Wyandotte County/KCK Unified Government Payroll
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In 2010 the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kan. had 2,292 government workers who were paid almost $116 million in total salaries.
With a 2010 census population of 157,505, a decrease of 0.2 percent since 2000, county/city government salaries cost every person about $735.
For the 89,928 residents ages 21 to 64 that’s $1,288 per resident.
The median salary for a Unified Government worker was $49,629 with the middle half of workers earning between $36,213 and $66,279.
While 21 employees were paid over $100,000, eight salaries were high statistical outliers (see boxplot).
Table 1. Statistically “high” salaries among Unified Government Workers
Twenty-six departments have 1 percent or more of the total salaries and account for about 82 percent of all salaries.
Table 2. Unified Government departments with 1 percent or more of 2010 salaries
The top 30 of the 294 position titles account for half the salaries.
Table 3. Positions in Unified Government accounting for 50 percent of salaries
The table below is a list of salaries for the 2,292 Unified Government workers (in alphabetical order):
Table 4. Unified Government 2010 Payroll (click below to view PDF)
(click to view PDF)
Download file with Unified Government 2010 payroll information in Excel or PDF format. The Excel file can be filtered or sorted differently.
Wyandotte County is the fourth largest county in Kansas with a 2010 census population between Shawnee County with 177,934 and Douglas County with 110,826.
See Technical Analysis report for additional details.
Cross-county comparisons will be made in future articles.
NOTE:
“Due to the recession and very tight budgets, UG employees have not had pay raises since 2008. 2012 will be the 4th consecutive year of no raises. Also, in 2010, all non public safety employees were furloughed for 15 days which amounted to a pay cut. The numbers shown are for what the salary would have been without furloughs.”
– Mike Taylor, Public Relations Director, Unified Government of WyCo/KCK
Word cloud of position titles in WyCO / KCK UG in 2010 (click to enlarge)
Computer Assisted Reporting Notes and Files
- Payroll summary by department: Statistics (CSV), Boxplots (PDF)
- Payroll summary by position: Statistics (CSV), Boxplots (PDF)
- Word clouds of position titles and department names (PDF)
- R analysis script and input/output files (ZIP)
Statistics summary files show number of employees, salary lower and upper bounds (min and max if there are no outliers), quartiles (Q1, Q2 — the median, and Q3). Sum, mean and percent of total figures are also shown. See p. 3 of Technical Analysis report for information about boxplots.
Related
- Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas
- Wyandotte County, Kansas at Sunshine Review: “D” Grade for Sunshine (government transparency)
- Wyandotte County, Kansas, Wikipedia
- Kansas City, Kansas, Wikipedia
- Kansas Watchdog County Resources (includes salaries from other counties)
- State Government Payroll Database, KansasOpenGov.org
- Government Employment & Payroll, U.S. Census Bureau
- New Kansas.com database: 2010 public salaries, Wichita Eagle, Nov. 23, 2010.
- KanView now provides salary information about state workers, Kansas Watchdog, Sept. 10, 2009.
- Search the Wyandotte County salary database, Kansas City Star, April 21, 2008.
- Public employees’ pay, Kansas City Star, March 31, 2008.
- Salaries for State Agencies, Lawrence Journal World, 2005.
- State public employee salary resources, Sunshine Review
Contact: Earl F Glynn, earl@kansaswatchdog.org, KansasWatchdog.org
Reprinting: Kansas Watchdog is a free wire service and we welcome reprinting and only ask for attribution and notification. If you’d like to reprint this story we ask that you e-mail the author with the date the story will run and the outlet name.
Posted under Accountability, Charts, Graphs, Maps, Column B, County Government, Open Records, Transparency.
Tags: Kansas, Kansas City Kansas, Payroll, salaries, Unified Government, Wyandotte County
10:40 pm on October 18th, 2011
Where would I find what the UG s retirement obligations are for police/firefighters?This seems to be a major problem all over the country.
10:03 am on October 19th, 2011
We asked Gene Meyer from KansasReporter.org for his insight about your question:
“there are three different KPERS retirement plans. The big one with all the problems that we write about is for teachers and city and state employees. The one your correspondent may be asking about is for police and fire fighters, and the third is for judges. ”
“One of the biggest reasons for splitting them up like that their career life spans are different. Teachers can work a long time, but 60 or 65 is pretty old for, say, a firefighter to run into burning buildings. Similarly, judges tend to get later starts in that job than the rest of us.”
“The police/firefighter and judges funds are generally in better balance because Kansas didn’t cap the employers contributions the same way they did with the big teacher state worker funds. Last I saw, for 2010, police firefighters was about 25-30 percent underfunded, which is manageable.”
“More details are on the KPERS website, http://www.kpers.org, under reports and publications. There are interim reports there as well as CAFRs if he wants to go that far into the weeds. The Truth in Accounting (www.truthinaccounting.org) run their numbers too, which are worst case estimates.”