Something is in the water at the LA Department of Water and Power

Soon to be published 2013 payroll data for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power reveals extraordinary levels of public employee compensation. As an example of the widespread excessive levels of pay found at the LADWP below are 3 charts comparing the levels of pay for: Custodian Supervisors, Customer Service Representatives, and Garage Attendants.

The values below are the median pay only; no benefits are included. The salary.com data is the median salary+bonus for current positions with the same or similar job titles. As pay tends to rise every year, the disparities found below are actually greater than reported, as the government pay is from 2013 whereas the salary.com pay data is for 2015. Thus, the 2015 government pay is likely to be even higher.

For custodian supervisor, the salary.com data references “janitorial supervisor” as there was no “custodian supervisor” position found. The City of LA includes job titles such as “chief custodian supervisor” and “head custodian” in the reported median.

The job title used for the salary.com is “parking attendant” as no “garage attendant” was found. The average pay for garage attendants was $77,811, a roughly 5% increase from their 2012 average of $74,408, as reported by Bloomberg.com.

The job title used for the salary.com value was “Customer Service Representative II.” The job title used for the City of LA value was “Customer Service Specialist.” As LA County did not have any employees with a job title of this type, we used “Customer Service Representative II” job titles as found in the LA County Sanitation District.

There were 40 Customer Service Representatives who made over $100,000 each in pay alone in 2013. For the department as a whole, the average full-time, year-round employee made $114,941 in 2013.

TransparentCalifornia.com will post the entire data-set in a searchable and downloadable format to the website within the next few weeks.