While Daniel Lurie may be proud of his annual salary of $1 as mayor, one of the highest paid employees in the city last year was a 911 dispatch supervisor who earned more than $475,000 in total salary when factoring in overtime pay, according to compensation data from the city controller.
The supervisor is Heather Grives, who has worked as a dispatch supervisor in the city’s Department of Emergency Management since 2017. When it comes to base salary, her numbers are in line with the city’s pay raise structure for the job: Grives’ annual rate began at just over $107,000 in her first year, rising to $155,729 in 2025.
It’s overtime, though, that has put Grives in the elite company of top earners in city government. After averaging about $86,500 in overtime pay between fiscal years 2017 and 2020, her rate shot to about $139,741 in 2021. It made another big jump in 2023 to $293,364; in 2024, it was $331,343. Grives’ overtime earnings crept down to $320,185 in fiscal year 2025.
In her capacity as a supervisor, Grives is tasked with managing all aspects of the dispatch office, including training dispatchers and, when necessary, taking on the “duties of a [dispatcher] as circumstances warrant,” according to the city’s description of the job. (Grives was described as a key figure in the emergency response to the brutal attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul in 2022, according to a post on X from Department of Emergency Management Executive Director Mary Ellen Carroll.)
Grives did not respond to Gazetteer’s request for comment, and the Department of Emergency Management only acknowledged the rise in overtime pay and described it as a response to external factors in recent years.
“San Francisco’s 911 dispatchers and supervisors have stepped up, working as much overtime as needed to help prevent mandatory overtime for their colleagues,” spokesperson Denny Machuca-Grebe wrote in an email to Gazetteer. “The department has worked hard to address the staffing crisis that began during the COVID-19 pandemic, and we are now seeing a reduced need for overtime. We hope to continue this trend through ongoing hiring efforts.”
There are other dispatch supervisors who earn more in overtime than their base salary, such as Dorian Lok, whose overtime pay rose from just $57,012 in 2019 to $257,212 and $210,000 in the last two years.
It’s not just supervisors raking in high overtime wages, either. Of the top ten earners at the dispatch office in fiscal year 2025, eight of them made a majority of their total earnings through overtime pay, per city data. All of them worked more than 3,000 hours, which amounts to a 58-hour work week, every week, for a year.
Grives, though, is an outlier: She has reported working about 5,000 hours in each of the last three years. That represents an astonishing pace of labor: Some 96 hours of work each week, or more than 13 hours a day, seven days a week. (For example, Caroll’s X post notes that Grives handled the Pelosi call in the middle of a 16-hour shift.)
SF’s 911 dispatch center is not alone in seeing reduced staffing lead to increased overtime. Around the country, experts have been sounding the alarm on the growing number of vacant positions, a crisis made worse by an “exodus of experienced employees,” according to a 2023 report from the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch, a group that advocates for the industry and champions emergency protocols. In addition, the loss of long-term employees leads to a loss of institutional knowledge within a dispatch office, the group noted.
“The 911 staffing problem appears to be deep and wide-ranging, affecting parts of every state and every type of 911 center, from rural to urban,” the report states.
Staffing and workload issues have forced SF dispatchers to speak out for years, warning that chronic burnout will only worsen the city’s problematic 911 response times. The city has struggled to hire and retain qualified dispatchers, leaving a handful of staffers to pick up the never-ending slack.
The dispatch office isn’t the only one in the city to report eye-watering overtime pay. However, other top earners of overtime are primarily law enforcement officers employed by the San Francisco Police Department, Sheriff’s Office, or Fire Department, rather than civilians in city governance.
