Part One of a three part series – Opening the Books on local, state and federal salaries and spending
By Aaron Warner
The highest-paid City of Burlington employee earns more than $260,000 – and several others aren’t far behind.
This information comes courtesy of Adam Andrzejeski (an GEE ef ski), founder and CEO of Openthebooks.com, the world’s largest database of public sector spending, whether at the federal, state or local level.
The information provided below comes almost exclusively from Openthebooks.com, and is Part One of a three part series. Part Two will examine spending in other Vermont municipalities and at the State level. Part Three will examine federal spending.
In 2022, Openthebooks.com filed some 50,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and captured 25 million public employee pension and salary records. They also were the first to obtain payroll information for the State of California. Their mission is to bring total transparency to the people who often overpay both employees and contractors with their tax dollars.
Shockingly, the federal spending swamp “is dwarfed by the state and local swamps,” Andrzejeski said in a Hillsdale college speech. Of the two million government employees who are “highly compensated” (re: make six figures or more) 1.6 million are state and local.
The City of Burlington is no stranger to highly compensated senior employees – especially among the senior employees of the Burlington Electric Department.
Darren Springer, the General Manager for Burlington Electric Dept. (committed to “net zero by 2030”) was the highest paid city employee at $261,591, up from $214,585 in 2020, according to Openthebooks.com.
Kasti Munir, COO for Burlington Electric, was the second highest paid city employee at $239,637, up from $218,678 in 2020.
Linda Carter, a 43 year employee of Burlington Electric, made $225,275.65 before passing away in April of this year.
Dwayne Mellis, a DEA task force and Burlington policeman, earned $207,912 in 2022.
One big earner was paid not to work, but to stop working. 2022 saw BPD officer Jason Bellevance, who was accused of violent assault, paid over $340,000 to resign.
School Superintendent Thomas Flanagan earned $182,000 in 2022. Mayor Miro Weinberger earned $124,768, according to OpenBooks.com.
OTB has a free downloadable app showing the 23 million government employees and their earnings at every state and local level. All you need to do is put in your zip code to get the data.
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Categories: Burlington
This is sickening
If you think politicians make too much you should see how much their corporate bosses make!
That info is coming…
The issue isn’t just high salaries. Is there commensurate performance? And how many employees are there? The Vermont Agency of Education, for example, has as many employees, not counting contractors, as Vermont has public school students. Which, according to U. S. Labor Statistics, explains why almost 40% of the Vermont workforce is employed in the tax subsidized sectors of health, education, and government.
Whatever happened to pay for your performance, Burlington has become a cesspool with debt ( see above salaries ) for one, and then all the other atrocities………………..
It’s pretty sad, what the performance is from Burlington leadership, if they didn’t work for the city, they’d all would have been fired for incompetence !!
For all the Burlington taxpaying homeowners, are you getting your money’s worth,
keep working…….. they’ll keep spending.
Not sure if the cited figures include the benefits (insurance, 401K match, pension,) yet a quarter million+ a year is no chump change in Vermont. Consider the lowest paid worker on the totem pole, it usually works out the highest earns tenfold or more. Similar to the corporate world. However, head honchos in public service and non-profit managers and above, earn salaries with benefits that pale to those who work below them, and do tenfold the work. Good to know where taxpayer money is going and to whom.
Well, if it plays out accordingly, if the former Twitter can get rid of 80% of their workforce and still function, albeit with some bumps initially, I am pretty certain every other organization…federal, state, commercial, nonprofit etc. can do exactly the same. Just think about who was classified as “essential” during the plandemic.
Yes, Pam, they can (and should) cut their workforces. But they won’t, because they must maintain the voting majorities required to sustain the inefficiency of their grift.
“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money” – – a saying often credited to Alexis De Tocqueville but nonetheless prescient no matter who was the author.
Ben Franklin said it another way: “In these Sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its Faults, if they are such: because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no Form of Government but what may be a Blessing to the People if well administred; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administred for a Course of Years, and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”
Unfortunately, no amount of common sense and wisdom held by the few has ever convinced the many of their foolishness. Only a calamity of one kind or another has made this ultimate point.
“Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force.” – – Lord Acton
These pearls of wisdom have been in abundance for centuries. And yet most of us still become lazy and corrupted by our good fortune. It’s human nature. We just have to learn to live with it.
The whole thing is criminal. Yearly performance reviews by a qualified third party would go a long way toward stopping this crap.
If only Vermont would stop taxing retirees social security benefits and military pensions maybe we could afford to live here like these public servants do. If you think these salaries are an eye opener look into the publicly available salaries of state employees like our equity director and tim ashe who was voted out and had no real experience…
$182,000 for the school superintendent. For that money, he needs to be given a short leash and directed to work much harder and much smarter on the need for good school administrators. His hires have been shaky, at best. Huge turnover at BHS, and a principal gone from an elementary position in 2022 due to lack of diligence about licensing. And there have been others. You can’t be paid like that as a Superintendent and have such an important responsibility to kids and parents, and screw up so much with your hires of building leaders. Get on it, school board!