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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Tim Hoefer

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Payroll files for 384 Public Authorities have been posted on www.SeeThroughNY.net, the Empire Center’s government transparency web site for taxpayers.The new data includes names, titles, base pay rates and total pay received for most of the 44,320 public authority employees added today.

The top earner was David Hohn, president emeritus and executive director of health policy at the Roswell Park Institute, who earned $1,519,572 in total pay.That was $1,263,549 more than his annual rate of $256,023, and more than double the amount earned by any other public authority employee. Ninety-nine out of the 100 highest paid public authority employees in 2008 worked for either Roswell Park, the Nassau Health Care Corp., or the New York City Health and Hospitals Corp.

More than 70 percent of the 7,443 employees of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PA) earned overtime or other extras above their annual base pay in 2008.The overtime champion was Thomas Hoey, a police sergeant, who earned $265,628 last year, including $167,267 in extra pay.Including Hoey, 28 of the 50 highest-paid PA employees were police officers, sergeants or lieutenants.

Newly posted data also include the 2008 salaries of 23,333 employees of municipal authorities across the state, such as:

• Albany Parking Authority executive director Michael Klein, who earned $128,115;
• Schenectady Metroplex Development Authority executive director Jayme Lahut, who earned $133,000;
• Oneida-Herkimer Solid Waste Management Authority executive director Hans Arnold, who earned $143,062, including $13,936 in extra pay;
• Yonkers Parking Authority chief of finance Haitham Gammoh, who earned $144,456, including $24,856 in extra pay;
• Water Authority of Great Neck North superintendent Robert Graziano, who earned $184,735;
• Long Island Power Authority CFO Elizabeth McCarthy, who earned $340,168, including $65,168 in extra pay; and
• Amherst Industrial Development Agency executive director/CEO/CFO James Allen, who earned $190,125, including $30,326 in extra pay.

The complete 2008 payroll of the state’s largest public authority, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, was posted in June. SeeThroughNY also offers searchable databases of complete employee payrolls for the state government, New York City and public school districts; teacher and superintendent contracts for all of the state’s 733 school districts; a breakdown of nearly $300 million in legislative pork barrel allocations approved this year and last year; operations spending by the state Senate and Assembly; and a “benchmarking” tool to compare local government spending on a per-capita basis. The Albany-based Empire Center is a non-partisan, independent think tank.