Earnings (including overtime, longevity pay and other bonuses) of City of Ocean Shores highest-paid employees in 2012:
Mike Styner, police/fire chief, $118,159.70.
Russ Fitts, assistant police chief, $115,757.20.
Curt Begley, firefighter/paramedic/acting fire marshal, $108,618.81.
Don Grossi, police officer, $108,226.72.
Michael Thurier, firefighter/paramedic, $104,845.09.
David Batchelor, finance department, $104,705.43.
David McManus, police officer, $99,776.06.
Matt Krick, firefighter/paramedic, $96,217.40.
Travis Bearden, firefighter/paramedic, $93,305.82.
Joe Hoffman, firefighter/paramedic, $92,283.86.
Diane Foss, city clerk (retired in early 2013), $91,366.24.
Steve Ensely, finance director, $91,235.93.
Brian Ritter, firefighter/paramedic, $90,675.72.
John Garner, firefighter/paramedic, $89,487.70.
Jeremy Tower, firefighter/paramedic, $85,470.48.
Jeffrey Elmore, police officer, $84,961.56.
Chris Iversen, police officer, $83,959.50.
Kyle Watson, police officer, $83,282.89.
Mayor Crystal Dingler was paid $11,500.
City councilors were paid $4,200.
Styner was the highest paid in 2009, taking home $108,748. Fitts was paid $99,669 in 2009. Two firefighter/paramedics earned more than $102,000, and a third more than $94,000 in 2009.
Ocean Shores paid more than $5.6 million to all of its full-time, part-time and paid-volunteer employees in 2009. The total in 2012 was just under $5.3 million.
Home of...The Immaculate Jagoffs of Pittsburgh 
It just seems wrong on many levels. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate to police and fire fighters of ocean shores. It just seems out of sync with the cost of living in the area and also with salaried people in similar jobs in other small cities.
It’s way out of sync & has to be changed.
Is it any wonder they will say or do most anything to protect their seats on the gravy train?
Jezz! Where do I apply? Oh, that’s right, you have to belong to a Union before you can apply. Silly me!
Employees join the unions when hired.
Can you imagine what their pensions will cost the taxpayers? These people are grossly overpaid. These are public servants making six figures. Paramedics are not MDs. The work conditions in Ocean Shores do not warrant six figure salaries. Someone needs a reality check and their head examined.
The paramedics save your sorry ass in the field…….dumbass.
Somebody with your attitude should not be involved in saving anybody and certainly never should have been hired onto the public payroll in the first place.
Not always!
The head exam and reality check should be given to the mayor, who apparently, given the fire contract she just negotiated, thinks those types of salaries are perfectly fine. The council as a whole is apparently just as crazy for ratifieng it.
I’m alive, thanks to the Paramedics. I’m safe, thanks to the Police. Their salaries are no different than the other agencies in the area. We live by the beach and pay nothing compared to other beach communities. Yet we sit around and bitch.
So what is the limit you will pay or force your fellow citizens to pay double, triple or unlimited the home run of public unions?
You are alive because of God. You will never be safe thanks to the Police. The Police respond to incidents. After you have been robbed, raped, assaulted, or murdered the police will show up. Ask Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy how well they were protected by police. They had them all around them! You have two or three around town. If you want to feel safe, protect yourself.
How can one feel “safe” when the police & fire are a good 15 minutes away sitting in their buildings?
I guess they need those extravagant salaries so they can afford the taxes and levies.
Remember, these are the public servants you are talking about. I wonder how much the doctor at SeaMar makes.
Even she’s leaving!
From my understanding, some of the salaries of the police officers include federal grant money given to the city. The figures listed are somewhat misleading in certain aspects.
They come out of your taxes and the general fund and are what they are. There is no free lunch. They come from your taxes and the figures come from the city itself. Would you dare to suggest the city could be misleading?
Pay is pay. If it comes from a grant, the grant only lasts so long. Then the tab is on the city. Maybe we all could get grants! Then all of us could make 100,000!
Grants,if available or applicable, pay for entry level staff positions. None of those individuals making this kind of money are entry level. Most grants also have strings attached, such as the city being required to fund the individual after the grant expires. That is where O/S keeps getting in trouble, accepting “free” help with no clue how to fund it after the grant expires. “Don’t worry, be happy”.
For many years, OS does NOT hire entry level officers because the cost of training is high. But so are salaries—or are they??
The reason salaries are high is because we use Seattle, Bremerton, and Tacoma as the baseline for everything. Really? We are nothing like those places when it comes to cost of living, crime, or lifestyle. That is the game the Union has trapped all cities around here in. If you start with a false premise you keep getting screwed. How many employees have left for the “big city”? Just look at the number that have been here for years and years. but for layoffs, you would be hard put to find any that have left. Even when laid off they seem to return if the position opens up again.
Good points! They will keep demanding what they WANT.
“Entry level” does not mean untrained. It does mean that the newly hired officers start at the bottom of our union pay scale. And rises quickly from there. And, absolutely yes, in comparison to the private sector jobs requiring the same level of training and/or formal education in our area and given the working conditions like relative safety and lifestyle, the salaries are very high. Exorbitant when coupled with the fantastic benefit package. The cost of union labor in O/S is the 800 pound gorilla in the room. And the gorilla is a pickpocket. Finally, I see that one of our more ardent and less credible name-callers is back.
Entry level does indeed mean “untrained.”
Lateral means “experienced” with the training and education needed to fill a public safety position. Hate to break it to you….
If training and education needed to full a public safety position, why do we have education incentives and all that additional training provisions in the contract. The NCN and Daily World just had articles about additional training. Should Public Safety personnel already be trained on entry to buildings etc? If not, what have they been doing for the last 5, 10, 20, 30 years?
For advancement purposes. Some advice, don’t go spoutin’ off when you have no freaking clue about what you’re talking about. Anything else I can school you on?
Yes, how about some advice on how Public Safety can get rid of the uneducated overpaid fools on its payroll and replace them with professionals.
Uneducated? I believe the majority of them hold Bachelors Degrees.
I think your comment is simply uncalled for. Why resort to name calling?
What is your definition of professional(s)?
Advancement? Really. Someone has to be caught driving drunk, smoking pot or just retire for advancement in a 10 man department. This is not SPD, LAPD or NYPD. Just sit back and wait 25 years. You can be Chief too.
Here they pull people out of bars & charge them with DUI.
Wasn’t standard building entries. Look up “Active Shooter” training. That’s they were all doing.
Don’t they just open the door and walk in for a standard building entry? I would suspect that any other type of entry would presume there could be an “active shooter”. You don’t bash down a door of a home unless you worry about a person behind that door being armed and ready to shoot.
AnomynonA, great points. There was once a small coastal village whose topcop did most of that and ended up running the city (into the ground).
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