Eyewitness News investigates salaries and pensions of public workers. A new website, transparentcalifornia.com makes it easy to find out how much our local public employees are making. Some of the numbers may be surprising. In the Fresno area there are tens of thousands of employees you can look up, from county workers to police officers and firefighters. The website's creator wants the public to become educated about where our tax dollars are going.
Launched this week, transparentcalifornia.com aims to be a one-stop website to easily see how much public employees make. Southern California creator Mark Bucher says via Skype that he wanted to make it simple for people to use. The non profit California Public Policy Center took six months compiling information by making public records requests.
"Trying to shed light on the financial situation California finds itself in with unsustainable salaries and pensions being promised to public employees," said Bucher.
Salaries can be viewed by city, county or state workers. The top earners in 2012 out of Fresno were Fresno State President John Welty and a Fresno County Chief Child Psychiatrist who each made $314,000. You view see base pay, overtime pay, and other pay. They're added together for total pay. One Fresno police officer made $100,000 just in overtime.
"We are 150 officers down since Mayor Swearengin took office. 150. That's why we have ridiculous amounts of overtime," said Jacky Parks, President of the Fresno Police Officers Association.
Parks says the officer, who isn't named, must have worked 36 extra hours each week to earn that kind of money.
"That's a lot. But it's a lot because we don't have enough officers. Somebody's got to work those shifts," said Parks.
A former Fresno County judge is collecting $188,000 in pension. A total of 139 former county workers are making over $100,000 each year.
"The retirement system is very costly," said Fresno County Supervisor Judy Case-McNairy.
Case-Mcnairy says pension reform now blocks new employees from getting the same perks as current and former employees. She feels more reform is still necessary.
"I would love to have a dialogue with employees whether they'd like some of that money back in their check and slow down the accrual of pension costs," said Case-McNairy.
Pension figures are not posted for Fresno city workers, including police and fire pensions. The web site creators say the agency is stalling the request, but when Eyewitness News reached out to the retirement system, it was told the information would have been provided, but the web site didn't pay the $250 dollars to produce the records.
Since the website's launch on Tuesday, there have been 388,168 page views and 24,940 visits from 19,000 visitors.
Since the website's launch on Tuesday, there have been 388,168 page views and 24,940 visits from 19,000 visitors.