With The City having just undergone a round of belt-tightening to overcome a $338 million deficit in the newly passed 2008-09 budget, it would seem an especially important time for municipal department heads to carefully monitor expenditures. That memo does not seem to have reached the San Francisco Fire Department, where The Examiner recently found that just five firefighters accounted for a total of nearly $843,000 in overtime pay during 2007.

And in only the last six months, this quintet of six-figure firefighters continued racking up 3,252 hours of overtime at approximately $53 per hour — as many as 970 overtime hours apiece. They are assigned to the department’s Bureau of Equipment, which fixes minor vehicle and equipment problems in the field. On standard 24-hour shifts, they perform routine maintenance during the day and then base at the Cesar Chavez Street fire station to respond to emergency repair calls.

Despite a mayoral edict for city departments to reduce overtime spending during this fiscal year, the Fire Department’s latest budget proposal asked for $20 million more in overtime funding. This request was rejected by the Board of Supervisors when it passed the new budget July 22.

Scrambling to defuse criticism about the four-alarm overtime money blaze, Fire Department officials attributed the high need for overtime staffing to a shortage of specialized personnel. A spokeswoman said fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White is trying to get more firefighters trained for the department’s specialized bureaus.

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The Fire Department is also advertising to hire another repair worker to train for the “special” requirements of the equipment- maintenance job. However, anybody who knows how frustratingly long it takes to complete the process of obtaining even the simplest city job would not be too hopeful for timely relief of this fire-engine mechanic shortage.

The most jaw-dropping spin heard to date about the alleged need for six-figure overtime pay at the Bureau of Equipment repair shop came from the union leader of San Francisco Firefighters Local 798, John Hanley. He argued that the system actually does “save The City lots of money by not having to outsource these jobs.”

So apparently the public is supposed to believe it saved money by paying $222,722 to the Bureau of Equipment’s top-earning firefighter in 2007 — just $30,000 less than Chief Hayes-White’s salary — instead of hiring a few experienced truck mechanics whose pending applications might already be on file at The City’s other fleet-maintenance yards.

Surely any competent heavy- equipment mechanic would encounter little difficulty in learning to repair special fire-engine apparatus such as water pumps or ladder extenders. San Francisco is also short of firefighters available to fight fires without overtime pay, and that is what the taxpayers need from their Fire Department.