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6-Figure Servants
Florida public servant wages and who earns $100,000 a year
Lucrative ‘Extra Duty’
The cop in the bank lobby may top $100,000 this year.
Peruse pay lists of governments throughout Florida, and you will find some of the highest-earning employees are law officers, some of whom make into the six figures and out-earn their chiefs. Many pull in that pay with the help of tens of thousands of dollars earned annually on “extra duty” jobs — in uniform working for private employers such as grocery stores, special events, banks and at private homes.
It’s a practice that bulks up employee pay and provides a service for private employers. It also presents issues. “Excessive extra duty hours could result in conflicts of interest and diminished on-duty performance,” city of Miami independent auditor general Theodore Guba wrote in a January report that faulted the city’s control of its “extra duty” program.
Miami city policy limits officers to a combined 16 hours a day of on-duty and “extra-duty” work. Officers also aren’t supposed to work more than 36 hours a week of “extra duty” time.
According to Guba’s research, in 2018 officers worked 449,334 hours in outside employment for a total of $18.9 million — or $42 an hour, on average. Most officers tallied under 1,000 “extra duty” hours a year. Even at that ceiling, an officer works nearly 20 extra hours a week. At $42 an hour, someone working 1,000 hours adds $42,000 a year to gross pay.
Guba looked at the 10 officers clocking the most extra-duty time. The officer with the highest put in 3,714 hours on jobs for private employers in 2015 — just over 10 hours a day for every day of the year. Even No. 10 on the list worked the equivalent of 5.5 extra hours a day for 365 days. In a 13-week span, an officer in the Coconut Grove area of the city tallied 897 “extra-duty” hours — 69 hours a week.
Guba found the city police department’s internal controls inadequate in ensuring extra duty work was accurately recorded and in preventing police from doubling up — getting paid for the same hours by both the city and private employers.
He found that nearly 10% of “extra duty” hours worked overlapped with either city on-duty time or extra-duty time with a second private employer.
The city’s Citizen Investigative Panel in a separate report made similar findings. Much of the fault lies with how the “extra duty” program is run. The system that officers log into for “extra duty” work doesn’t communicate with the scheduling system for regular on-duty work.
Guba recommended the city address the problems, and the city says it will. Guba in his report noted he found similar issues and made similar recommendations in 2016 and the police took no action.
In his new report, he recommends the city cap “extra duty” at 1,000 hours a year per officer “to minimize the risk of creating an inappropriate loyalty, conflict of interest or a risk of officer fatigue.” The city agreed a ceiling was in order and said a policy will be developed for granting exceptions to it.
Average Weekly Wages
Local Government Employees in Florida
- Lowest: Dixie County (10 local governments) — $632 ($33,000 annually)
- Highest: Miami-Dade (77 local governments) — $1,180 ($61,000 annually)
- Average weekly wages of local government employees top $1,000 only in Broward, Collier, Duval, Lee, Monroe, Palm Beach and Sarasota counties.
- In general, average weekly wages fall below $800 only in Florida’s northern tier of poor counties and its interior agriculture counties in the south.
- 44,568: Government employees making more than $100,000 annually in 2017.
Read more in Florida Trend's March issue.
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