Making sense of public employee compensation is no easy task. California’s 58 counties and 482 incorporated cities have diverse populations, different costs of living and between 121 and nearly 10 million residents. The Center for Investigative Reporting sought to provide context to understand and compare city and county employee compensation, which generally accounts for more than a third of local government spending.
CIR analyzed data from the California State Controller’s Office, which collects compensation records for nearly all city and county employees in the state. Its database spans from 2009 to 2012 and annually includes as many as 700,000 full- and part-time municipal and county employees and all elected officials. It does not include independent contractors.
CIR used the state’s database to examine how local governments compensate their top officials. We identified the records for city managers, mayors, city council members, police chiefs and city fire chiefs, as well as county administrators, district attorneys, county supervisors and sheriffs.
Employees’ positions sometimes were presented in a straightforward manner, such as “accountant” or “fire chief,” but at other times were obscured by abbreviations, spelling errors or vague classifications, such as “Dept. Head V.”
The state’s database does not include employees’ names. In some cases, we identified top officials by matching their reported compensation to separate compensation records that included employees’ names. We identified others by contacting cities and counties directly. In some communities, not all positions were reported or could be identified.
CIR contacted cities, counties and organizations that represent or recruit local government leaders to identify factors that influence pay. Many said they considered the pay of similar positions in neighboring or similar communities, as well as cost of living, staff sizes and budgets.
We conducted a statistical analysis to determine what demographic factors are linked to top officials’ pay. Our analysis found that the two factors that most strongly correlated with compensation were population size and median rent.
The compensation data we used was the most uniform metric available in the state’s database: total wages subject to Medicare taxes.
Those wages are the total of regular pay (typically wages or salary); overtime pay; one-time payouts of unused vacation and sick time; and other taxable pay, such as car allowances and bonuses. Wages subject to Medicare taxes tend to be lower than gross wages because they do not include pretax deductions or deferrals, such as earnings an employee contributes to retirement. For public employees not subject to Medicare taxes, the state instructs employers to come up with an estimate.
The State Controller’s Office updates its compensation database daily, generally with only minor changes. CIR used records published July 17. When contacted by CIR, some cities and counties said they reported incorrect data to the state and provided updated data to CIR. Payday California includes these corrections.
CIR did not include health and retirement benefits in its analysis because they were reported inconsistently in the state’s database. Until 2011, the state required only limited reporting of retirement contributions.
The City of Los Angeles, for example, reported no pension contributions in calendar years 2011 and 2012. Other city records, however, show that it contributed nearly $1 billion in each of those fiscal years to pension plans for more than 85,000 retired and current employees. The city also did not report actual contributions to each employee’s health benefits; instead, it reported the average amounts it contributed.
Read more about CIR’s analysis in our story.
Want more in-depth investigations? Sign up for our newsletters to get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Republish Our Content
Thanks for your interest in republishing a story from Reveal. As a nonprofit newsroom, we want to share our work with as many people as possible. You are free to embed our audio and video content and republish any written story for free under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license and will indemnify our content as long as you strictly follow these guidelines:
-
Do not change the story. Do not edit our material, except only to reflect changes in time and location. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week,” and “Portland, Ore.” to “Portland” or “here.”)
-
Please credit us early in the coverage. Our reporter(s) must be bylined. We prefer the following format: By Will Evans, Reveal.
-
If republishing our stories, please also include this language at the end of the story: “This story was produced by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org/podcast.”
-
Include all links from the story, and please link to us at https://www.revealnews.org.
PHOTOS
-
You can republish Reveal photos only if you run them in or alongside the stories with which they originally appeared and do not change them.
-
If you want to run a photo apart from that story, please request specific permission to license by contacting Digital Engagement Producer Sarah Mirk, smirk@revealnews.org. Reveal often uses photos we purchase from Getty and The Associated Press; those are not available for republication.
DATA
-
If you want to republish Reveal graphics or data, please contact Data Editor Soo Oh, soh@revealnews.org.
IN GENERAL
-
We do not compensate anyone who republishes our work. You also cannot sell our material separately or syndicate it.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually. To inquire about syndication or licensing opportunities, please contact Sarah Mirk, smirk@revealnews.org.
-
If you plan to republish our content, you must notify us republish@revealnews.org or email Sarah Mirk, smirk@revealnews.org.
-
If we send you a request to remove our content from your website, you must agree to do so immediately.
-
Please note, we will not provide indemnification if you are located or publishing outside the United States, but you may contact us to obtain a license and indemnification on a case-by-case basis.
If you have any other questions, please contact us at republish@revealnews.org.