.

This year’s study was completed as part of the potential consolidation of the county’s four fire districts and emergency medical services, Miller said.

The Employers Council analysis of median salaries for each of the three roles looked at paying the district administrator $29.62 an hour, or around $61,600 a year, each of the fire captains $44.74 an hour, or around $93,000 a year before overtime and the fire chief $76.04 an hour, or around $157,000 annually, nearly double Miller’s current salary.

The analysis combined three salary factors: a national human resources market salary formula, peer government sector salaries, and a peer global network, which is salary data entered by employers.

Diana Portillo-Burger, a consultant with Employers Council who presented her analysis at an Oct. 21 fire district meeting, said the peer global network is “based on whatever data we found,” as long as they have five data points.

The Plaindealer requested more information from Employers Council on how the compensation study was completed, but the consultant’s attorney, Tina Harkness, declined to answer questions.

“We do not discuss who our clients are or the work that we do for them,” Harkness wrote in an email.

Peer salaries used for the fire chief analysis included fire districts in places including Breckenridge, Steamboat Springs, Grand Junction and Montrose.

“That’s not what we consider the Western Slope,” Ridgway Fire Protection District board Vice Chair Pam Kraft said during Portillo-Burger’s Oct. 21 presentation. “We don’t consider Breck or Avon or Steamboat as Western Slope.”

The Plaindealer filed records requests with every fire district included in the Employers Council compensation study for the captain and fire chief salaries. Information provided in those responses shows those districts serve areas and handle calls for service far greater than the Ridgway Fire Protection District.

For example, the Montrose Fire Protection District serves a population of around 36,000 and covers more than 1,100 square miles. That population is nearly 28 times the size of the Ridgway Fire District’s 2,513-resident taxpayer base, while Montrose’s coverage area is nearly 14 times as large as Ridgway’s 80-square-mile service area.

The Grand Junction Fire Department serves a population of 160,000, with nearly 34,500 calls as of Nov. 4 this year. Ridgway, by comparison, has received 110 calls for service this year as of Nov. 12, according to Miller.

The fire chiefs in Montrose and Grand Junction were budgeted to make $156,704 and $191,008, respectively, this year.

And districts like the Red, White & Blue Fire Protection District in Breckenridge and Steamboat Springs Fire Rescue see around 2,000 annual calls for service and pay fire chiefs about $195,000 and $166,000 respectively.

The study did not include districts in places like Norwood and Silverton, which serve population sizes and handle calls for service that are more comparable to Ridgway. Norwood Fire Protection District serves roughly 3,500 people and handles around 400 calls for service annually, while Silverton serves a population of 792 and received 45 calls for service this year as of Oct. 18.

Miller said Norwood wasn’t included because the district only has three paid employees. The district covers 845 square miles and pays its fire chief $80,000 annually. Last week 80% of voters in the district approved a measure to triple the department’s mill levy — similar to the level support seen for Ridgway’s 2022 ballot measure. Norwood Fire Chief John Bockrath said the funding increase will primarily go toward hiring three paid on-call firefighter-paramedic employees per day.

It is up to the Ridgway board to decide how the Employers Council study is used, Miller said.

For now, if Miller and LaSala’s wage increases are approved by the board, they will be retroactively applied after staff evaluations are completed at the beginning of next year, Ridgway Fire Protection District board Chair Christen Williams said during a Nov. 9 budget work session.

Lia Salvatierra is a journalist with Report for America, a service program that helps boost underserved areas with more reporting resources.