Civil Beat Shares Honolulu Employee Salaries

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Editor's note: This special report includes three other stories:

• Honolulu's highest-paid employees
• Honolulu's lowest-paid employees
• Who works for the city of Honolulu

It costs Honolulu taxpayers about $88,000 on average to compensate a city employee, a Civil Beat analysis has found.

The city has a budget of nearly $2 billion, with about half of that going toward payroll for its work force of 10,500 employees.

The City and County of Honolulu gets the bulk of its funding from taxes and revenue from services such as sewers, refuse and public transportation, with property taxes leading the way.

The city is spending $670.54 million on salaries for fiscal 2011, which began July 1. That includes nearly $40 million the city set aside to fund more than 1,000 vacant positions. It's spending another $252.8 million on additional employee compensation, including pension contributions, health benefits, and accrued vacation pay-outs. The total compensation cost is about $924 million.

Civil Beat filed a request under Hawaii's open records law asking for the names, positions and salaries of all city employees. Providing data on how government works and how it spends taxpayer funds is central to our commitment to the importance of transparency. It's also important for public employees to know that they're being paid fairly in comparison with their colleagues.

(You can also read articles about state salaries, University of Hawaii salaries, Department of Education salaries, pay at Hawaii Health Systems Corp., the Legislature and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs.)

The city provided a list of 8,461¹ employees and their salaries, including 534 employees at the Honolulu Board of Water Supply, a semi-autonomous branch. The data does not reflect pay reductions caused by twice-monthly furloughs, which began July 1 for about 5,000 city employees. Newly-elected Mayor Peter Carlisle has said he would consider cutting city workers pay, or eliminating jobs as a way to end furloughs.

Here is the data as provided by the city's Department of Human Resources and the Board of Water Supply.

Civil Beat has created a searchable database for full members to make the data more accessible. Here's an example of such a database.

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