Most city managers receive compensation packages that are worth more than what the state pays Gov. Jerry Brown, according to a new database of public employee salaries produced by the San Jose Mercury News.
The paper says it “is making the dollar amounts available in a database of hundreds of thousands of public employees' compensation costs at www.mercurynews.com/salaries. But trying to make sense of the numbers is no easy task.”
The preliminary findings show that “managers' pay and benefits, using data collected from 104 cities and towns in the greater Bay Area, indicates that compensation doesn't depend on the factors you might imagine -- such as the population of a city, the size of its workforce, or, seemingly, the challenges of running it. Instead, a scattershot pattern emerges across the region, with a manager's pay, benefits and extra sweeteners determined as much from what they can negotiate from elected officials as from hard facts.”
“Of the 104 cities analyzed, all but five -- Rio Vista, Dixon, Gonzales, Escalon and Sebastopol -- compensated their manager or administrator more than the $213,000 that Gov. Jerry Brown received in cash and benefits to run the Golden State last year.
And when it comes to compensation, city size doesn’t matter, the paper found.
“Consider San Francisco and Vallejo. The world-famous City by the Bay has seven times more residents and 70 times more government employees than the recently bankrupt Solano County city, yet Vallejo City Manager Daniel Keen raked in almost $70,000 more than San Francisco City Administrator Naomi Kelly did last year.”
You can search the entire database here