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California State Salaries

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32 pointsmarcamillion45 comments

I see a seven-figure salary next to the name of a surgeon who's saved my child's life on three occasions. Yeah, that's about right.

I seriously apologize - I mis-clicked and accidentally voted this down... Any surgeon who has the power and does save any child's life deserves a good salary - they are miracle workers on so many levels.

Well I'm happy your child is healthy but your attitude is exactly the problem. The question isn't what your child's life is worth the question is could that doctor have done the same thing for less money. Because if we could've paid him $500,000 instead of $1 million we'd have $500,000 more dollars to save the other children's lives. Don't get me wrong, if the doctor can make 1 million elsewhere then we should pay him 1 million. But if he can't we shouldn't pay him 1 million simply because government officials don't mind spending other People's Money.

If institutions like UCLA and UCSF want to be world leaders, they need to pay top dollar to attract the best surgical talent. That's just reality.

P.S. I never said my child was healthy.

The basic problem is people stupidly think that a "state employee" is always someone like the clerks at the DMV, when in actual fact, it includes public university medical school professors and similar high-skilled people, the hiring of whom requires high salaries due to competition with other hiring institutions. If you want to pay a professor of cardiovascular surgery as if he were a DMV clerk, you're not going to get a professor worth hiring.

It also includes high-skilled people being asked to work in unusually unsafe or unpleasant situations, for example prison psychiatrists.

Whoa. A college football coach is the highest paid california state employee? Seems like california is focused on the wrong things.

The justification is generally that these football programs pay for themselves with ticket sales, merchandising, and segregated fundraising. I know that at my private alma mater (Duke), Coach K makes many times the salary of President Brodhead and it's still a net positive income for the school.

Whether that's a business that universities should be in is a question for another day.

This is the case in almost every state.

Winning football teams fill stadiums (selling tickets), get better ESPN coverage (more money) and keep alums happy (bigger donations). That position probably turns a profit when it's all accounted for.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/...

"no college or university in the United States has an athletic department that is financially self-sustaining."

That may be true but it's not a direct rebuttal to the previous comment.

Does Texas' $3M coach bring in an additional $2.9M+ per year compared to if Texas hired a coach for $100,000?

That doesn't disprove the statement. If may very well be that the football (or whatever) program turns a profit and the rest of the athletic department loses more than the profitable program makes.

http://www.ncaapublications.com/productdownloads/REV_EXP_201...

BCS: "Between 50 and 60 percent of football and men's basketball programs have reported net generated revenues (surpluses) for each of the five years reported."

Translation: football makes money, other sports lose money.

FBS: "Only two percent of football programs reported net generated revenues."

Translation: When your program sucks, your revenue sucks too.

Also note that all 14 programs that made money overall were BCS teams.

The vast majority of his salary is not paid out of state funds. According to this, most of the compensation is provided by Nike:

http://www.californiagoldenblogs.com/2010/12/3/1850306/thoug...

The same is true here in Texas. #1 is the head football coach at Texas (2.5 million) and #2 is the head basketball coach (just under 2 million).

http://www.texastribune.org/library/data/government-employee...

The highest paid professor is Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize winning physicist ($391,000).

How about this: general manager/CEO of San Mateo country's transportation department makes $400,000:

http://www.samtrans.com/pdf/Executive_Compensation.pdf

Does the market really require that wage to keep the buses running on time? Are the skills necessary that rare? He makes more than the President of the United States.

The President also gets $400k, and after he leaves office gets a $200k pension, plus a bunch of other benefits, so overall is doing quite a bit better than the bus guy.

To be fair, that guy's salary is a few hundred bucks over $400k, while Obama's is exactly $400000.

Hm, getting down to page 2500 of results, we see that civil engineer salaries are going down each year.

I have heard that these top salaries get skewed because state employees tend to get a lot of "back end" compensation. So if it's your last year of employment, you collect unused vacation and sick pay. They also put in as much overtime as possible because it forces a higher pension due to averaging of the last few years of pay to determine pension amounts. So you will see a guy who maybe made 70k getting 100k+ during his last one or two years.

What's obsurd is the increase from 2009 to 2010.

Great recession? California bankrupt ? Someone never got the memo, it seems.

> California bankrupt ?

Well at least now we know why ;-)

That's the problem with raw data like this. It's easy for you to look at a couple pages, find some examples, and make a blanket statement like that.

Start at the last page (with the default still >$100k) and go through a few hundred pages. You'll see that the majority have taken ~10% pay cuts from 2008 to 2010.

I'm not saying that CA "did get the memo", but your tone seems unnecessary, at least based on the data you linked to.

I hear you tedkimble...and you are right. Perhaps the data isn't all complete - but that assessment isn't that far off.

Restrict the searches to California Highway Patrol officers. You will see pages and pages of them with double digit salary increases year on year.

Might not be 100%...but I mean...really.

The reason this is such a major injustice, is because California is then forced to cut certain welfare programs to those who really need it (i.e. the most vulnerable) because they can't afford it.

Meanwhile, Mr. 5-0 goes home with a 300K pension at 60.

Just saying, something is odd with that picture. No matter how you twist the data.

Edit: For instance tedkimble, look at this guy on page 4(don't mean to call him out, but I wanted to go in the median somewhere and bottom of page 4 seems to fit the bill):

>Darrell L Brooks CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL SERGEANT, CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL $212,049.00 $125,744.00 $126,602.00

He took a pay cut from 2008 to 2009 (by 0.67% approx) and from 2009 to 2010 got a pay raise of 68.4% ? How is that even right ? That seems to be a common pattern - for the highway patrol guys.

I have no axe to grind here....but this seems like injustice to the nth degree.

Edit 2: Just for completeness, here are some others:

>Terry D Dunn CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL SERGEANT, CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL $202,446.00 $125,182.00 $120,518.00

>Paul E Reyes CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL OFFICER, CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL $203,197.00 $161,532.00 $166,468.0

>Joseph W Sobkowiak CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL OFFICER, CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL $197,704.00 $138,645.00 $142,325.00

>He took a pay cut from 2008 to 2009 (by 0.67% approx) and from 2009 to 2010 got a pay raise of 68.4% ? How is that even right ? That seems to be a common pattern - for the highway patrol guys.

That's likely overtime, not an increase in salary.

The table needs context. How much could the same person make in private industry for a similar job?

True, but you could also ask how much value they or their dept. add. What's their NPV as an employee?

There's a pernicious assumption hiding there that public employees by definition must not deserve or earn their pay, whereas private employees doing the same work and making the same amount do.

Not really. It's completely fair for taxpayers to question the NPV of their employees (aka government workers).

Questioning it doesn't mean the NPV is negative. After all, private employers do this all the time. They decide a line of business provides an insufficient return on capital or doesn't fit the core, and they shut it down. Other times they find the NPV is awesome and pour on the investment. Since taxpayers are "the boss," this is completely appropriate.

If anything, the pernicious assumption runs precisely the opposite direction: that anyone who dare question the value to cost ratio of our bureaucratic overlords be attacked.

These people are supposed to be public servants. You would expect a special kind of person willing to make sacrifices for the greater good to take these jobs.

I would expect that pay and benefits should be pegged to the private sector. In some cases they could make more and some cases they could make less. But overall it should come close to private sector pay.

Average Compensation (2009)

Federal (123,049) State & Local (69,913) Private (61,051)

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/income/2010-08-10-1Afe...

I'm not a big fan of public unions. It seems like there is nobody at the bargaining table on the side of the tax payer. Also, if people don't like the benefits that come with serving the public, they should not take the job. Like I said, it should take a special kind of person.

Here is a nice article on public unions

The Beholden State How public-sector unions broke California http://city-journal.org/2010/20_2_california-unions.html

I'm guessing there is some background missing on those highest payed - for example a discussion on why coach salaries are so high http://www.azcentral.com/sports/asu/articles/2009/09/20/2009... They are not funded out of taxpayer money.

The reason why coaches like Tedford and Howland get paid so much is because the amount of revenue they bring in for their schools is worth much, much more. It's the same reason Fortune 500 CEO's get paid millions because the value a good CEO can create for their company is often worth hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. So paying their CEO just a few million is a relative bargain. Same concept with D1 football and bball coaches.

Looks like we crashed the site :|

A lot of these salaries are in the Corrections department. The US didn't get to be the world's #1 jailer for free, guys!

While I agree that the US has a serious imprisonment problem (jailing people for the wrong reasons), I have to believe that getting doctors to work in the prison system requires some significant financial incentives -- and most of these people seem to be medical professionals.

> some significant financial incentives ...

Oh I understand that but a $500k increase from $200k to $700k ?

Could just mean that the person didnt work a full year previously. Numbers without real context dont really help, me thinks.

Agreed. The numbers just don't make much sense without that context.

The average cost per inmate in California is about $49,000, twice the cost to run prisons in other states (the average is around $28,000). Some states are even less. The average cost per inmate in Florida is under $20,000. Texas is a little over $15,000.

Actual data: "even after accounting for the value of retirement, healthcare, and other benefits, state and local employees earn less than private sector counterparts. On average, total compensation is 6.8% lower for state employees and 7.4% lower for local employees than for comparable private sector employees"

The state of California pays 9.8% less for similar jobs, in line with the national average of 11.4% less.

http://www.nirsonline.org/index.php?option=content&task=...

The lowest salary on the last page is $103,000

It's no surprise that the state is bankrupt

That's because by default it only shows salaries over $100,000.

it doesn't change the fact that thousands of state employees are getting paid over 100,000 per year and the state is bankrupt.

Somehow I find it hard to get bent out of shape about "SENIOR BRIDGE ENGINEER" making 103,000/yr. That's hardly buckets of cash, particularly in CA. There are plenty of much more absurd salaries listed right there for you to call out...

I hope in the future that when 'taxes' and 'rich' come into the conversation, $100,000/year doesn't.

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