County and Municipal Payrolls in New York

Local government is a labor-intensive business, and employee compensation is the single biggest element of most municipal budgets. The 2021 edition of What They Make, the Empire Center’s annual report on public payrolls, allows New York taxpayers to compare this key element of local government costs around the state.

The information in this report—broken down by region and by type of government—is based on data submitted annually to the New York State and Local Retirement System (NYSLRS) by local governments outside New York City.[i] Job titles are generally not included in the data submitted to NYSLRS.

The latest county and municipal payroll database includes 2020-21 state fiscal year payroll information for full-time and part-time workers actively enrolled in the pension system as of August 2021. The figures used to compute the averages include regular pay, overtime and pay for unused sick and vacation time. However, the figures do not include employer pension contributions, health insurance and other fringe benefits—elements of total compensation that can add 35 percent or more to personnel costs.

This report provides a summary analysis of the data, broken down by local government level: County, City, Town, Village and Fire District. Data are further divided into two categories by employee type: general employee and police or fire.[ii] Highlights include:

• New York’s highest-paid local government employee was James Dalgish, the Police Chief for the Village of Kings Point, who was paid $454,102 in 2020-21.
• The highest paid general employee was Charles Strome, the City Manager of New Rochelle, who was paid $333,922 in 2020-21. Of the fifty top-paid general employees, forty-three are from Long Island and thirty-two are from Suffolk County alone.  
• The Mid-Hudson cities of Yonkers, Rye, and New Rochelle topped the list, respectively, of highest average paying cities, each with an average pay just over $100,000.  
• The top-paying local government was the Village of Oyster Bay Cove. Serving an affluent community on Long Island’s North Shore, the village’s workforce, which consists solely of 14 police officers, was paid an average of $204,208.

Top 50 Paid Employees - statewide

Individual public employee pay records for every year starting in 2008-09 can be found at the Empire Center’s transparency website, SeeThroughNY.net. The site includes a searchable database of 171,363 people who were paid a total of $10.2 billion by 1,983 local governments outside New York City during the fiscal year ending March 31, 2021.[iii]

Who’s missing?

What They Make uses pay data reported to the New York State and Local Retirement System. However, if a public employer is not making payments on an individual’s behalf, no data are reported. This can happen for several reasons:

• An employee is already collecting a pension from the system.
• Many community college employees belong to SUNY’s Optional Retirement Plan, a 401(k)-style plan, instead of the state’s defined-benefit pension plan. The counties that employ them make no payments to the state pension system on their behalf.
• Thanks to the 2012 state pension reform, some non-union employees are eligible for the state’s 401(k)-style Voluntary Defined Contribution (VDC) retirement plan. Like the SUNY Optional Retirement Plan, the VDC plan takes the long-term responsibility of funding retirements off the shoulders of taxpayers. In Rochester alone, 11 employees joined during the first two years it was offered.[iv]

Double-dipping?

While employee home addresses and other personal identifying information are appropriately treated as confidential, the pension system does provide original hire dates for each individual on a local payroll. An analysis of 2020-21 data found 4,464 individuals who were paid by two or more local government employers in New York.

In most cases, the pay amounts reported for individuals listed under multiple employers suggest the person changed jobs during the year or had multiple part-time jobs. Sixty-eight individuals, however, had five or more employers during the year. Several of them worked as code enforcement officers, assessors, emergency medical personnel or even dog control officers for multiple local governments.

Most individuals working for multiple local governments were part-timers, such as attorneys and assessors, whose combined salaries were well below $100,000. However, 53 employees collected pay over $200,000 by working for two local government employers, up from 46 the previous year. Thirty-five of the 53 were Suffolk County employees (up from 27 last year).

In some cases, however, the same person held high-paying jobs with at least two local governments. The highest-paid individual paid concurrently by multiple local governments during 2020-21 was Charles M. Lohmann, who earned a combined total of $312,173 as a Detective Sergeant for the Suffolk County District Attorney ($265,947) and as police chief for the village of Head of the Harbor ($46,226).

Regional Employment and Pay Summaries