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6-Figure Servants
Florida public servant wages and who earns $100,000 a year
Barriers to Information
Florida taxpayers can look up the pay of any state government, university or college employee online at salaries.myflorida.com, the site where the state publishes them. But those interested in local government pay don’t have it so easy. Taxpayers generally have to file public records requests with their local governments now that one of the easiest ways to get the data has hit a state barrier.
OpenTheBooks, a government transparency non-profit, routinely posted salary information for Florida local government, school, charter school and special government district employees. It captured much of the data with a single request to the Florida State Management Services Retirement System, which has the data from many local governments whose active employees participate in the state retirement system. In 2017, that single request yielded pay information on 765,516 employees of 1,177 local governments, 34,873 of whom made more than $100,000. OpenTheBooks then filed requests directly with 343 local governments to capture data on nearly 1 million more employees. All told, 44,568 employees made $100,000 or more.
But in the last annual go-round, the state retirement system rejected OpenTheBooks’ request, forcing the non-profit to directly approach the 1,177 local governments, says Adam Andrzejewski, OpenTheBooks founder and CEO. Headquartered in a Chicago suburb, OpenTheBooks does its data processing in Boca Raton.
At the end of the cycle, the group received “responsive” records from only 1,047 public bodies out of 3,364 with whom it filed in Florida. The rest either didn’t respond or demanded a “draconian” fee that Andrzejewski says amounts to a “transparency tax.”
“Therefore, 2,367 units of local government in Florida violated open records law,” he says. “Hundreds of thousands of public employee salaries are being shielded from the citizens and not subject to taxpayer review.”
Without those governments, the organization heard from just 1,047 governments that employed 849,569, of whom 40,783 made $100,000 or more.
Pension Incomes
2,889 Florida state government retirees draw at least $100,000 a year in pensions.
Pensions for public employees generally become an issue two ways: When a government struggles to keep the pension system solvent — the pension funding gap — or when a participant makes the news in a negative way. An example of the latter: Scot Peterson, the Broward deputy who didn’t confront the Parkland school shooter, began drawing an $8,702 monthly pension in 2018 — $104,424 a year.
For the former, Florida’s retirement system is one of the nation’s better funded. As of 2016, Pew Trusts ranked Florida 13th in a measure of how well-funded a pension plan is. Florida was reducing its funding gap, too. Nationally, taxpayers in 2017 forked over nearly twice as much as they did a decade earlier to cover public employee pension obligations, according to Pew. As the trillion-dollar bill comes due for public pensions nationally, it crowds out spending on roads, schools and other public needs and wants. State and local pensions nationally equal 1.5% of GDP.
Florida’s state retirement system doesn’t cover all government employees in Florida — some governmental units have their own retirement systems — but of those covered by the state system, some 2,889 retirees in Florida pull in at least $100,000 per year for a total of $347 million. More than a third — 1,013 — worked for Miami-Dade County. Retired prosecutors, public defenders and judges from throughout the state also make up a good share of the list. The largest pension benefit is $345,564 annually to Dennis Gallon, who retired in 2015 as Palm Beach State College president with 50 years in the retirement system. College and university retirees dominate the highest-benefit list, with the exception of a few public safety people from Broward and Miami- Dade. A list of state retirement system pensions of over $100,000 — scrubbed of retiree names — is available at floridahasarighttoknow.myflorida.com.
Accrued Leave Can Boost Pay
Government employees are often allowed to bank decades of unused time off, resulting in six-figure lump-sum payments.
In his last paycheck of 2018, Miami-Dade Assistant County Attorney Thomas “Tim” Abbott, headed for retirement, cashed in 2,324 hours of unused sick leave — 58 weeks — accumulated over more than three decades. The sick pay came to $323,497 and made him the county’s highest-paid employee for the year at $601,981 in gross pay.
He wasn’t alone in cashing out. Fire division Chief Paul Smith, likewise on the cusp of retiring, cashed in 3,575 hours of accumulated sick leave and holiday leave for $291,947, placing him among the county’s top earners.
Cumulatively, Abbott, Smith and five other top earners — a police division chief, a couple of police majors, a fire division chief and a firefighter all heading toward retirement — drew just over $1 million in sick leave pay and $361,000 in holiday leave.
“These are all examples of longtime employees who received payouts of accrued leave,” says Deputy Mayor and Budget Director Jennifer Moon.
Unlike many private employers where use-itor- lose-it is the norm for sick leave and vacation leave, governments often allow employees to bank unused time off. For the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2018, Miami-Dade carried a $693-million liability for sick and vacation leave. Across cities, accumulated leave creates budgeting issues, especially as the Boomer generation retires and cashes out. Additionally, at a number of local governments, those final years’ salaries inflated by accumulated time off go into the employee pension calculation.
Some governments now cap how many hours employees can carry or cash them out annually. Also, some prevent unused hours from being used to calculate retirement. Miami-Dade, however, allows up to 500 hours to be used.
