GovernmentExecutive.com

When Kathrene Hansen, executive director of the Greater Los Angeles Federal Executive Board, tallied up the things that would have made her job easier during the wildfires that swept through Southern California recently, a change in locality pay for the Los Angeles area was near the top of the list.

"We can't recruit because we can't compete with the pay in a very expensive area," Hansen said.

The strain caused by disruptions in traffic and displacement of federal employees whose homes were burned or threatened by the fires pushed already understaffed agencies near the breaking point, she said.

"Most of our agencies have a 20 percent vacancy rate," Hansen said. "When you're staffed at bare bones, and you have even 10 percent of your workforce who can't get to work, it's very hard to keep those offices running."

Mercer Human Resources Consulting found in its annual survey that Los Angeles was the 42nd most expensive city in the world in terms of cost of living. New York was the only American city to beat Los Angeles on the list, earning the 15th spot.

And yet, the Office of Personnel Management's projections of potential locality pay rates in 2008 show that the increases for federal employees in Los Angeles would be smaller than those for employees in Buffalo, N.Y.; Hartford, Conn.; Milwaukee; Phoenix; and Sacramento, Calif., to name a few cities.

Locality pay isn't based on cost of living, but rather on private sector salaries. The 1990 Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act was implemented in 1994, with the goal of narrowing the divide between federal and private sector pay in areas where the gap was more than 5 percent, and closing the gap within nine years.

But the Federal Salary Council reported in September that as of March, the pay gap between Los Angeles federal employees and private sector employees was 52.58 percent. Only four cities had higher gaps: Boston, New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

Hansen said it's not just the private sector with which federal agencies can't compete. In Los Angeles, they struggle to keep up with state and local employees' salaries as well.

During the wildfires, one of those pay gaps was particularly notable, she said: Because federal firefighters make less than their state and local counterparts, the Los Angeles area has fewer federal firefighters than it needs. Such a gap might be less important during contained fires when state and local firefighters could pitch in.

But in fires as widespread as the ones that tore through California this fall, Hansen said, "when you're totally dependent on mutual aid, the state and local efforts are focused on nonfederal properties and protecting structures, so the fires on federal property are being dealt with by an understaffed force."

This isn't the first time that the Los Angeles Federal Executive Board has expressed a need for changes in locality pay. But Hansen said she hopes that this year's wildfires will finally make the need clear.

"We've been trying to tell Washington D.C. that for many years," she said. "Maybe that will open their eyes."