The Empire Center for Public Policy has posted updated municipal salaries on the newly revamped SeeThroughNY.net, the Center’s transparency website.

The data include the names and earnings of the 168,748 people who worked for New York’s city, county, town and village governments in 2010-11.

The Center also paired the data with its annual report on these salaries, which summarizes average wages on a regional basis for each of the local governments (outside ofNew York City) contained in the database. Some highlights:

County and municipal earnings during the period totaled over $9.1 billion.

The highest paid municipal employee was Suffolk County Police Department Deputy Chief Thomas Groneman, who earned $273,659.

The highest average salary group included 6 employees of the Kensington (Long Island) Police Department, with average earnings of $165,849.

Earnings for police and fire employees onLong Island increased by 16 percent while those in the Mid-Hudson region fell by 10 percent.

The database consists of full-time and part-time workers, including employees who left or retired during the fiscal year, and employees hired during the year. Salary totals include overtime and pay for unused sick and vacation time.

Improvements to SeeThroughNY include a redesigned database that runs queries and returns results at significantly improved speed. The new database also includes new, interactive features and advanced search options.

SeeThroughNY allows the public to examine government expenditures on the Internet. In addition to municipal payroll data, it includes payrolls for New York State and New York City government, public authorities and school districts throughout the state. Also posted are pension data for former state and local governments and school districts, state legislator office expenditures, pork barrel “member item” spending, and a benchmarking feature for comparing local government and school district spending. The site was launched July 31, 2008.

The Albany-based Empire Center is a project of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, one of the nation’s leading non-profit 501(c)3 think tanks….

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