Inside City Hall: Miami’s Salary Secret

With salaries and benefits consuming 77% of Miami’s budget, payroll systems track every dollar paid — including overtime and bonuses — but city officials declined to provide a full accounting of what employees actually earn.

The City of Miami can tell you what each of its 5,031 employees was scheduled to earn last year. What they won’t tell you is what they were actually paid.

The distinction matters. 

For many city employees, base pay is just a starting point. Overtime, bonuses and other add-ons can significantly increase earnings, with some workers — news reports in cities across the U.S. show — doubling their base salary.

Such pay boosts may help explain why in the current fiscal year, salaries and benefits for City of Miami workers will account for roughly 77% of the city’s $1.8 billion operating budget, a number that has increased 57% in just five years.

Read more: Inside City Hall: Miami’s Pay Raise Machine

So how much, exactly, did each city employee actually take home last year? 

The Spotlight asked, repeatedly. 

The city won’t tell us.

After our December reporting showed that the number of city workers with base pay of at least $200,000 had more than doubled in two years, we filed a public records request seeking a full accounting of annual take-home pay.

Read more: Inside City Hall: Miami’s Growing $200K Club

Sorry, city officials told us, such records don’t exist. But they can be created, for a price: $193, to reimburse IT staff for two hours of their time.

We agreed to pay.

But days later, the offer was abruptly rescinded. 

“Please be advised that the Office of the City Attorney has requested that we refrain from proceeding with this request,” Orlando Rodriguez, Assistant Director of the Office of Communications, wrote in an email, “noting that under state law the City is not required to create a new record in order to fulfill a public records request.”

So how can we obtain the data? we asked.

Rodriguiez refused to answer: “As previously stated, I must defer to the city attorney on this matter.” 

We appealed the decision to City Attorney George Wysong, who promised “we will look into this.”

We never heard back. He’s not answering our emails.

We also appealed, repeatedly, to Miami’s chief administrator, City Manager James Reyes. He didn’t respond. 

To understand what records do exist and which ones might shed light on total take-home pay by city workers, we asked for an interview with Human Resources Director Angela Roberts. She declined, after repeated requests, to speak with us.

So we submitted questions in writing to the Office of Communications. (City rules prevent its employees from responding directly to the media.)  

In their response, officials confirmed that all employee pay — including base salary, overtime and other adjustments — is recorded at the “transaction level” and stored in systems that can be queried and exported. 

They also confirmed that the city maintains a payroll database tracking all payments made to employees and has previously exported that data for audits and internal analysis. 

Producing a comprehensive figure of “total compensation,” officials noted, would require combining payroll data with information from other departments, including pension contributions and benefit costs.

In its responses, the city acknowledged that it has, at times, produced reports showing total annual compensation by employee. 

So, the records can be produced. 

But the city won’t do it.

Hoping to bypass the city’s administrative staff – the very people whose employment data we’re seeking – we appealed to our elected officials. District 2 Commissioner Damian Pardo and his communications aide did not respond to our repeated requests.

Neither did Mayor Eileen Higgins, and her staff assistants, who arrived in office last December on a promise of bringing customer service and accountability to City Hall – as well as a “deep dive” into runaway city spending.

Multiple requests to Higgins and her office staff requesting help obtaining the salary data went unanswered.  

In a city where overtime and other forms of additional pay play a major role in earnings — particularly in public safety departments — a full and complete picture of city employee compensation has broad policy implications: for setting the annual budget, for setting employee base salaries, for meeting pension obligations and for negotiations with the local municipal workers union.

Previous news reports, for instance, have detailed how City of Miami Fire-Rescue personnel have at times ranked among the city’s highest-paid employees once overtime is included, in some cases earning nearly as much in extra hours than in base salary. 

In the city’s police department, heavy overtime has at times allowed employees to substantially increase take-home pay, driven by staffing shortages, scheduling practices and union rules.

Because pension benefits are typically tied to an employee’s highest-earning year, the ability to increase income through overtime can directly affect long-term retirement payouts, making total compensation, not base salary, the more meaningful measure of costs to taxpayers.

What the city’s current administration — and at least some of its elected officials — are offering for public consideration is only a partial view: base salaries, job titles and department assignments, along with aggregate personnel spending in the budget.

But in a system where overtime and supplemental pay can substantially increase earnings — and future pension obligations — what the city won’t show us remains a critical piece of its financial picture.