Public pay database offers glimpse at employee compensation

The BND’s Public Pay Database is back for another year. The database is an annual look at the salary information of public employees in the metro-east and is intended to keep taxpayers informed about how much they’re paying public servants.

Current salaries for what employees made in 2015 have just been added for St. Clair, Madison, Clinton, Monroe, Bond and Randolph counties. In the coming weeks and months, similar information will be added for select cities, school districts, townships and colleges and universities in the area.

The database can be found here.

Besides current salaries, information also is available for previous years back to 2011. The information is gathered through Freedom of Information Act requests.

The database gives basic compensation data and does not included retirement or insurance benefits — two big draws on taxpayers.

Because there’s no required format for keeping salary information, it comes to us in a variety of ways, including in spreadsheets, on CDs, on paper and, in one case, a handwritten letter.

In order to roughly compare the salary information across government units — like how much the state’s attorneys make in every county — the data needs to be uniform, and not all the numbers could be cleaned. Therefore, there are many caveats to the database. For example, some include holiday pay, other don’t. Some school districts also offer “extra pay” for additional duties, such as coaching.

In addition, it may not be possible to match up what hourly employees made in 2015 by multiplying their hourly rates and hours worked, as wage rates may have changed in the course of the year.

The News-Democrat asked for salary information for the most recent completed reporting period. Specifically, the paper asked for numbers from either the calendar year or the fiscal year, which usually runs from July to June, so the time period to compare many government districts may not be the same.

Bottom line, the database will be updated regularly as we receive more information. We’ll alert readers when that happens.

This story was originally published April 6, 2016 at 11:08 AM with the headline "Public pay database offers glimpse at employee compensation."