All politics may be local, but all local government payrolls are not equal in the Washington metro region.
Information obtained by The Examiner shows government workers are far more likely to be earning more than $100,000 a year if they are employed by the District or Montgomery County than if they work in Loudoun County, Va.
Roughly 7.5 percent of people on local government payrolls in Montgomery and D.C. earn more than $100,000 a year, compared with less than 2 percent of those working for Loudoun.
The rest of the metro region’s counties have about 4 to 6 percent of their work forces earning more than $100,000 a year. In Arlington County, it’s 5.8 percent of the work force, in Fairfax County roughly 5.4 percent, about 4.6 percent in Prince George’s County and 4.1 percent of Prince William’s work force.
Steve Fuller, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University, says the powerful unions in the District and Montgomery — which recently protected pay raises of as much as 8 percent in despite budget problems — are likely a factor into the salary differences.
“I think part of it is they’ve got a union effect that Virginia doesn’t have,” Fuller said, because Virginia policy bars unions from collectively bargaining. “Employees in D.C. and Maryland have far more power than those who work in Virginia, who basically have no power other than threatening to leave their jobs.”
Nelson Akeredolu, spokesman for the D.C. Office of Human Resources, said he was unable to comment on the figures.
Montgomery union leaders, however, say it’s Montgomery management salaries that throw off the curve. Montgomery pays many of its top directors salaries that are roughly $40,000 a year more than in Fairfax, a fact that likely helped Montgomery lure a police chief and a director of procurement from Fairfax in recent years.
Montgomery Council Member Valerie Ervin, who doggedly protected county contracts from raise reductions this year, said she’s proud that Montgomery’s work force has many people with years of county experience under their belts.
“I don’t think it’s bad to have longevity in your employee ranks,” Ervin said. “If you see who makes the salaries, it is people who have been here a number of years. The system has invested in people over time.”
Fairfax County Supervisor Penny Gross said all of the suburban counties have to combat the sticker shock that comes with recruiting people from outside the area.
“In the department head categories, to get somebody who is qualified and capable and willing to come to this area, the salary level had better be considerable,” Gross said.
Fuller said he’d expect Montgomery and Fairfax to be leading the pack in suburban government work force salaries, because they’re older, larger and more established than counties like Prince William and Loudoun that are farther from the District.
“For a county like Loudoun — 10 years ago, almost nobody was living there, but now they’ve got almost 300,000 people,” Fuller said. “They’ve had to do a lot of hiring recently, so their staff is newer and their payroll doesn’t have as many people with years of experience.”
Loudoun officials did not respond to requests for comment about the county’s payroll.
Fuller said that given the high cost of living in the D.C. region, he was surprised counties didn’t have more people making more than $100,000.
“A salary of $100,000 a year isn’t all that big a number anymore,” Fuller said. “At George Mason University, where I’m at, I know it’s hard to hire anybody for academic or management positions for under $100,000 these days.”
