Thirty-six employees for the City of Easton earned a taxpayer-funded salary of more than $100,000 last year, according to a lehighvalleylive.com analysis.
Of those top earners, 24 were firefighters, eight were police officers and the remaining four worked in the city’s administration.
The salary information, which is available in a searchable database below this story, is part of a project lehighvalleylive.com started in early 2021.
In February, the news organization partnered with a journalism class at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications to obtain salary data from every municipality in Lehigh and Northampton counties. That’s 64 municipalities between both counties.
Local government bodies generally don’t make taxpayer-funded salaries easy to find even through they’re considered public information. To obtain the salaries of those employed by the 64 Lehigh Valley municipalities, we submitted individual requests through the Pennsylvania Right-to-Know Law.
Students in the journalism class were each assigned to submit requests to two municipalities apiece. In most cases, the requests were fulfilled in compliance with the law. Some municipalities didn’t fully comply, but partially fulfilled the requests. And there were several that didn’t comply at all in what constitutes a violation of state law. We’ll be exploring those violations in a series of stories later this year.
The decision to publish public employee salaries has not come without criticism in the past. After lehighvalleylive.com did so in 2014, Bernie O’Hare, who writes the influential blog Lehigh Valley Ramblings, questioned the news organization’s commitment to government transparency and why it saw fit to use the Right-to-Know Law for the purpose of acquiring the salaries when there are more pressing local issues that could be uncovered through the law’s usage.
“I believe in transparency in government, obviously, and I think that you should be able to get the information concerning the salaries of government workers,” O’Hare said last week in response to an inquiry from lehighvalleylive.com. “The problem I have with publishing it … is for the people who have relatively low salaries.
“That kind of diminishes them in the eyes of their neighbors. It makes them feel bad about themselves. It’s kind of an invasion of their privacy. They may work for the government but they’re not policymakers. That’s basically the extent of my opposition.”
For at least one statewide, conservative-leaning organization that advocates for taxpayers, the need for government transparency outweighs other issues when it comes to publishing public employee salaries.
“Since this is an issue of government transparency, we believe it is important that local residents know what they are paying their public servants,” said Nathan Benefield, vice president of the Commonwealth Foundation.
The Commonwealth Foundation publishes the salaries of public education employees statewide. Other organizations, including our sister website pennlive.com, routinely publish the salaries of state employees. But there appears to be no repository for local government employee salaries in Pennsylvania.
Benefield acknowledged that it’s not something the Commonwealth Foundation has tackled. “We’ve never done the same research for local government salaries as for state employees and teacher salaries — primarily because there’s no single source, and we generally focus on state-level issues,” he said.
As for invading the privacy of employees, Benefield said it’s not a valid argument against government transparency.
“Anyone who works as a public employee should understand that their compensation comes from their friends and neighbors’ taxes, which are public funds and should be subject to basic standards of transparency,” he said.
The database below includes the 2020 salaries of every City of Easton employee. It is the first of four that we’ll be publishing this week. The four selected are the most populous municipalities in Northampton County. The others are the City of Bethlehem, Bethlehem Township and Palmer Township.
Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to lehighvalleylive.com.
"employee" - Google News
July 26, 2021 at 06:01PM
https://ift.tt/3rBQ0zn
Every City of Easton employee’s 2020 salary and the reason we’re showing them - lehighvalleylive.com
"employee" - Google News
https://ift.tt/3c4ygEc
https://ift.tt/2W5rCYQ
Bagikan Berita Ini
Kalah terus main di tempat lain?
ReplyDeletemari coba disini a+j+o+q+q (WA +855969190856)
Sedia deposit pulsa juga (min 20rb)