For Fayette County history teacher Joseph Jarrell and thousands like him, the state has virtually eliminated raises for years.
Meanwhile his health insurance has skyrocketed, the cost of driving to school in Peachtree City has gone up, even the cost of the bananas he awards to his best-on-the-test students — he writes “top banana” on the peel — has risen.
Jarrell skillfully leads his students through the rise and fall of empires, but it may take even more skill for him to make sense of the rise and fall of the past decade: in 2012, he made $296 more than he did in 2008, and he’s taking home far less money now than he was then.
Ron Jackson runs the state’s technical college system, which increased tuition 13 percent last year and suffered a $17 million state budget cut for the upcoming year. The system has merged schools and uses mostly part-time faculty to save money.
Unlike Joseph Jarrell, however, Jackson has received two substantial raises since 2010, raising his pay from $158,000 to $189,100.
The difference? Jarrell is a veteran teacher whose pay heavily depends on how much money his district gets from the state. Jackson, whose raises during the same period came to nearly 20 percent, is a state commissioner whose salary is set by a board that governs his agency. An analysis of salary data by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and agency records and interviews make clear that not everyone in state government has seen his or her earnings stagnate since Gov. Sonny Perdue froze salaries at the start of the Great Recession.
» Interactive graphic: State workers paid more than the governor
While most ordinary state workers and teachers have had few or no raises since the recession, nearly 1,000 of Georgia’s highest-paid employees earned more in just the past year.
“It is demoralizing. You are trying to do more with less and you are feeling less appreciated,” said Jarrell, a McIntosh High School teacher. “I have heard many teachers say they wouldn’t encourage anyone to enter this profession.”
Other key findings of the AJC’s state salary analysis:
- A lot depends on where state employees work. Most of the top-paid people who earned more in 2012 worked for the University System. But about a hundred agency executives, senior bureaucrats and highly compensated staffers who work outside the college system earned more last year as well.
- The state salary database doesn't specify whether employees who earned more money did extra work or received a raise, a bonus, a promotion or some special stipend paid by an outside source. What is clear, though, is that for every state employee earning six figures who took home more money, scores of employees earning five figures did not.
- State workers are still living under a cost-of-living pay freeze put in place by then-Gov. Sonny Perdue in fiscal 2009. But not all boards that govern state agencies followed the freeze when it came to top staffers.
The Technical College System of Georgia board, for example, awarded Ron Jackson $31,000 in raises since 2010, because, board members say, leaders like Jackson make a big difference.
“The board is very aware of the total budget situation in the state and for technical colleges,” board chairwoman Lynn Cornett said. “We felt it was so important to maintain the leadership we have with Commissioner Jackson that we should do this (raise his pay). He has led the system through very difficult times and still maintained very high performance standards.”
On the lower end of the scale, however, some officials worry that stagnant pay is chasing good workers away from state government.
“We are losing a lot of quality people in state government because they are not able to earn a living wage,” said Senate Minority Leader Steve Henson, D-Tucker.
Gov. Nathan Deal acknowledged during an April speech that the pay freeze for many state employees is a problem. He said the state lost 16 percent of its workers last year, and the count has been on rise.
“The service to our state without pay raises is having some consequences,” he said.
‘Retain outstanding faculty and staff’
In Georgia’s University system, pay raises for school presidents have gotten the most hype. The Board of Regents sets the pay package for college presidents, based on the recommendation of the system’s chancellor. The panel decided last month not to give any raises, although they have given them to some leaders the past few years.
Hundreds of university administrators and faculty take home big-money salaries, and many of them saw their earnings increase in recent years.
“While there have been no systemwide raises since 2009, there have been promotions reflecting normal career advances made by faculty and staff,” said Georgia State University President Mark Becker. “In other cases, we have adjusted some salaries to retain outstanding faculty and staff who would have been recruited away from the university by outside institutions at significantly higher salaries.”
In addition, faculty can earn extra pay for teaching more classes or doing other extra work. And some staffers — from administrators to coaches to hotshot professors — draw pay from several sources.
For instance, the highest-paid state employee on open.georgia.gov last year was Georgia State University marketing professor Viswanathan Kumar, who GSU officials call one of the top five “researchers and marketing practitioners” in the world. His overall pay increased from about $580,000 in 2009 to $949,000 last year, according to the site, which lists salaries of all state employees.
Kumar’s base pay is only about half of what he makes. He earns more from fees paid by corporations and executives who attend his executive-level courses at the college.
Lonely — and lucrative — at the top
A sizable number of the highest-paid employees work at state agencies — like the state lottery, teacher retirement system or ports authority — that provide bonuses or incentive pay.
The AJC reported earlier this year that now-retired Lottery President Margaret DeFrancisco was paid $456,000 in fiscal 2012, including a $75,000 bonus. That was slightly less than she made in 2011, when the bonuses were bigger. The 10 highest-paid lottery employees below DeFrancisco received raises. Lottery officials said that was because each took on more job responsibilities or was promoted. The lottery receives its operating funding from ticket sales.
As with the lottery, the Teacher Retirement System’s bonus system has been criticized. The pay of the chief investment officer, Charles Cary, went from $567,000 to nearly $617,000 — nearly 9 percent — in fiscal 2012. Two other top investment staffers made more than $500,000 last year.
System officials note that they oversee a $59 billion fund and that the private sector pays as much or more for such positions.
The Ports Authority makes money from fees paid by those who use the ports and doesn’t receive direct state appropriations, and the authority hasn’t frozen pay. As in the case of the lottery and retirement systems, those at the top get incentives. Executive Director Curtis Foltz made $429,000 in fiscal 2011, according to state data. Last year it was $487,000 (a 13.5 percent increase).The year pay freezes were implemented for state workers, 2009, he was paid $331,000 as the authority’s chief operating officer.
The state’s transportation board voted its commissioner, Keith Golden, a 3 percent increase in January, taking his salary to $187,979. His predecessor, Vance Smith, had been paid $182,503 in fiscal 2011, his last full year in the job, which is about what Golden was paid last year.
“We felt it appropriate to reflect our confidence in him through a small increase,” said board Chairman Johnny Floyd, a former state lawmaker.
Barring promotions, other DOT workers have not gotten raises, officials said.
Corrections Commissioner Brian Owens’ pay has gone from $125,000 in 2009, the year he was named to run to the prisons agency, to $149,000 this year — a total increase of 19 percent.
Some other top corrections staffers, though not all, earned more in 2012 than 2011. Meanwhile many prison guards, most of whom make less than $35,000 a year, saw their pay stagnate.
Deal’s staff told agency heads last year that some merit raises would be acceptable as long as they didn’t increase a department’s budget and staffers were “doing more with less.” The governor’s staff says he didn’t want to lose good people to private industry. It is unclear how many of these merit increases have been given out by agency heads.
‘Losing them out the back door’
State lawmakers have not been blind to the impact of not giving raises to rank-and-file workers. They have put money in the budget to bump up the pay of Department of Natural Resources rangers and GBI staffers. House Appropriations Chairman Terry England, R-Auburn, said the money was put in the budget to move them toward parity with state troopers, who start at $35,741. All three agencies have been losing young staffers to better-paying jobs elsewhere.
“We were losing them out the back door faster than we were bringing them in the front door,” England said.
Giving all 200,000 state employees and teachers a cost-of-living raise, something that was common in the 1990s and early 2000s, would be expensive. State officials say it would cost the state about $128 million to give 1 percent raises.
So a 3 percent raise for all state workers and teachers — the same percentage the DOT commissioner received — would cost $384 million. During a time of almost constant cost-cutting, state leaders say, they haven’t had the money for those kinds of increases.
That’s small consolation for state employees and some teachers who have seen their incomes decline during the recession.
One administrative assistant, who didn’t want her name used for fear of retribution, said she has received two cost-of-living raises in the past 11 years. She makes a little less than $39,000 a year, about the same as she did in 2008. But health insurance has gone up every year, so she says she now takes home less than she did in 2000. She works with single mothers whose children are on PeachCare, the health insurance program for children of the working poor.
“The common response we get is, ‘You should be happy to have a job,’” the staffer said.
‘Not good for employee morale’
Many of the state’s teachers have been eligible for longevity raises, but not all systems have funded them. And many systems have forced teachers to take days off without pay.
Donna Marie Aker, a Gwinnett County math teacher, said she takes home less today than she did in 2006. This year alone, she said, her health insurance went up $120 a month. But comparatively, she’s not bad off. Bus drivers, cafeteria staffers and others have seen their hours cut at the same time their insurance has gone up.
“There comes a point where we should say anyone who works for Gwinnett County schools should not be part of the working poor,” she said.
Mercer University economist Roger Tutterow said giving raises to the leadership of organizations — rather than to everyone — costs relatively little, so it is easier to sell to governing boards.
“The higher you get in an organization, the more that it (getting raises) has to do with negotiating skills and your relationship with the board than necessarily being able to point to the uniqueness of the skill set,” he said. “Yes, people at the top of organizations are there for a reason — they are talented — but at the same time, I think the idea that they are irreplaceable may be a little overstated,” he said.
England, the budget chairman, said, “It’s not good for employee morale to see the chief getting a raise and nobody else is. It kind of does fly in the face of what we’ve set and the governor has set as the policy that we are holding the line on raises.”
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