County employee compensation

By JOHN FRANK, Times Staff Writer
Published September 9, 2007

To help inform the debate about county employees' compensation, the St. Petersburg Times took a broad look at the issues, including employee salaries in all five constitutional offices and benefits for county employees.

The figures at the heart of the analysis -- the total cost of salaries and benefits for the county's general government and constitutional offices -- were provided by the respective entities. The Times requested the totals for fiscal year 2002 as a baseline to compare against the figures for fiscal year 2007. It's important to note the 2002 numbers are actual expenses, while the 2007 numbers are proposed because the budget year doesn't end until October. This makes the biggest difference for the Clerk of Court's Office, which refunds a portion of its allotted money each year.

The Times chose the five-year period because it encompasses the bulk of Hernando County's major growth spurt. Numbers for the forthcoming 2008 budget year also were provided, but did not play a major role because they have not yet been approved.

The agencies' figures were fact-checked by George Zoettlein, the county's budget director, at the Times' request. Zoettlein also furnished the county's figures, using numbers from the general fund. In the accompanying story, county employees included in those figures are called "general government employees." It's a layman's way of defining those employees who carry out the main operations of government.

Also, the county and each constitutional office provided the size of its staff in 2002, 2007 and 2008.

On the thorny issue of salary increases, the Times decided to look exclusively at salaries for county employees instead of using the much-talked-about figures collected by the state's Agency for Workforce Innovation.

To get at county employee salaries, the county's Human Resources Department provided a payroll database for 2002 and 2007. It includes personnel from all aspects of government. For the Times analysis, Hernando County and Spring Hill fire-rescue workers were excluded because they are different entities. Also, lifeguards were taken out of the 2007 payroll because they were not included in the 2002 payroll.

The analysis also used median salary figures to make comparisons between years as opposed to averages, as the story explains. Steve Doig, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter who now teaches media statistics at Arizona State University, further expounds on the difference:

"Both average and median were invented as ways to take a big collection of numbers and turn them into a single value that tells you something about the whole collection," he said during an interview. "A good example is the salaries of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. The players' average salary is $893,463, but the median is less than half of that -- $411,000. That's because the team has a small handful of stars making more than $2.5 million a year, backed up by a group of journeymen, most of whom are making less than $500,000 a year -- which may explain a lot about the Devil Rays' record this year."

One element intentionally missingis a comparison between Hernando and neighboring counties or the private sector. It's natural to try to compare these figures, as critics have done in recent town hall forums.

But it's a tenuous comparison as the state figures include noncounty employees and the use of potentially skewed averages.

AWI reports the county's average annual wage for municipal and county workers is $40,467. It counts employees from the city of Brooksville, which is not facing much of a budget dispute, the Southwest Florida Water Management District, which covers a 16-county area, and other entities.

Not to mention, county and municipalities sometimes calculate figures differently, putting some employees in categories not used by other counties, and vice versa, according to statisticians at Tallahassee-based AWI.

The agency reports the county's private sector earns an average $27,650 annually. But similarly, this is largely meaningless for comparison because it includesservice industry part timers who make low hourly wages and top-tier workers making significant salaries.

[Last modified September 8, 2007, 20:34:00]