Madison Malicki’s alarm goes off at 8 p.m. No breakfast. Quick shower. Then the hour-long drive from Dixon to Sacramento on the Yolo Causeway to start her night shift at the Sacramento River Water Treatment Plant. For six years, this has been her routine—and it’s wearing her down.
Malicki isn’t alone. The small crew of water plant operators keeping Sacramento’s drinking water safe and clean is drowning in overtime. Since 2023, overtime hours for the city’s water treatment plant staff have ballooned from about 4,000 hours to 5,300 hours, costing the city $3.5 million. Workers like Malicki routinely pull 16 and 17-hour shifts. Double shifts have become“normal,”as she puts it. The real kicker? Falling asleep driving home is a regular concern—a hazard that comes with the territory when you’re this burned out.
The problem is straightforward but stubborn: Sacramento’s Department of Utilities has a staffing crisis. As of July, the Sacramento River Water Treatment Plant has 11 plant operators and five vacancies. Plant supervisor May Turner says some operators are eyeing retirement or parental leave, and there’s nowhere else to turn. The graveyard shift is particularly hard to fill. Sure, the city offers an extra 5% shift pay for night work, but competing water agencies in the region—Vallejo pays 10%, and East Bay Municipal Utilities District pays 15%—are luring people away. Add in the bureaucratic red tape of working for a city (every decision runs through labor relations, HR, city council, and the city manager), and it’s easy to see why operators are bolting for other agencies.
The city’s utilities director, Delia Fadel, acknowledges the problem. The salary ranges for plant operators—junior operators between $27 and $39 per hour, senior operators between $38 and $54 per hour—simply aren’t competitive. Back in 2023, management promised hiring bonuses, retention bonuses, and training incentives. Those programs are now defunct. The city also floated a $240,000 emergency staffing contract, which hasn’t been used yet, but documents show the proposed extension would pay outside contractors $134.68 per hour—nearly three times the maximum rate for a city employee. Union representative Payden Martin argues this is backward: pay operators more instead of handing fat contracts to outside workers who don’t know Sacramento’s water system.
And they really don’t know Sacramento’s water. The Sacramento River Water Treatment Plant opened in 1921—Calvin Coolidge pushed the button—and it’s the first of its kind west of the Mississippi. The 45-acre complex operates around the clock with Byzantine complexity. It takes two to three years just to fully learn the facility. Workers deal with seasonal challenges no contractor would understand instantly: some years bring torrential storms dumping dirt into the system; other years mean dealing with wildfire impacts. The lime slaker alone—equipment that mixes calcium oxide with water to adjust pH—can be“our problem child,”as Malicki describes it. These aren’t problems you solve by bringing in a temp.
Malicki has been at the plant for a decade, starting as an intern. She’s proud of her work, proud of the pension and retirement benefits that no one in her family before her ever had, proud of the public service mission. She and her colleagues take on crushing overtime partly because they’re terrified of what contractors would mean: replacement, devaluation, loss of control. Every shift, they try to hand off the plant better than they found it.“There’s stakes that we have in these plants,”she says. That’s the real cost nobody’s counting—not in dollars, but in the lives of people who care deeply about something bigger than themselves, stretched to the breaking point because the system won’t pay what it takes to keep them.
About the Author
Andrew Johnson
Andrew Johnson is a contributor to LocalBeat, covering local news and community stories.
