Florida Trend | Florida's Business Authority

Florida public servant wages and who earns $100,000 a year

What it takes to make at least $100,000 as a government employee. Hint: Consider being a first responder.

In December, the union for state workers, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Florida, held a rally at the Capitol in Tallahassee to lobby for more pay. In January, the state teachers union federation held a rally of its own to ask for more money.

Other units of Florida government feel wage pressure. Given the strong employment market, local governments nationally and in Florida report the same difficulties as private-sector employers in finding workers. Seeing a shortage of teachers, Gov. Ron DeSantis has proposed raising teacher starting pay to $47,500, the second-highest in the nation, at a cost to taxpayers of $603 million. The state Department of Corrections, which has had trouble hiring and keeping prison guards, last year announced $1,000 hiring bonuses, and the governor this year proposed retention incentives as well. Local police forces also report fewer applicants.

What makes for appropriate pay — in both the public and private sectors — is always up for discussion. For most government workers, full-time government work is a route to the middle class. The conventional wisdom on government work is that workers trade higher pay for job security and defined-benefits pensions that have all but disappeared in the private sector.

The average weekly wage for local government employees at the 10 governments within Dixie County, for example, is just $632 a week, or about $33,000 a year — the lowest average weekly wage within a Florida county for local government workers, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. In general, average weekly wages fall below $800 in Florida’s northern tier of poor counties and its interior agriculture counties in the south.

The local government workers in Florida with the highest average wages are the employees of the 77 governments within Miami-Dade, whose average weekly earnings are $1,180 — about $61,000 a year. Average weekly wages of local government employees top $1,000 in Broward, Collier, Duval, Lee, Monroe, Palm Beach and Sarasota counties.

But some in government earn much more than that — six-figure incomes that are a rarity in some governments but in others as common as one in five employees. OpenTheBooks.com, a non-profit that publishes information on government contracts, spending and salaries, issued a 2018 report on Florida that showed 34,873 government employees in Florida made more than $100,000 in 2017, at a cost to taxpayers of $5.5 billion.

Typically, they are senior managers, attorneys, school principals and others with advanced degrees. But some blue-collar workers such as mechanics and municipal power employees can pull in six figures, too. Any city’s list of six-figure employees usually includes a lot of first responders — not just chiefs and captains, but first-line police officers and firefighters who run up hundreds, even thousands, of hours of overtime and work for private employers funneled through their cities. Regardless of position, local government workers also can reach six figures by cashing in unused vacation and sick leave stored up over the course of a career.

Any comparison of wages yields anomalies. OpenTheBooks, for instance, noted that 26 managers and senior executives in relatively small Florida towns made more than every governor nationally. Boca Raton alone in 2013 had four employees that out-earned all the nation’s governors.

The non-profit’s founder, Adam Andrzejewski, says its mission is “putting the salaries out there and letting people decide what’s a wise or an unwise level of spending.”

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.

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.
Select from the following options: