San Diego, California, National News - The San Diego Union-Tribune

City of San Diego payroll data

Part 1: The city's payroll shot up $41 million last year, even as the mayor confronted a budget shortfall and pledged to rein in spending.

Part 2: Thousands of city employees receive special payouts and unusual benefits that are pushing personnel expenses higher than ever.

Part 3: Pay for city employees has grown increasingly top-heavy in the past several years. One out of eight workers took home at least $100,000 last year.

Background: Behind the stories

More: Other Union-Tribune Watchdog Reports

We at The San Diego Union-Tribune thought long and hard about whether to publish all employees' names and salaries in a searchable form. A major part of our responsibility is to weigh the public's right to information against individual privacy concerns. Employee compensation is a significant cost to the city of San Diego, and plays prominently in the city's strategy for cutting the budget. In our three-day series, the Union-Tribune offers its readers the context for the city's payroll information. Here we can provide you with the valuable details. In the end, the decision to post this data was driven by our belief that you deserve to know how your tax dollars are being spent.

-Karin Winner, Editor

This database includes six years of compensation for the city work force of about 12,000 public employees. Individual pay for each year can be affected by promotions, partial years of employment, leave taken, vacation payouts and other issues that can cause wide fluctuations. Because the city did not provide breakdowns of types of pay, the data shown has limitations in disclosing some of these variables. The annual figure for compensation includes salary, overtime, bonuses, pension settlement payouts, uniform allowances, cashed-out vacation time, and hundreds of other types of cash compensation that are not broken out.

The database the city provided also lumped tuition and mileage reimbursement with income, making it impossible to extract. However, city officials said reimbursements paid last year were less than $800,000, or about one tenth of one percent of the $732.7 million payroll.

For questions or comments on this application or our coverage of it, e-mail localgov@uniontrib.com or call 619-542-4570.

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City of San Diego payroll data

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