The Examiner’s Metro jackpot special report last week found transit employees piling up more than $70 million in overtime. Eyebrows were also raised by another Examiner finding — Metro’s 200 highest paid employees were all paid at least $40,000 in overtime last year. Plus, the report detailed how Metro employees use excessive overtime to fatten up already generous pensions.
Some Metro employee union officials weren’t happy to see those numbers in print, but Metro riders and Washington region taxpayers benefited immensely by having access to important data in evaluating the transit system’s performance. After The Examiner report appeared, Rep. Tom Davis proposed legislation limiting overtime to no more than one-third of base salary and removing overtime from Metro pension calculations. The Metro jackpot special report thus provided a classic illustration of transparency and accountability in government.
Too bad officials in most other Washington region jurisdictions don’t follow Metro’s practice on this issue. The Examiner’s requests for overtime data from local government officials in Alexandria, Arlington County, Fairfax County and Prince William County were adamantly denied. Prince George’s County has yet to respond to this newspaper’s Jan. 8 request.
District of Columbia officials said there is no central personnel database for the district government, but Mayor Adrian Fenty told The Examiner he thinks compensation data should be made public and promised to follow up with city officials. City officials in Bowie, Rockville and Vienna refused. Fairfax city officials claimed it would cost $300 for the two or three mouse clicks required to copy data for the 500 relevant employees. Herndon officials said they have no electronic employee compensation records but offered to allow The Examiner to copy the paper documents.
Only Montgomery County officials provided all of the requested data, leading a now former county spokesman to quip that The Examiner had requested “everything about our employees but their shoe sizes.”
Taxpayers in these jurisdictions clearly have an interest in seeing overtime and pension data for local government employees. There are 386 Fairfax County government employees paid $100,000 or more annually, 111 in Alexandria city government and 160 in Prince William County government. Remember, these figures don’t include overtime, so it is certain there are hundreds more local government workers being paid more than $100,000 annually. This is why taxpayers have a right to know if overtime and pension costs for local governments are as excessive as those paid by Metro.
Readers who want to probe deeper into the data that has been made available so far to The Examiner can do so on the Washington Examiner Community Action Network homepage at: www.examiner.com/wecan. Additional data is added to the page as it is received.
