Santa Clara is continuing its legacy of highly valuing public safety, causing its general fund to carry a heavy burden. More than half of its expenditures go toward public-safety salaries.
In 2026, the city is set to spend $169.59 million of the $335.37 million in the general fund on pay for the Santa Clara Police Department (SCPD) and the Santa Clara Fire Department (SCFD), according to the city’s most recent budget.
Not only is the amount Santa Clara spends high in aggregate dollars, but it is also significantly higher as a percentage. Many California cities earmark between 25% and 40% of their general fund for public safety.
For instance, Sunnyvale also spends a lot of money on public safety salaries. It spent $94.82 million of its $288.3 million general fund budget on public safety — 32% of its total general fund spending, according to its most recent budget.
But Santa Clara is on the upper end of what cities spend, putting it almost in a category of its own.
Santa Clara has a population around 130,000 residents, while Sunnyvale is slightly larger with a population of about 155,000 residents, according to Census data.
Given the numbers, Sunnyvale residents each pay $611 for public safety. Santa Clarans pay more than twice that at $1,304 per resident.
A look at both cities’ top earners in 2024 gives a snap-shot of how Santa Clara pays more than its neighbor.
The top 10 Santa Clara public safety salaries, according to Transparent California, totaled $6.52 million, including benefits. Sunnyvale, meanwhile, only paid $5.57 million.
Former Santa Clara Police Chief Pat Nikolai’s benefits and “other pay” accounted for about half of that roughly $1 million delta in 2024. Nikolai collected $326,945 in “other pay” and another $236,801 in benefits.
Nikolai was Santa Clara’s highest earning employee in 2024, earning $904,825 in total pay and benefits.
That year, Sunnyvale’s director of public safety, Phan Ngo, earned $545,463 in total pay and benefits, the sixth-highest public safety salary.
Last year, Santa Clarans elected a new police chief, and Sunnyvale also appointed a new public safety director. So, how those new positions will affect public-safety-salary spending long-term is still unknown.
Examining both departments’ top brass reveals that even without Nikolai’s herculean compensation, Santa Clara is still paying significantly more than Sunnyvale for public safety. For instance, Santa Clara’s tenth-highest public safety earner — a SCPD sergeant — would still be the highest-paid Sunnyvale public safety employee, earning more than all three deputy chiefs.
Most of the money Santa Clara spends on top salaries goes to the police. While Sunnyvale public safety officers are cross-trained — providing police, fire and EMT services — only $2.5 million of the $6.52 million Santa Clara spent on top salaries went to the fire department’s top brass.
Cities sometimes include some pension contributions along with benefits for figures on Transparent California. Without a clear delineation of how each city tracks these contributions, getting a clear picture of the tax burden to residents over a public servant’s career is difficult.
However, real cost is typically 30% to 60% higher than what’s reported on Transparent California, meaning the gulf between the two cities could be even larger.
Even if the numbers are only a rough estimate, Santa Clara’s public safety spending has still grown at a breakneck clip over the past decade.
In 2016, Santa Clara spent $96.29 million on salaries for all city employees, according to that year’s budget. While that year’s budget didn’t specify how much went to public safety, if the city spent the same percent as it does now, that would have amounted to $48.14 million.
That means this year’s spending amounts to a 254% increase.
Meanwhile, according to Census data, the city’s population has only grown 7% since then. In the past decade, Santa Clara’s crime rate has risen 153%, according to crime statistics.
All this ignores that roughly half of the $400 million bond measure voters approved will go toward capital projects for public safety. Although some of the numbers remain a bit opaque, what is clear is that Santa Clara’s public safety spending is swelling to never-before-seen levels.
And it doesn’t show any sign of slowing down soon.
Contact David Alexander at d.todd.alexander@gmail.com
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Santa Clara Puts Bond Money to Work
Crunching The Numbers On Santa Clara’s Salaries, Spending (Dec. 2024)
You get what your pay for.
Budget cops in Sunnyvale allowed non-stop robberies of jewelry stores.
Superbowl protectors in Santa Clara never tolerate serial strong-arm robberies.
Thank you, Santa Clara Police and Santa Clara Fire Department!
I’d rather pay you your rightful salary and feel safe than save a penny to live in the chaos.
My understanding, the average cost to hire and train a police officer until they can drive solo is roughly $250,000. That’s if they don’t require any remedial training.
How many officers leave Santa Clara to go elsewhere compared to ANY of the neighboring agencies or counties? The truth is, SCPD attracts mid-level and seasoned officers (and sergeants) from other agencies…and they don’t leave. Factoring attrition alone, SCPD saves millions of the course of their career. SCPD hires lateral officers like crazy. Many of the lateral officers demoting from Sergeant to Officer just to wear a SCPD patch. There’s a reason and money is not the dangling carrot. People leave bad managers, not bad jobs. SCPD is not perfect, but the culture and community attracts many when the qualified candidate pool is limited. This is a great “problem” to have.
There’s a reason why SCPD officers don’t leave. Yes, the pay is great. Moreover, the community loves their public safety and its reciprocated. I have a house in San Jose that was burglarized. The cops never showed up. Never. I also had a stolen car parked in my driveway. The cops never showed up. I had to put the stolen car in neutral and roll it onto the public road. A week later, the stolen car was still there even though I reported it to dispatch.
If you think professionalism is expensive, wait until you get the bill for mediocrity.
How are they counting the money, David? If they pay cops to work events and then bill the stadium for reimbursement, are they relieving the expenditure or showing other income? Thats a huge issue for Santa Clara and what you are trying to say.
It should also be noted that the City charges the stadium an administrative fee on public safety services. How does that number benefit the general fund?
If you are going to make comparisons, they should be fully investigated and reported fairly.
I also agree- you get what you pay for!
Law enforcement officers who staff Levi’s Stadium during events aren’t full-time peace officers employed by the City of Santa Clara. The vast majority of them are double-badgers, meaning they are active or reserve peace officers employed by another agency who are making extra money by wearing a Santa Clara PD uniform and picking up per diem during events.
This process has been in place since the stadium first opened in 2014. David’s article is well written and reported fairly.
Santa Clarans and the greater community aren’t getting their money’s worth with SCPD.
Santa Clara Fire should not be lumped together with Police when discussing public safety spending. The data makes it clear that the largest compensation outliers and cost growth are concentrated in the Police Department, not Fire.
Only a small fraction of the top public-safety salaries cited belong to Santa Clara Fire, and none approach the executive-level compensation that has driven much of the headline numbers. Even Santa Clara’s tenth-highest public safety earner—identified as a police sergeant—would out-earn Sunnyvale’s highest public safety employee. That is not a fire-department issue.
Santa Clara Fire delivers continuous, measurable, life-saving services: emergency medical response, fire suppression, rescue, and disaster readiness. The majority of Fire calls are medical emergencies, where response time directly affects survival and long-term outcomes. Fire staffing and deployment are dictated by safety and response standards, not discretionary spending choices.
Blurring Fire and Police together muddies the conversation and unfairly targets a department that provides high return on investment and essential services every hour of every day. If Santa Clara wants a serious discussion about fiscal accountability, it needs to separate the departments and follow the data.
Santa Clara Fire is not the driver of these compensation concerns—and should not be treated as such.
You’re absolutely wrong on that. The City of Sunnyvale borders Santa Clara; some Santa Clara Unified schools are within the Sunnyvale border, and the two cities share the same recruiting pool. Other cities bordering Santa Clara are Campbell and Cupertino, which contract fire services with the County and, of course, San Jose. Population and geographic area, Sunnyvale is the closest comparison to Santa Clara.
The City of Santa Clara’s safety and response standards are no higher than those of Sunnyvale. Both cities have a published response goal 90% of all calls for service within 6 minutes.
A differentiator between the two cities is that Santa Clara’s firefighters work a 48/96 ‘Kelly’ schedule, in which they’re on duty for two days followed by four days off. A good portion of that 48-hour/2-day duty is spent sleeping, while Sunnyvale’s public safety officers still work four 10-hour shifts in a row.
Santa Clarans and the greater community aren’t getting their money’s worth with SCFD.
Couldn’t agree more, Ann 👏
Couldn’t agree more, Ann 👏👏
The argument that Santa Clara firefighters “sleep through” their shifts ignores how emergency response works. SCFD personnel are on duty and immediately available 24/7. Rest during low call volume is what allows crews to perform safely and effectively when major incidents occur at any hour.
Santa Clara residents receive strong service because SCFD is a specialized fire department. Firefighters are dedicated to fire suppression, rescue, EMS, and hazardous materials response, with training and equipment focused on those missions. That depth matters in complex, high-risk incidents.
Sunnyvale’s public safety model asks personnel to split their time and training between police and fire roles. That may work for some communities, but it inevitably trades depth for breadth. Santa Clara has chosen mastery over multitasking—and residents benefit from that decision with dedicated fire protection and consistent emergency response.
Ann’s response appears to be lifted directly from IAFF Local 1171’s marketing. Her claims of “safety” are debunked by:
• Expert Analysis: Dr. Susan Koen notes that 48/96 shifts cause cognitive fatigue in busy departments.
• Industry Warnings: The IAFC warns of sleep deprivation and the bullying of safety whistleblowers. https://www.iafc.org/docs/default-source/1safehealthshs/progssleep_sleepdeprivationreport.pdf
• Grand Jury Findings: Santa Clara’s fire service model was deemed “outmoded.” https://santaclara.courts.ca.gov/system/files/fdresponse_0.pdf
While the union cites Silicon Valley’s cost of living to justify exorbitant pay, many firefighters live hours away in the Central Valley and Sierra Foothills. Residents in Campbell, Saratoga, San Jose, Sunnyvale, and Milpitas get the same level of emergency response for less money. Santa Clara’s high costs reflect political spending, not better service or better firefighters.
Your analysis holds for SCPD as well.
Show us the data that response times in nearby cities are as good as SCFD…oh yeah you won’t. Because they are the best in the county. ✌️
”Slow Clap” is one of those people who scream on social media that whoever doesn’t like their opinion should “unfriend me now” without ever contributing to the discussion. Thankfully, we have others here who aren’t useless.
For the useful others: Santa Clara City fire department responds to fewer calls for fire/emergency services than Sunnyvale DPS does – 5,666 vs 6,352, respectively (2020 data). Data collected from 2018-2021 shows Santa Clara FD consistently reduced mutual aid contributions to neighboring entities, becoming 2021’s lowest M/A contributor in the County. All fire jurisdictions exceeded the 90% goal; the other departments did it while helping their fellow firefighters out when called upon.
Congratulations to San Jose FD, Morgan Hill FD, and Santa Clara County FD for consistently leading the county in providing mutual aid to other agencies. And Gilroy, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Milpitas, Cal Fire, and Sunnyvale for also providing more mutual aid than Santa Clara City despite having less generous budgets, salaries, overtime, and benefits.
Your insults are as outdated as the 2020 data you share to support your argument 😂.
Does slinging insults make you feel better about not being able to answer the question I asked?
I can copy and paste some of what Ann already shared because I would say much of the same. She shares great facts. But the repetition seems like it would be unnecessarily redundant.
I think the discussion above in comments is missing the point. SCPD is overpaid, and we’re not getting our money’s worth. Rather than aggregate numbers, start with looking at pay scales then at staffing levels. Both are higher than in other cities.
SV Voice could also do some digging into which candidates were purchased by the SCPOA, and the role of those candidates in setting SCPD salaries. And then do an analysis of SCPD productivity.
SCPOA has realized a great return on its investment. At our expense.
“CSC”
This argument is internally inconsistent. First, SCFD firefighters are accused of “sleeping most of the shift.” Now the same 48/96 schedule is criticized because firefighters are supposedly too sleep-deprived to function. Both claims cannot be true at the same time.
Fatigue is a known risk in all emergency service models, particularly in busy departments. Selectively citing studies that criticize long shifts—without acknowledging workload, staffing levels, or fatigue-mitigation practices—presents an incomplete picture. Many high-performing departments use 48/96 schedules precisely because they reduce cumulative fatigue, limit excessive commuting, and improve recovery compared to fragmented schedules with frequent turnovers.
The Grand Jury’s reference to an “outmoded” model addressed governance and structure, not frontline performance or service quality. Conflating those issues misrepresents the finding. Santa Clara residents continue to receive consistent, professional emergency response from a department fully dedicated to fire, EMS, hazmat, and technical rescue—rather than personnel split between unrelated public-safety roles.
Comparisons to neighboring cities also overlook a fundamental policy choice: Santa Clara has prioritized specialization over dilution. Lower cost elsewhere is largely the result of combined police/fire roles and reduced specialization—not evidence of superior efficiency or equivalent capability.
Where firefighters live is irrelevant to the service delivered on duty. What matters is training, staffing, readiness, and accountability. On those measures, SCFD performs at a high level. Higher cost does not automatically indicate waste, just as lower cost does not guarantee comparable service.
Ann, you’re fishing for controversy in my evaluation. Try not to muddle these two observations…
a) SCFD has a relatively low call-for-service rate. With that, they have more time to sleep on shift.
b) Agencies with higher call volume and less time to sleep will likely experience cognitive fatigue, as described by Dr. Susan Koen.
The above scenarios are not inconsistent. The consistency in observations is that neither benefits residents, but both benefit the fire department’s employees. So, which is it? Santa Clara is no safer today, with firefighters working 48/96, than it was when SCFD worked 4-10s. At least with the 4-10s, firefighters were afforded full sleep every night.
Like most weak arguments, you label others as inconsistent, selective, misrepresenting, and incomplete while filling your point with posaganda terms such as high-performing, consistent, and dedicated. However, you provide no data or peer-reviewed studies to support your conjecture.
Other fire and emergency services in Santa Clara County are not ‘diluted’; they provide the same skills and capabilities as Santa Clara City’s services. Where firefighters live is highly relevant when they cite high prices in Silicon Valley in their efforts to secure higher salaries and retirement pensions. If they don’t live in Santa Clara, where the average single-family home is selling for $1,670,000, they don’t need to claim that living here is expensive to justify exorbitant benefits.
Firefighters employed by the City of Santa Clara are no better than their peers throughout the County, and their workload is lighter than in other agencies. They should not be compensated any higher.
Over the last decade the Police and Fire Unions went from their multi-candidate endorsements in 2016 to solely Gillmor aligned candidates. I have broke down by year who the POA and Fire Unions have supported and who had donated to their PAC’s. Lots of developers including Related Company. It makes me wonder how many development deals Gillmor voted in favor on (with her majority) in return for their donations to the POA supporting her candidates. Where is the Grand Jury? Quid pro quo much? and everyone wonders why they are the highest paid in region.
2016
Santa Clara Police Union
Supports
Kathy Watanabe
Debi Davis
Teresa O’Neill
Tino Silva
Pat Nikolai (heavily in favor)
Mike Sellters
Dominic Caserta (County Supervisor)
Patricia Mahan
Rod Diordon Jr.
Ahmed Rafah
Mohamed Nadeem
John McLemore
With Donations from
DeAnza Properties
Citation Homes Central
California Apartment Association
Prometheus Real Estate Group
George M. Markus and Affiliated entities- Summerhill, Essex Property Trust
Fire
Kathy Watanabe
Debi Davis
Teresa O’Neill
Tino Silva
Dominic Caserta (County Supervisor)
Patricia Mahan
Rod Diordon Jr.
John McLemore
2018
Santa Clara Police Union
Supports
Lisa Gillmor
Nancy Biagini
Hosam Haggag
Bob O’Keefe
With Donations from
Build Jobs PAC
Citation Homes Central
California Apartment Association
George M. Markus and Affiliated entities- Summerhill, Essex Property Trust
Prometheus Real Estate Group
DeAnza Properties
Newberry Park Associates LLC dba Linq Apartments
Santa Clara Fire Union
Lisa Gillmor
Nancy Biagini
Hosam Haggag
Bob O’Keefe
2020
Santa Clara Police Union
Supports
Kathy Watanabe
Teresa O’Neill
Bob O’Keefe
Robert Mezzetti
With Donations from
Related Company
Citation Homes Central
Devcon
California Real Estate PAC
DeAnza Building and Maintenance
Newberry Park Associates LLC dba Linq Apartments
Viso Properties
Republic Urban Properties
Santa Clara Fire Union
Supports
Kathy Watanabe
Teresa O’Neill
Bob O’Keefe
Robert Mezzetti
2022
Santa Clara Police Union
Supports
Lisa Gillmor
Larry McCollach
Christian Pellecchia
With Donations from
Related Company
Griffin Holdings
SCS Development Co.
Citation Homes Central
California Real Estate PAC
Santa Clara Fire Union
Lisa Gillmor
Larry McCollach
Christian Pellecchia
2024
Santa Clara Police Union
Supports
Satish Chandra
Teresa O’Neill
Bob O’Keefe
David Kertes
Kelly Cox
With Donations from
Related Company
Devcon Construction
California Real Estate PAC
Santa Clara Fire Union
supports
Satish Chandra
Teresa O’Neill
Bob O’Keefe
David Kertes
Kelly Cox
I Made an error, I did not separate the candidates the POA opposed, Mike Sellers,Patricia Mahan, Ahmed Rafah, Mohamed Nadeem, John McLemore and accidentally put them in the list they received support.
Your own logic doesn’t even support your own argument. 😂
2018 Santa Clara Fire Union Supports
Lisa Gillmor
Nancy Biagini
Hosam Haggag
Bob O’Keefe
(Only Lisa & Hosam won. Btw Hosam didn’t win a council seat it was city clerk. – still only 50% of candidates endorsed won)
2020 Santa Clara Fire Union Supports
Kathy Watanabe
Teresa O’Neill
Bob O’Keefe
Robert Mezzetti
(Only Kathy won – 25% of candidates endorsed)
2022 Santa Clara Fire Union Supports
Lisa Gillmor
Larry McCollach
Christian Pellecchia
(Only Lisa won – 1/3 of candidates endorsed)
2024 Santa Clara Fire Union Supports
Satish Chandra
Teresa O’Neill
Bob O’Keefe
David Kertes
Kelly Cox
(Only Bob & Kelly won – 2/5 of candidates endorsed – Bob also isn’t a council seat, he’s City Clerk)
So, with less than 50% of candidates actually being elected for all the previous elections you shared, how would they possibly receive a positive return on their investment? It doesn’t equal a council majority vote in their favor…
Gee, I wonder who the POA and Fire Union will support in 2026 elections. Kathy Watanabe for Mayor, The Suds Jain Recall and David Kertes come to mind. Gillmor will never deny POA and Fire a raise because they return the favor in elections. No wonder why they make so much noise about the 49ers. Once Gillmor gets a solid majority in 2026 there will be no stopping how high the salaries will go. Clearly the POA and Fire Unions do not care about the budget and pushing the city into bankruptcy. An unsustainable model, but who cares right, just blame it all on the 49ers. Clearly the current council cannot see they are being duped into supporting something Gillmor uses against them down the road.