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 Public 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…..

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