Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Want to know how much your kid’s teacher makes? Or how much the governor is paid?
A database of public employee salaries is among the features of a new website the Ohio Treasurer's office is debuting this week, ohiotreasurer.gov.
The searchable database includes 2011 salaries for all state workers and wages for other public workers as recent as 2010. The office is working on getting more current information about local government employees.
“I think taxpayers work hard for their money and they have a right to know where it’s being spent,” Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel said.
Mandel, a Republican who took office in January and hopes to challenge incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown for U.S. Senate next year, said the new website also will include other features that aim to encourage investment in Ohio bonds and make electronic payments easier.
The Ohio Department of Administrative Services already posts bi-weekly wages for approximately 58,000 state workers. But users must calculate yearly earnings on their own using the bi-weekly figures. It is also more cumbersome to search for names because the information is provided in a .pdf format.
Mandel’s site allows a curious taxpayer to search for salaries by name, department and salary range. For a given worker, the database returns wages in the most recent pay period, total pay for the year-to-date, and an estimated annual salary.
Redesigning the website has cost $58,172, according to the treasurer’s office. A spokesman for Mandel pointed out that his predecessor, Democrat Kevin Boyce, spent $65,667 overhauling the site when he was in office.
A good government advocate applauded Mandel’s inclusion of a salary database, but she said the feature could be more useful if the wages could be downloaded into files that can be sorted, such as Microsoft Excel files.
“In terms of functionality, this is nice if you want to do a quick look,” said Catherine Turcer, director of Ohio Citizen Action’s Money in Politics Project. “But if you wanted to do deep research that reporters and citizen advocates do, this doesn’t meet that need. It’s a good step, but it’s just a baby step.”
Seth Unger, a spokesman for Mandel, said the treasurer may consider making the information downloadable in the future.
The office also is working on getting more current salary information for about 300,000 local government workers.
Currently, the salary database uses data about teachers and other local government workers from the Buckeye Institute, a conservative think tank that makes public employee salary information available on its website. The institute acquired the data through public records requests.
Mandel’s office earlier this year tried to amend the state budget to require local governments to provide salary information, but lawmakers did not include it in the budget’s final version. Mandel will pursue passing the legislation this fall as well.
“Right now, we’re prepared to do records requests of the local government entities,” Mandel said. “We’re confident most local governments are going to want to partner with us.”