Lawyers, overtime lead the way on county’s best-paid employee list
In Miami-Dade County government, lawyers earn the most and the Parks Department pays the least. A look at 2020 compensation data for nearly 30,000 county employees.
The highest earners in Miami-Dade County government tend to hold law degrees. Top paychecks also went to people running departments that don’t rely on property taxes for their budgets.
For some of the county’s mid-level employees, overtime can be a big source of income, too — especially during the COVID-19 emergency that began in March 2020.
A Miami Herald database with compensation data for more than
30,000 workers in MiamiDade government shows the county’s legal department is home to the bulk of the top earners.
The recently retired Abigail Price-Williams, until November MiamiDade’s county attorney, secured the top slot with $415,768 earned in 2020.
Of the 20 highest-paid employees, all but three worked under Price-Williams in the County Attorney’s Office.
Behind Price-Williams were the department heads overseeing PortMiami and Miami International Airport, two county facilities where most of the budget comes from the travel and cargo industries.
Lester Sola, a longtime administrator who now runs the county’s Aviation Department, earned $406,406 last year, just ahead of the $398,777 earned by his PortMiami counterpart, Juan Kuryla.
For this article, the Miami Herald received compensation information for the 33,620 people listed on Miami-Dade County government’s payroll in 2020. For compensation, the Herald included only wages paid for county work in 2020. That included 1% pay supplements for the COVID-19 pandemic response for police and correctional officers and firefighters and paramedics that began in March, as well as a 1% supplement for transit workers that began in October.
The figures do not include any payments for off-duty service for firefighters or police, which are paid by private companies, or one-time payments tied to retirement or ending county employment.
To account for the small payouts that come with employees who only worked a few hours a week or who joined Miami-Dade’s workforce late in the year, the Herald eliminated anyone earning less than $8,902.
That’s the equivalent of working 20 hours a week at Florida’s minimum wage in 2020 of $8.56 an hour. Screening for compensation under that amount left payouts to 29,548 employees.
The Top 50 earners can be found in the chart attached to this article above. To search the database for all 29,548 employees in the Herald database — or to browse by department — use the interactive tool below.
Along with highlighting the county government’s top earners, the compensation data shows:
SOME MIAMI-DADE WORKERS EARNED MORE FROM OVERTIME
Significant overtime payments helped a few mid-level county employees break into the Top 50 list.
Nitza Dominguez, a sergeant with MiamiDade Police, earned $301,690 in 2020, with about $166,000 of that coming from overtime paid by the county. That made Dominguez the
27th best-paid county employee, well ahead of the $223,044 in compensation for the police department’s director, Alfredo “Freddy”
Ramirez III, who finished 156th on the county’s best-paid list.
Dominguez is the coordinator for the county’s state-mandated retraining courses for police officers, housed at Miami-Dade’s Public Safety Training Institute outside Doral. The campus includes a pool, basketball courts, gun range and classroom space.
A department spokesperson, Det. Alvaro Zabaleta, said Dominguez’s duties expanded significantly in 2020, and that she “was responsible for all of MDPD’s COVID-19 matters.” That includes overseeing an in-house hotline on COVID issues for police personnel, COVID testing for agency employees and the police department’s own contact-tracing procedures for when a worker tested positive for the virus.
Her year of extra COVID duties brought with it a significant compensation boost. County records show she took home about $183,000 in 2019 — about 40% less than she did in 2020.
No county agency paid out more overtime last year than did MiamiDade’s Police Department.
In 2020, overtime accounted for about 19 cents of every dollar the agency paid in compensation, totaling $90 million in a payroll of $468 million. Across all agencies, Miami-Dade paid out about 10 cents in overtime for every dollar of compensation.
While it has a smaller payroll, the county’s Transportation and Public Works Department comes close to the Police Department’s reliance on overtime in 2020. About 17 cents of every dollar in compensation came from overtime, which is typically paid at 50% more than regular hourly wages.
The COVID-19 pandemic took the financial pressure off Miami-Dade for overtime expenses, since most government expenses related to fighting the pandemic are eligible for federal relief dollars.
The COVID crisis, which prompted a county state of emergency now approaching its 15th month, also accelerated some demands for overtime. Not only were duties expanded for testing sites, business inspections for emergency rule compliance, food distribution events, buses running at reduced capacity and other government responses, the virus also had many divisions extra short-staffed because of medical leave, according to administrators and labor leaders.
“We’ve had people worn to a frazzle from the overtime they’ve had to work,” said Don Slesnick, a former Coral Gables mayor who is also a lawyer for the Government Supervisors Association of Florida union’s Local 100 chapter. “In many cases, workers aren’t available because of COVID. That’s one of the driving forces here.”
The highest overtime payout in Miami-Dade last year went to Lenard Davis, a transit supervisor. His base pay is about $90,000 a year, but he earned roughly $276,000 in 2020. Most of the extra compensation came from $177,000 in overtime, making him the county’s 46th best-paid employee of the year.
Jeffrey Mitchell, president of the county’s Transportation Workers Union, said the transit agency’s hefty overtime bill comes in part from the department being chronically short-staffed.
“There wasn’t a whole lot of hiring in the prior administration,” Mitchell said of transit under Carlos Gimenez, MiamiDade’s mayor from 2011 until Daniella Levine
Cava succeeded him in November. “They’re just short-handed. When you’re short-handed, it drives up the costs for the people who are there.”
Luis Espinoza, a Transportation and Public Works spokesperson, called Davis an “extremely dependable” employee who has been working extra shifts overseeing a maintenance division where three of the 10 staff positions are vacant.
“He has gone above and beyond to ensure his department has run smoothly during a year with many challenges,” Espinoza said. He said Davis worked roughly an entire second work-year in 2020, reporting 2,080 hours in regular wages and another 2,739 in overtime.
Across the department, though, Transportation and Public Works did not see overtime usage spike, reporting about 1 million hours between January and December. That’s only about 3% more than in 2019, and slightly lower than the overtime hours reported in 2018.
COUNTY JOBS CAN MEAN MIDDLE-CLASS SECURITY
Across Miami-Dade’s payroll, the median compensation for 2020 was $73,769. That’s well above the median income for the county as a whole, which the Census Bureau estimated at $54,991 for 2019.
Some county departments pull up the average.
The median pay for the Police Department was about $103,000 in 2020, and the county’s Fire Rescue Department’s median pay was about $111,000.
Those well-paying jobs are offset by the departments that pay the least. The median pay for the county’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Open Spaces was just under $37,000 in 2020. The Library Department fared a bit better, with median pay of about $42,000 a year.
Close to the middle sits Transportation and Public Works, where the median pay hit about $71,000 in 2020.
That’s pretty close to the $69,697 that Angela Dowtin earned as a county bus operator.
Dowtin, 45, used to be a driver for a mortuary, transporting the deceased from nursing homes, residences and morgues.
Five years ago, she applied for an opening in the county’s transit agency. Now she’s working from 7:15 a.m. to 7:15 p.m., with a midday break that keeps her typical shift at 10 hours. She’s working five days a week, Thursday through Monday, mostly driving the 37 bus between Hialeah and South Miami and the S route up and down Miami Beach.
“I have it during rush hour,” Dowtin said of the S, one of the county’s busiest routes. “I get to see and meet so many people.”
Dowtin said she’s happy about her pay, which is set at about $43,000 for the year but grew in 2020 with more than $20,000 in overtime. Working for the county’s secondlargest employer, second only to the school system, Dowtin said she’s also interested in opportunities in other departments as well.
“There are operators who have left us and gone on to police and fire. There’s accounting,” she said. “There are so many options available in the county. You just have to get in it.”
GIMENEZ, LEVINE CAVA DIDN’T CRACK TOP 100
The 2020 compensation data covers two mayors. Gimenez was in office until Nov. 17. He’s now a Republican congressman representing Florida’s 26th Congressional District. Levine Cava succeeded him after spending most of 2020 on the county payroll as one of Miami-Dade’s 13 commissioners.
When Gimenez first took office in 2011, he fulfilled a campaign promise to cut his own salary and reduced the mayor’s cash compensation from about
$320,000 under prior mayor Carlos Alvarez to $150,000.
That’s what Gimenez earned until 2018, when he said the county financial health had improved enough since the budget crunches that followed the housing crash and the propertytax rollback he secured during his first year in office. Commissioners in 2018 approved Gimenez’s request for a $250,000 yearly salary.
In 2020, he earned $232,817 for his final 11 months on the payroll, No. 120 on the best-paid list. (Gimenez now receives a county pension of about $6,300 a month that began after he left office, plus the $10,000 from Miami for his nearly 30 years there as a paramedic, fire chief and city manager, according to information from Florida’s Retirement System and Miami.)
Levine Cava finished in the low 16,000s on the best-paid list with earnings of just under $69,000. Most of that came from a commissioner compensation package of around $50,000. Like Gimenez, Levine Cava also announced a pay cut for herself shortly after taking office, reducing the mayor’s compensation 20% to $200,000 a year. She did not begin receiving her mayor’s salary until after taking office in November.
If that $200,000 salary had in been place in all of 2020, Levine Cava would have landed somewhere around No. 340 on the best-paid list.
PART-TIME WORK KEEPS WAGES LOW IN PARKS
The Parks Department has Miami-Dade’s lowest median pay, at $36,644. That’s based on the Herald’s analysis of the 29,549 employees that earned at least $8,902 in 2020.
Parks is also a department that has relied on part-time workers for a sizable chunk of its workforce, a source of friction for labor leaders complaining of low wages for members looking for more stable county jobs.
“We’ve been fighting for this every year,” said SeAdoreia Brown, president of the AFSCME
Local 199 labor union, which represents janitors, park-maintenance staffers and other entry-level positions in multiple departments. “People are barely making ends meet down in the county, at least the ones on the front lines.”
Beatriz Lee, director of human resources for Parks, said the department has upgraded more positions to full-time hours in recent years.
Now about 38% of the Parks positions are classified as part-time, she said. About half of those part-time jobs are custodial positions known as park service aides, jobs that pay $12.09 an hour, Lee said.
That hourly wage is lower than what MiamiDade requires vendors and contractors to pay their workers under the county’s living-wage ordinance, which sets minimum compensation at $17.45 an hour if health benefits aren’t offered.
Lee said the Parks pay scales are set in the union contracts Miami-Dade negotiates with AFSCME, freezing most of the rules until the next agreement takes effect. The fixed low wages and cap on hours for many Parks workers make keeping them a problem, she said.
“We experience huge turnover. The administrative costs of replacing people is pretty significant,” she said. “It would be great if we could have the majority of them be full-time.”