Local government is a labor-intensive business, and employee compensation is the single biggest element of most municipal budgets. The 2016-17 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 all local governments other than New York City.¹ The data do not include job titles; however, it includes separate analysis of the pay received by uniformed police and fire employees.

The latest county and municipal payroll database includes 2016-17 state fiscal year payroll information for full-time and part-time workers actively enrolled in the pension system as of August 2017. 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 into three categories: General Employees, Police and Fire.² Highlights:

• New York’s highest-paid local government employee in 2016-17 was Thomas C. Donnelly, a Ramapo town police officer, who was paid $441,968. Donnelly reportedly retired in August, after earning average annual pay of $156,689 in the previous eight years.
• Forty-seven of the 50 highest-paid local employees were police officers. Twenty-five of them worked for the Nassau County Police Department. Among the 10 highest-paid employees, six (including Donnelly) were town police officers in Rockland County.
• The highest average pay reported for any group of local employees was the $220,088 paid to Village of Kings Point’s 20 police officers, down slightly from the $222,394 village officers averaged last year. The highest average pay among non-uniformed employees was $89,755 paid to 12 Sands Point village employees.

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 174,635 people who were paid a total of $9.7 billion by 1,515 local governments outside New York City during the fiscal year ending March 31, 2017.³

Regional differences

The types of local government employees who top the pay lists in each region vary. In parts of upstate, elected district attorneys, community college officials and mental health professionals rank among the top 10, while the Mid-Hudson and Long Island lists are dominated by police officers. In the North Country, two municipalities (Lewis County and the town of Massena) operated hospitals, skewing pay averages for each.

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 is 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 401k-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 401k-style Voluntary Defined Contribution 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 the plan was offered.⁴

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 2016-17 data found 4,179 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. Thirty-seven individuals had five or more employers. Several of them worked as code enforcement officers or assessors for multiple local governments.

Twenty-six employees collected pay over $200,000 by working for two local government employers, up from 17 the previous year. Seventeen of the 26 were Suffolk County employees (up from 9 last year) who also were paid by a village police department.

In some cases, however, the same person held high-paying jobs with at least two local governments simultaneously. The highest-paid individual paid concurrently by multiple local governments during 2016-17 was Charles M. Lohmann, who worked simultaneously as an investigator for the Suffolk County District Attorney ($236,883) and as police chief for the village of Head of the Harbor ($42,379).

Read the entire report, with tables, here.

Endnotes:

1. Some employees are listed as receiving $265,000 in pay, reflecting the federal limit on salaried pay that can be credited toward certain pensions. The actual pay may be higher.
2. A category labeled “Special Districts,” including library, fire, and other districts, exists on the SeeThroughNY.net database, but is not included in this report because the information provided by the Comptroller does not easily allow for such categorization.
3. Includes multiple counts of individuals listed with more than one employer.
4. https://empirecenter.org/publications/retirement-choice-popular-so-far