Sixteen Allegheny County workers received more than $50,000 in unused leave last year, and all worked in the police department, sheriff’s office or jail.
The top nine spots in the Western Pennsylvania county were dominated by the police, according to an investigation by The Center Square, which obtained the data from a request under the state’s right-to-know law.
Sergeant Christopher McHenry earned the most at $80,083. Officers Richard Keebler, Kirk A. Ruckel, and Kevin McCue each received more than $71,000. The exception was Douglas E. Clark, a sergeant in the sheriff’s office, who cashed out $70,914. Those sums amounted to half to two-thirds of their $110,000-plus annual salaries last year.
County policies suggest the largest payouts were driven largely by accumulated sick leave. The county tightly caps unused vacation time. By contrast, many police, sheriff’s office, and jail employees may cash out as much as half a year of unused sick leave when they leave county employment.
Where the money went
Mark Moses, a former city treasurer and author of The Municipal Finance Crisis, said leave cash-out policies allow some employees to take home more money than higher-salaried officials.
“This shows where the money is going in the organization,” he told The Center Square in an interview.
Eight of the largest leave recipients earned more compensation last year than County Executive Sara Innamorato, Warden Trevor Wingard, and County Solicitor Rosalyn Guy-McCorkle, each of whose salary was in the $150,000 to $160,000 range last year. The latter officials oversee a county of 1.22 million, the 39th largest in the country.
Another five police cracked the top 50. In addition, 17 of the 50 came from the sheriff’s office or jail department.
To put those figures in perspective, employees from the three departments represented 21% of the county’s workforce, or 1,223 of 5,900, last year. Yet they accounted for 60% of the 50 employees who cashed out the most money from unused sick and vacation leave.
The police department’s dominance wasn’t confined to the top earners. Police department employees received $825,548 in unused leave last year, more than twice as much as the next two departments combined.
Sheriff’s office workers cashed out $379,478, while those from the District Attorney’s office received $373,794. Jail department employees received $328,200.
Like city, like county
The pattern mirrored one that The Center Square found in Pittsburgh last month. Allegheny County’s payouts for unused leave were even larger. It paid $3.3 million to 475 employees, while the Steel City paid $2.3 million to 200 city workers last year.
Leonard Gilroy, vice president of government reform for the Reason Foundation, said the large payouts show the folly of governments showering generous benefits on their workers.
“Most types of employees don’t work at a place based on their benefits,” Gilroy told The Center Square in an interview. “Governments need to compete with the private sector for workers, but the idea that they are going to win because of super generous benefit policies is not supported by the evidence.”
An email and phone call to the Allegheny County’s controller’s office were not returned.
Caps hard and loose
Gilroy noted that most governments no longer permit retiring employees to rack up $200,000 to $300,000 in unused leave in their final year on the job—amounts he described as “crazy” for taxpayers to pay. Like Moses, he described Allegheny County’s policies on unused leave for retiring or departing employees as partially reformed.
The county places a hard cap on unused vacation leave for many police, sheriff’s office and jail employees covered by collective-bargaining agreements. Employees generally cannot carry vacation leave from one year to the next, and payouts are typically limited to unused vacation from the current year when an employee leaves county service.
The county’s cap on unused sick leave is far looser.
Many employees for the three departments may cash out as much as half a year’s worth of sick leave. The amount depends on the bargaining unit.
Police officers, sergeants, and lieutenants, as well deputy sheriffs, sergeants, and lieutenants, are permitted to receive as many as 132 days of unused sick leave. Those covered police employees are paid at their daily rate, while covered sheriff’s office employees are paid on a sliding scale.
Correctional officers may be paid for as many as 130 days based on their hourly rate.
Steven G. Craig, an economist at the University of Houston, said most governments and businesses have adopted the opposite approach.
“(S)ome institutions, including firms, have combined sick and vacation days into one pool,” he told The Center Square in an interview. “For those that have not done that, they usually only pay for vacation days, not sick days.”
Among the top earners, retirement eligible employees held only a modest financial edge. Police officers Keebler, Ruckel, and McCue started in 2006. Yet they cashed out $71,000 to $73,000, only a few thousand dollars more than their counterparts Brad L. Martin, who started in 2014, and James P. Grill, who started in 2012.
Large leave cash-outs, the records suggest, are not confined to employees at the end of their careers.