the town dandy / By Hank Sims

The $100,000 Club

(Feb. 21, 2008)  If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the last couple of days, it’s this: Working for the County of Humboldt can be a very lucrative proposition.

Last week the Journal filed a Public Records Act request seeking the salaries of every county employee. In the request, we piggybacked off a California Supreme Court decision handed down in September 2007 which affirmed that, yes, the salaries of public employees are matters of public information. Public employees unions had fought the decision, but the court sided with the Contra Costa Times, the paper that instigated the matter. Since then, newspapers around the state have been gathering up public salary information and sharing with their readers how much they, the public, are paying their public servants. We thought we’d join in.

To his everlasting credit, Humboldt County Auditor/Controller Michael Giacone acted upon our request with lightning speed. Unfortunately, he was not able to provide precisely what we asked for — an electronic version of annual salary records — because, he said, no such record existed that didn’t also contain private information (such as Social Security numbers) that would take time and money to redact.

Instead, he provided a paper copy of a sheet detailing payroll for a single two-week period in August 2007. That information could be multiplied by 26 to get an employee’s annual salary. There are some kinks in this system. Some employees are paid by the hour, and may not work the same hours from week to week. Some may have received an unusual amount in a particular week because they had received back pay in that pay period, perhaps upon retirement. But weeding out the obvious irregularities gives us a pretty good picture of who gets paid what.

Given the paper-based format of the data, we weren’t able to data-crunch the roughly 1,700 names on the list that Giacone gave us in quite the way we would have liked to. But the nut of the matter seems to be that if you are on the top of the food chain in Humboldt County government you are doing pretty damn well.

All told, about 45 county employees make over $100,000 per year. Around 160 make over $75,000. Though Humboldt County governmental types often complain that low salaries make it difficult to recruit people, in fact we seem to stack up pretty well on the top end of the chain. This is considerably better than the public at large. In 2004, median household income in the county was only $33,281, according to the Census Bureau. It’s also quite a bit better than some neighboring counties. According to Redding’s Record-Searchlight, only 23 Shasta County employees made $100,000 a year in 2007. That’s in a relatively prosperous county with 163,000 residents, compared with our 130,000. (Shasta County government appears to be roughly the same size as ours, with 1,720 employees on the books.)

Who makes the most money in Humboldt County government? Generally speaking, doctors and lawyers. Especially the former, and especially psychiatrists working in the county mental health department. One of these, Dr. Jonathan Sommers , took home an astounding $9,998.82 during the two-week pay period for which we have records. Two of his colleagues did nearly as well: Dr. David Aryanpur and Dr. Monir Chaudry made $9,037 and $8,011, respectively.

The lawyers trail far behind. County Counsel Wendy Chaitin makes around $106,000 per year — $30,000 less than her counterpart in Shasta County, $60,000 less than her counterpart in Butte County. District Attorney Paul Gallegos is paid $136,331 per year. Public Defender Kevin Robinson doesn’t do near as well, earning only $119,905 per year.

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