Piecing together Monroe County’s municipal salary picture

A review of Rochester-area public payroll records for 2009 reveals that 274 municipal employees earned more than $100,000, and the top earner was Monroe County’s medical examiner, Dr. Caroline Dignan, who made $170,309.
The top 20 — with cumulative gross pay of $2.7 million — includes health department officials, six Greece police officers, the district attorney, the county’s commissioner of Human Services, the city’s deputy fire chief and the highest paid local police official, Irondequoit Chief Richard Boyan.
The information comes from analysis of payroll records requested in October by the Democrat and Chronicle under the state’s Freedom of Information Law. We sought records from 36 municipalities in Monroe and Ontario counties in preparation for Sunshine Week, a national campaign celebrated each March that tests the effectiveness of federal, state and local open records laws.
Nearly five months and more than $1,000 in data retrieval fees later, all the contacted communities have responded with data, but much of what was provided wasn’t what was requested: electronic records showing six years of employee names, titles, full- or part-time status, annual regular pay and gross wages with a breakdown of compensation, including annual overtime, bonuses or other stipends. No information was requested that would expose employees to identity theft. We were able to build a database and analyze payroll records from 17 of the communities.
The project aimed to highlight two issues: public payroll and the ease — or difficulty, as it turned out — of citizen access to government records.
Our experience was not unique.

“We also tried to get payroll data from municipalities, and it was challenging,” said Tim Hoefer, director of the Empire Center for New York State Policy, a conservative think tank that runs SeeThroughNY.net. That website offers a searchable database of public salaries as provided by the state retirement system.
The Empire Center’s data does not have the detail that the Democrat and Chronicle was seeking.

Hoefer said his group ultimately gave up on getting the information individually from counties, towns and villages.
“It was too big a task,” he said. “And it was tough to get it because all systems are different and there’s no standardized accounting system.”

That problem became apparent here, too: In some communities, officials said they couldn’t comply with the request due to paper record-keeping, payroll systems that don’t provide customized reports and the sheer volume of data requested.
“We have all that, but just not in one, single report,” said Beth Watro, human resources director in Irondequoit. Town officials there couldn’t even provide an estimate of how many hours of labor it would take to go through their system and pull out exactly what we’d asked for. Ultimately, the town provided copies of documents used annually to certify civil service payroll.
Perinton insisted it doesn’t maintain the records we asked for and instead sent us only employee names and pay rates.

Penfield initially wanted nearly $9,000 for paper copying fees and employee time needed to compile the records. Later, however, Penfield sent most of what was requested via e-mail, for free.
Henrietta officials insisted on a letter from the Democrat and Chronicle promising to reimburse them for hiring a programmer to extract the data before they’d turn over the records. Fulfilling the request initially cost $225, but the town refunded $135 after the programmer’s bill came in.
Other communities, such as Greece, Webster, Riga, Parma, and the village of Spencerport, took the request as a challenge and worked their accounting systems hard to provide the data.
“Getting the information together was really a learning experience for us,” said Kathryn Firkins, Greece’s director of constituent services. There, Human Resources director Tracey Easterly spent hours working their in-house system to pull together detailed information into a workable electronic format. The town provided the results for free.
“I think something really good came out of it,” Firkins said.

At the top

Piecing together data from 36 municipalities to give the public a snapshot of where their tax dollars go was akin to building a jigsaw puzzle with pieces from dozens of different boxes. After weeding out responses that amounted to a foot-and-a-half high stack of paper documents that couldn’t be transformed into database format, the Democrat and Chronicle set about constructing a searchable database from what could be used — the payroll records for 17 municipalities, including large employers Monroe County and the city of Rochester, and the towns of Greece, Henrietta, Webster, Brighton, Penfield, Pittsford and Irondequoit. The records detail payroll for more than 14,000 employees.
Payroll data was not sought from school or fire districts.

Among the communities whose information could not be used was Perinton, which sent only employee names and a list of their hourly or bi-weekly pay rates, and Sweden, which sent more than 150 pages of paper documents that included no overtime data. Honeoye Falls gave its weekly payroll in paper copies. And Clarkson provided more than 600 pages of copied weekly pay stubs.
In analyzing the records, we looked at payroll for 2009, the most recent full year of data available. We did not examine compensation in the form of benefits such as pension contributions or health care.
Of the 9,300 employees listed in the database who earned more than $15,080 (the state-mandated minimum wage for a 40-hour work week), 274 earned more than $100,000. Dignan led with gross pay of $170,309.
According to the Empire Center, the highest-paid county or municipal employee statewide that year was Thomas Purtill, a now-retired police captain from Rockland County. His pay in 2009 was $543,416.
And, as with our top 20 earners, the Monroe County area’s over-$100,000 club is dominated by public safety employees: city and suburban police and Rochester Fire Department employees.
“The general trend across the state is that police officers are some of the highest-paid municipal employees,” said Hoefer of the Empire Center.

The 2009 records show more than 2,000 people employed by law enforcement in Monroe County, Irondequoit, Rochester, Greece, Fairport and Brighton. That number includes command staff, officers, jailers, deputies, court security and clerical workers.
The highest-paid police official was Irondequoit Police Chief Richard Boyan, who had gross earnings of $135,087, including longevity, education and holiday pay. Boyan has been on the job with Irondequoit since 1967 and became chief in 2000.
Overall, the median gross wage in 2009 among all police employees was about $71,000, including overtime. In all, police agencies in the database spent about $145 million on employee wages. About $5.4 million of that — roughly 4 percent — was in overtime.
“If there’s a lot of overtime, you need to wonder if there’s pension padding going on or is a department so understaffed and undermanned they legitimately need that much overtime,” said Hoefer.
In 2009, the Greece Police Department was torn apart by scandal: Two officers were accused of drug and sex crimes and the chief of police, deputy chief and others were suspended or resigned. The department was down 14 sworn officers. Those who remained scrambled to fill leadership positions and worked extra hours to provide police coverage throughout the town, said Firkins, Greece’s spokeswoman.
That year, the department had 89 employees — including those who left midyear — and a total payroll exceeding $7.8 million. Of that, about 15 percent — roughly $1.2 million — was spent on overtime.
“Everyone was working quite a bit of OT that year because of the short-handedness,” said Firkins.

The department named a new chief in February 2010, and Chief Todd Baxter has restructured the command staff, hired more than a dozen new officers and instituted new general orders to help curb or manage the overtime needs.
“Overtime, within limits, is an unavoidable cost of policing,” said Baxter, noting that shifts sometimes have to be extended due to unpredictable events, court appearances and contract requirements.
“But it is our ethical and moral obligation to ensure we spend the taxpayers’ money as best we can.”

The disparities

The county’s top earners also include a host of elected officials: town supervisor John Auberger of Greece, who was paid $114,568, and Pittsford supervisor William Carpenter, who was paid $113,131. Fairport village administrator Kenneth Moore, who was appointed, was paid $122,841. In contrast, Irondequoit town supervisor Mary Ellen Heyman was paid $62,000 that year.
The list revealed other interesting disparities:

Deputy County Executive Daniel DeLaus Jr. was paid $142,582 — more than County Executive Maggie Brooks, who was paid $120,000.
Deputy County Clerk Justin Roj was paid $86,006. His boss, County Clerk Cheryl DiNolfo, earned $81,000.

And then-Monroe County Undersheriff Gary Caiola was paid $129,639, while Sheriff Patrick O’Flynn grossed $123,030.
Noah Lebowitz, Monroe County spokesman, said the sheriff’s salary is a function of the district attorney’s salary, which in turn is set based on how much state Supreme Court justices are paid. The sheriff is paid 90 percent of what District Attorney Michael Green is paid — in 2009, Green was paid $136,700.
As for the deputy county executive, deputy county clerk, undersheriff and other county staff, those salaries are determined by salary groups and step schedules, and are sometimes subject to cost-of-living adjustments and/or merit-based increases, he said.
Elected officials’ salaries, on the other hand, are set by statute at a fixed amount.

At the bottom

At the low end of the pay scale are mostly part-time seasonal workers such as lifeguards, elections inspectors and recreation assistants, many of whom are paid just a few hundred dollars for their work. The middle spectrum of public employees reflects the array of services government provides: There are highway department laborers, nurses, plow operators, bridge engineers, custodians, attorneys, librarians, auto mechanics, landscape architects, forensic scientists, caseworkers, refuse collectors and administrative assistants.
A national debate rages over whether public employees are better-compensated than their counterparts in the private sector. An Empire Center for New York State Policy study first conducted in 2006 found that the average salary for state and local government jobs in the state is higher than the private sector average in most parts of the state.
In Monroe County, however, the differential was virtually indistinguishable; with public employees earning 99 percent of the average private sector wage, according to the study.
But a different study released earlier this year by the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, says public employees generally earn 8 percent less than their private sector counterparts, when controlling for education, experience, organizational size, gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, disability and hours worked annually.
According to our data — excluding all those who earned less than what a full-time minimum wage job would pay but including all overtime and other payments — the median pay for municipal workers was $50,405. The average pay was $53,125.
Hot topic

With governments from the federal level on down struggling to make ends meet, “there is a laser focus on what governments are spending,” said Joseph Stefko, director of public finance for the Center for Governmental Research in Rochester.
“The reality is that between 65 (percent) and 75 percent of average local government costs is people costs, and that’s not to disparage those costs because those people provide very vital services and do all the things that people want government to do,” Stefko said. “But when we have the conversation about how we can do more with less, we have to address those growing people costs.”
And the taxpayers deserve a full accounting of those people costs, said Cory Janick of Penfield.

Janick would like to see towns make detailed budget and expenditure information available to the public for free “since we are the employers of those working for the town and we are financing the budget,” he said.
Making more information easily available may be the wave of the future: In response to a California scandal that uncovered municipal officials paying themselves salaries that exceeded $500,000, it’s now state law there that payroll information is posted on each municipality’s website.
And other states are taking the lead in sharing public information online: The Missouri Accountability Portal is a one-stop website with up-to-date data on almost every state expenditure, including those for payroll, contracts and vendors.
“It would be nice to understand payroll information, pensions being paid, and other detailed expenses for town maintenance and special projects,” said Janick. “That way voters can provide educated feedback to the town on where we may be over- or underspending the budget money.”
MCDERMOT

City 911 worker rakes in $80,000 in OT

A 911 dispatcher was the highest-paid city government employee again last year — thanks to more than $80,000 in overtime wages.

That allowed James Felice to edge out former Deputy Mayor Patty Malgieri, who resigned Nov. 2 and was paid $21,000 for unused vacation time.
Felice ended the year with $133,200 in total wages, according to records obtained by the Democrat and Chronicle under the Freedom of Information Law. Malgieri received $132,611.
Wages and other personnel expenses account for 60 percent of the city of Rochester’s budget. And the added pay, overtime in particular, fuels rising pension costs.
Facing a $50 million budget gap next year, city leaders have said there is no way to balance the budget without affecting personnel, either with furloughs or cutting jobs through attrition or layoffs.
“How are you going to make up $50 million?” said City Council member Carolee Conklin, head of the Council’s Finance Committee. “There is absolutely no way you can close the amount of gap we are looking at without losing uniforms.”
The city spent $9 million in overtime pay last year — more than one-third of that for police.

Cutting overtime was a focus of former Mayor Robert Duffy’s administration. But officials say there is little gain left to be made and little interest in tackling other areas of compensation — though separation pay benefits for executive employees here, for instance, are far more lucrative than, say, in Syracuse.
Vacation cash-out by departing civilian employees cost the city at least $700,000 in 2010, city records show — the highest total since 2006 but likely a fraction of the true cost, because it excludes police and firefighters. Last year was unusual in the number of veteran and senior management employees resigning or retiring.
Malgieri did not receive the highest payout in this category. That distinction went to former City Council chief of staff Bill Sullivan, who cashed out nearly $45,000 in unused hours.
The add-ons

Felice and Malgieri are among 114 city workers whose wages topped $100,000 in 2010. That number is down from 132 the year before but up from 75 in 2006.
City payroll records show dozens of areas in which employees can earn pay in addition to their base salaries, including selling back unused vacation or cashing out those days when they leave. Malgieri did both.
City officials argue they have kept wages in check. Payroll for the full-time work force increased 1.5 percent between 2000-01 and 2009-10, or $2.9 million in inflation-adjusted dollars, while the number of employees decreased by 9 percent, records show.
Acting Mayor Carlos Carballada said that while everything is on the table, there has not yet been any discussion about going after employee compensation other than reducing overtime.
“I think the small amount of money you could save, you would lose” in the long run, Conklin said, referring to cashing out or selling back vacation pay.
“I don’t know if morale could be much worse in City Hall. That (going after other pay benefits) could probably make it worse,” she said.

The level of anxiety, uncertainty and even anger, she said, is caused by the looming budget cuts and the at-times bizarre mayoral transition process.
Many pay benefits are tied up in union contracts. Even police bonuses, instituted under Duffy, are now part of the labor contract, and police set aside $210,000 for a required 30 or more bonuses to be awarded each year.
Last year, the department awarded 121 such bonuses totaling $206,268.

Take, for example, a now-retired police sergeant who ended the year as the city’s third highest-paid employee. Sgt. Shawn Brosnan collected overtime and compensatory time, cashed out unused vacation time and received a $1,788 bonus. He also got added pay for working night shifts and for his years of service, as well as a clothing allowance. Thus, his $76,000 position ended up costing taxpayers more than $130,000 in total wages, plus benefits.
Public safety personnel account for 70 percent of payroll. An arbitrator has been called in on the city’s police and firefighters labor contract, which expired in June 2008.
‘It’s cheaper’

Under Duffy, the city sought to drive down overtime and set goals of cutting police overtime by 60 percent and firefighter overtime by 37 percent in the current budget year, which ends June 30.
Executive Deputy Police Chief George Markert said this is the first year in his four or five years of handling the police budget that the target will not be met.
For the 2010 calendar year, the police and fire departments cut their overtime hours by a combined 15 percent, reducing spending by almost $715,000. Such gains will barely put a dent in what’s ahead.
The Fire Department has now been given a budget target reflecting a $5.9 million reduction for 2011-12, said Jim McTiernan, president of the firefighters union. Police have been told to plan for a cut of more than $6 million, also encompassing animal control and some parking services.
In addition, about 80 squad cars need to be replaced next year, purchases delayed to save money in the current budget year.

The 911 center, meanwhile, billed about 27,000 overtime hours last year and anticipates 24,000 hours this year. Its 2010 budget was for $802,000. Actual expenses were $1.1 million, Monroe County records show.
Under a cost-sharing agreement, the county reimburses the city for wages paid at the 911 center.

Felice, the dispatcher, put in a double shift most days last year — as he did the year before, said John Merklinger, the city’s director of emergency communications. He logged more than 2,200 overtime hours in both 2009 and 2010 — equivalent to the work of more than one additional dispatcher.
“The reality is, it’s cheaper to pay that overtime than to hire temp employees and pay the benefits and everything else,” Merklinger said, explaining it takes about 10 months to hire and train a new dispatcher.
Once hired, the first six months of training costs the city $55,000, he said. A beginning dispatcher is paid $27,000.

Unless Felice’s job performance falters, the city cannot limit the hours he works, as overtime shifts are offered on a first-come, first-served basis.
Overtime is so abundant, in part, because of understaffing but also because computer upgrades have required Merklinger to pull 10 employees to focus on that work.
The department has hired 44 people in the past year, of whom 21 are still in training. Fourteen of those new hires will finish training on or about April 1, Merklinger said.
Cashing out

When it comes to those other pay categories — vacation or personal days being sold back or cashed out, for example, as well as bonuses and longevity pay — all are legal and relatively small. But for the 10 highest-paid city employees, add-ons inflated base salaries by 20 percent.
The city’s policy for vacation accrual and cashing out is less lucrative than it used to be — but still more lucrative than in some cities. Rochester used to allow management employees, such as the mayor’s cabinet, to accrue up to 100 days. That was cut in half for employees hired after July 1, 1984. Monroe County also allows up to 50 days accrual and cash-out for management, as well as 911 dispatchers.
Syracuse, for comparison, has a “use or lose” policy on vacation for executive-level employees, and sets the maximum that can be cashed out at termination at 20 days. The city of Buffalo did not respond to multiple requests for its policy on termination pay.
Non-union management employees are small in number, roughly 300 in a full-time city work force of 2,800. And those ranks, at the top of the city pay grade, typically do not see many departures. But this is not a typical year, as the city lost two deputy mayor-level employees in little more than two months.
Thomas Richards moved from corporation counsel to deputy mayor, replacing Malgieri. He then stepped into the mayor’s office when Duffy departed, only to resign effective Jan. 20 so he could run for mayor in the March 29 special election.
Richards cashed out almost 39 days of unused vacation for $18,658, paid at the deputy mayor’s hourly rate.

Malgieri cashed out just more than 40 days of unused vacation, but colleagues say she forfeited countless days as she was more apt to put in extra hours than take leave.
“The city has made money on her,” Conklin said.

Duffy, when he retired in 2004 as police chief to run for mayor, was one of those employees who started before 1984. He cashed out 74 days’ vacation plus 10 days of compensatory time for $36,627.
Bracing for the hit

All this gets back to a budget where few areas remain to find big savings.

In the 911 center, Merklinger does not anticipate overtime to decline beyond this year, as call volumes continue to rise with an aging population and more agencies in the county eliminating their own dispatchers.
And the county appears willing to pay, acknowledging that overtime is the most cost-effective way to manage the workflow.

“Everybody is going to have to feel the punch,” City Council President Lovely Warren said, then paused and corrected herself: “The pinch.”
Whoever wins the special election will have to make the tough decisions. The mayor’s budget proposal typically is delivered in mid-May.

“Our obligation is to prepare the data,” Carballada said, “prepare a number of options to deal with it and, for whoever the mayor is going to be, to give them the consequences.”
He moved ahead last week, however, proposing $4.8 million in midyear cuts, including 15 layoffs. Union leaders say they will resist further reductions and wage freezes that city officials suggested Friday.
BDSHARP

Rochester city payrolls
For the second straight year, a 911 dispatcher working more than 2,200 hours in overtime was the highest paid employee in Rochester city government. James Felice received more than $80,000 in added wages, ending the year with a total of $133,200 — one of 114 city workers paid more than $100,000 in 2010. That number is down from 132 the year before but up from 75 in 2006. Over the years, the city has steadily reduced its overtime and its workforce. But personnel still accounts for 60 percent of the city budget, and the city is facing a $50 million budget gap in the year ahead.
The database below includes payroll information for city workers from 2006 to 2010.

City of Rochester firefighters pay and overtime
When firefighters earn overtime, they can take the pay or bank the hours as compensatory time to be taken as vacation or cashed out later, possibly at a higher pay rate. This salary information includes 2007 through 2010.
Total earnings also include holiday pay, shift differential, longevity pay, retroactive settlements, and other items (not shown).
Information in this database was provided by the City of Rochester. Does not include deputy chiefs.

City of Rochester police pay and overtime
When police earn overtime, they can take the pay or bank the hours as compensatory time to be taken as vacation or cashed out later, possibly at a higher pay rate. Comp time also is awarded for working a five-days-on, two-days-off (instead of four-days-on, two-days-off) schedule. The salary information contained herein includes 1997 through 2010.
Total earnings also include holiday pay, shift differential, longevity pay, retroactive settlements, and other items (not shown).
Information in this database was provided by the City of Rochester.

Findings

Although government salaries are available under state Freedom of Information laws, the information is often neither free nor easily available. In the age of information technology, some government agencies can provide only information on paper printouts. Thirty-six communities were asked for payroll data; only 17 provided information that could be imported to a database. Top earners in the Monroe County area are generally those whose jobs involve public health, welfare and safety. The lowest earners include library clerks, custodians, food service workers and nursing assistants. High-ranking public officials often are paid less than some of their staff.

By the numbers

Down by 14 sworn officers in 2009, the Greece Police Department spent $1.2 million on overtime, about 15 percent of total payroll. To lead a town of 27,000 residents, Pittsford supervisor William Carpenter was paid $113,131 in 2009. Mary Ellen Heyman, Irondequoit’s town supervisor, that year was paid $62,000 to lead a town of about 50,000 residents. The top 20 highest-paid public employees in Monroe County’s municipalities received more than $2.7 million in 2009. The Democrat and Chronicle paid more than $1,000 in Freedom of Information fees to fulfill payroll requests from 36 municipalities. More than half the towns/villages and Monroe County did not charge for the data. Some of the data retrieval and copying fees: Henrietta, $90; Rochester, $503; Clarkson, $405; Wheatland, $100; and Churchville, $26.05.

Coming up

On Monday, how transparent are members of the New York congressional delegation? Starting Monday, a six-day guide for getting information from state government.