The Post-Dispatch has published the 2024 edition of its annual Public Pay database, covering hundreds of thousands of government employees.
You can find the database at stltoday.com/pay.
The Post-Dispatch submitted requests for payroll records covering more than 130 government agencies, ranging from small towns to school districts to the states of Missouri and Illinois.
Readers can search the database to find the total amount earned during the 2023 calendar year by elected officials or full-time public employees ranging from librarians to firefighters to custodians. It also includes other helpful information, such as the median pay at each agency or department or details about public school teachers’ experience.
The newspaper added four agencies to the database this year: , the , the and the .
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The Post-Dispatch has published its public pay database annually since 2016. The project serves as a form of public accountability and helps the public see how tax money is being spent.
In Missouri and Illinois, payroll information is considered an open record, and state laws require that public agencies release it upon request.
Five small municipalities in St. Louis County — Bellerive Acres, Champ, Country Life Acres, Huntleigh and Westwood — are not included in the database because they don’t pay any full-time employees or elected officials.
Most agencies provided the Post-Dispatch with the data it requested within a reasonable amount of time, with the notable exception of .
This year, the city’s Sunshine Department took 140 days to provide the requested pay records, a full month longer than the 109 days it took last year.
In contrast, St. Louis County, which has a similar number of employees, fulfilled the same request in just seven days.
During those 140 days, the city’s sunshine coordinator, Joseph Sims, never provided a detailed explanation of the cause of the delay, as required by state law. Instead, each week, he sent the newspaper a templated response bumping up by one week his estimate of the “earliest time and date” the records would be made available.
The city released the records in July, a day after a reporter began directly contacting officials in the city’s personnel department.
A spokesperson for the personnel department acknowledged this week that the 140-day response time was “far from ideal.”
“(S)everal factors, including the complexity of the information requested and the coordination across multiple departments, contributed to this delay,” personnel spokesperson Jamie McGeechan wrote in a statement, adding that they were reviewing internal process to identify areas for improvement.
“We understand that timely responses are critical in maintaining the public’s trust, and we are committed to addressing any procedural challenges that may have caused the delay,” McGeechan said.