STF-RX pay cap?

What’s the skinny on this RX project on the Stanislaus and the OT cap affecting resource commitment? Hearing a lot of folks are turning down the order or pulling the plug early when they’d hit the cap and become volunteer firefighters. Any talk of an exemption on this asinine, antiquated rule so this important project can keep moving along?

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Since it’s a non-emergency incident, all employees categorized as “Exempt” are subject to OT and bi-weekly pay caps. Its been affecting most anyone in the GS 8 and above. There were whispers of a change coming but it will probably involve OPM and HRM, so probably not for a while.

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Only the government can get away with this stupid role

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It was brought up at the BOD meeting and passed up to the WO to solve.

With the increased emphasis on priority landscapes and RX, we need to treat RX assignments just like a fire assignment. True OT and ability to be exempt from the pay cap. Its going to get harder and harder to get folks to commit to RX assignments if this continues

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What are the details on the pay cap?

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NFFE is working on the issue. Simple fix would be to declare it a incident.

Assignments for prescribed burning are not suppression assignments and are not considered to be emergency assignments. This means that exempt employees cannot use the “11” prefix for overtime (TC 21) to exceed the overtime rate for a GS-10 step 1 and are also not authorized to change the RSEL code to exceed the biweekly pay cap. This affects exempt employees that are paid at or above the GS-9 step 5 rate.

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