It’s no secret the county budget is tight. Accounting for roughly 1 percent of the budget is the base salary of the top 25 highest-paid county employees.
Chautauqua County has a 2013 budget of roughly $230 million. According to numbers gathered from See Through NY, the total base pay for those 25 employees was $2,338,008 in 2013. The number is a 2.8 percent increase over the base pay for the 25 highest-paid county employees in 2012. It is an 8.4 percent increase from 2009.
Holding steady as the highest paid positions in Chautauqua County are a psychiatrist at No. 1 and the district attorney at the No. 2 spot, although the base salaries for those positions have fluctuated over the years.
The following are the 25 highest-paid positions in Chautauqua County for 2013, as well as the salary for the position, as collected from See Through NY:
Psychiatrist, $162,894
District attorney, $140,428
Physical therapy director for the Chautauqua County Home, $96.164
Director of Public Facilities, $95,353
Director of Health and Human Resources, $95,187
Assistant district attorney, $94,949
Assistant district attorney, $94,509
Sheriff’s Office sergeant, $93,657
Sheriff’s Office sergeant, $91,937
Director of Human Resources, $89,441
Administrator of the Chautauqua County Home, $88,880
Sheriff’s Office command pilot, $88,866
Director of Mental Hygiene, $88,791
Chautauqua County general employee, $87,709
Chautauqua County Department of Planning and Economic Development director, $87,506
Deputy Director of the Department of Public Facilities, $87,143
Director of child support enforcement for the Department of Social Services, $85,918
Chautauqua County executive, $85,000
Sheriff’s Office deputy, $84,824
Assistant District Attorney, $84,310
Chautauqua County sheriff, $83,820
Clinical Director for the Office of Mental Health, $83,611
Chautauqua County general employee, $82,884
Executive Director for the Office of Mental Health, $82,487
Director of the Chautauqua County Alcohol and Substance Abuse Clinic, $81,740
A phone call to the director of Human Resources regarding the titles of the two general employees was not immediately returned.
Comparatively, Cattaraugus and Allegany counties’ top 25 highest-paid positions also account for roughly 1 percent of their respective budgets. Cattaraugus County has a 2013 budget of roughly $218.5 million. Allegany County’s 2013 budget is roughly $114.8 million.
In Allegany County, the highest-paid employee is the district attorney, whose 2013 salary is $141,207 according to See Through NY. Making $108,754, and the No. 2 highest-paid employee in Allegany County is a certified registered nurse practitioner for the sheriff’s office.
Similarly, in Cattaraugus County, the highest-paid employee is the district attorney, whose salary is $143,133 for 2013, according to See Through NY. The second highest-paid county employee is a professional engineer who is in charge of engineering for the county’s highway division. The position is being paid $114,883 for 2013.
You may also like
Pandemic, recession don’t bring down school budgets
Stephen T. Watson
This year's school elections were delayed and then shifted entirely to voting by mail thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, which also shut down schools here and across the country.
District officials worried this new method of Read More
The good, the bad and the ugly in Cuomo’s budget
“We are at the early stages of what shapes up as the biggest state and city fiscal crisis since the Great Depression,” said E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center. “Borrowing and short-term cuts aside, the budget doesn’t chart any clear path out of it.” Read More
Economic Experts Discuss Long-Term Impacts of Coronavirus
"My prediction for now is this is going to be the most severe and prolonged fiscal crisis New York state and its local governments have seen, really since the Great Depression when government did not operate at the scale it now operates," Empire Center Research Director E.J. McMahon said. Read More
Medicaid cuts make the state budget, with some tweaks
Bill Hammond, director of health policy at the conservative-leaning think tank the Empire Center, suggested this is because the proposed cuts are meant to slow the otherwise rapid growth in Medicaid spending, which means an increase is still possible. Read More
Gov. Cuomo’s Lawsuit on Pres. Trump’s Tax Cuts Dismissed
But according to the Empire Center, a non-profit group based in Albany, the overall impact of the Trump tax cuts actually benefited most state residents. Read More
EDITORIAL: State schools continue spending more for less
As reported by the Empire Center last week, “The number of students enrolled in New York state public schools is the lowest recorded in 30 years.”
Since 2000, enrollment in public schools has declined by more than 10 percent statewide with most of it upstate as enrollment in New York City schools has increased 1.3 percent in the last 10 years. Students are not leaving to go to private or parochial schools either because they, too, are showing declines, down about 8 percent in the last decade. Read More
$1 billion semiconductor plant: ‘Flashy mega-project’ or ‘transformational investment’ for New York?
"The state is continuing its strategy of pursuing flashy mega-projects instead of making New York more attractive for all businesses. We're now in the second decade of this approach, and it's still failing to deliver the promised results," Girardin said. "This is the sort of economic development strategy that politicians turn to when they don't want to take on the tougher questions." Read More
Cuomo blames lawmakers for plate fee set by his administration
The new replacement policy, which was tucked into a press release announcing new plate designs, has been criticized as a "revenue enhancer wrapped in a public relations ploy" by E.J. McMahon of the fiscally conservative Empire Center for Public Policy. Read More
Enjoying our work? Sign up for email alerts on our latest news and research.