Coaches, doctors at top of state’s payroll

Twelve made $1M-plus in fiscal 2022, up from nine in previous year.

A dozen state employees topped the $1 million pay mark in 2022, including football and basketball coaches, medical school doctors and a pension investment director.

The highest paid was University of Georgia head coach Kirby Smart, which isn’t surprising since earlier this month his Bulldogs won a second consecutive national college football title. College football is a huge revenue generator for the state flagship university’s athletic program.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution put its annual top state pay list together for fiscal 2022 - which ended June 30 - using data from the state’s Open Georgia salary website.

Rank-and-file state employees got $5,000 raises from lawmakers last spring, as did members of the General Assembly. Gov. Brian Kemp is proposing an additional $2,000 raise this year for state and University System of Georgia employees and teachers.

That will be a drop in the bucket for some of the state’s highest-paid staffers.

The public is used to football coaches earning big money: Smart made $7.955 million in fiscal 2022, according to Open Georgia, and former Georgia Tech head coach Geoff Collins $3.5 million. Smart will earn more than $10 million this year under a contract extension signed last year. Collins was fired in September after a poor start to the 2022 season.

Charles Cary, longtime chief investment officer at the Teachers Retirement System, was paid $1,065,122, up from $1,018,238 the previous year. Cary’s increased earnings came even though the TRS pension program lost $15 billion in fiscal 2022 as the stock market tanked.

According to the Georgia Budget & Policy Institute, the median salary for a state government employee will be about $47,000 a year if lawmakers approve Kemp’s pay-raise proposal. State officials say the average is almost $64,000 a year with higher-paid University System staffers included.

Most of the others on the $1 million pay list were coaches, although a pair of doctors finished among their ranks. According to Open Georgia, James D. St. Louis, chief of pediatric and congenital heart surgery at Augusta University, earned $1.615 million, and Richard Lee, chief of cardiothoracic surgery at Augusta University, received $1.2 million.

Some others came close: Griffith Lynch, executive director of the Georgia Ports Authority, made $994,828 in fiscal 2022, according to Open Georgia, and Fernando Vale Diaz, neurosurgery chairman at Augusta University, $986,000. Georgia Tech’s Angel Cabrera was the highest-paid college president at $955,000.

Most of the top-paid nonuniversity staffers worked for either the Georgia Ports Authority or the Teachers Retirement System. Traditionally, among non coaches, the highest pay in the University System goes to doctors working at Augusta University, home of the state’s medical college.

According to Open Georgia, the highest-paid school system employee was Cheryl Watson-Harris, superintendent of DeKalb County schools, who made $639,037. Watson-Harris was fired by the DeKalb board last year.

It marked a departure from most recent years, when the highest-paid superintendent was typically longtime Gwinnett County school chief Alvin Wilbanks. The Gwinnett board decided in 2021 to buy out Wilbanks’ contract, but those payments kept him No. 2 among K-12 school staffers.

Kemp was paid $176,250 to run the state in 2022.