The massive Civil List of city employees is still incomplete. The salaries of most Department of Education employees do not appear on the list; teachers are missing, assistant principals are missing, principals are missing, superintendents are missing, etc. Chancellor Klein, Corporate Counsel Best, Appeals and Reviews Director Caputo, Robin Greenfield, Christine Kicinski, and Susan Holtzman from the Office of Legal Services are there, though, but Deputy Chancellor Carmen Fariña is not.

The Times article states, "Historical quirks in the legislative formation of various agencies, for example, means that the list contains records for the 47,000 employees of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, but has no records for the city's 77,000 teachers or employees of its economic development corporation."

Let's assume there are 80,000 DOE pedagogues, earning an average salary of $60,000 each. That alone would add $4,800,000,000 to the Civil List's grand total. Years ago, teachers and supervisors were, in fact, on the Civil List. At some point, they were dropped.

What we can say with quite a bit of certainty and experience, is that these people, with the added 620 who now work at Tweed, may not be willing to "retire" or "resign" because of corruption and fraud. For example, it is reasonable to assume that people who make a good salary and see something terribly wrong at work must make a life-changing decision to say something or ignore what is going on, which would leave them in their jobs. Which would you do?

LINK

For a list of salaries of any public employee in New York City ... hired, fired or otherwise, as of April 2005, click below:

Last names: A - L, click here

Last names: L - Z, click here

March 5, 2006
You Can't Fight City Hall, but You Can See How Much Everyone There Makes
By MIKE McINTIRE, NY TIMES

LINK

New York City's public payroll has more people than the combined populations of Albany, Hollywood and Liechtenstein. At $29 billion, it is larger than the gross domestic product of Guatemala.

Among the names on the payroll are 50 Bushes, 28 Clintons, 44 Nixons, 12 Gandhis and two Churchills. A Brando works at the housing authority, a Trump at transit and a Kissinger at design and construction.

And who knew there was a Municipal Water Finance Authority, let alone that half of the 19 people who work there are paid more than $90,000 a year?

Or that each borough has a public administrator (in addition to a borough president) who collects a $94,000 salary and has a staff?

These and other random insights emerge from a close reading of the civil list, a 6,685-page census of 267,000 public employees that is quietly filed away each year in the city's Records Department.

It contains the names, salaries and agencies for most employees of the city, as well as some at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a state agency that is not part of the city budget.

An anachronism by modern standards of electronic recordkeeping, the list has been published by the city annually since the enactment of the civil service law in 1883, when it originally included employees' home addresses. Since the 1960's, the list has been filed on microfiche, and two years ago the Records Department began putting scanned images of it online.

Except for a handful of genealogists and connoisseurs of the civil service system, few people seem to know, or have reason to know, the civil list exists.

It enjoyed a rare moment in the sun last month, when an online blog posted a link to it to show the salaries of City Council staff members who had been fired by Speaker Christine C. Quinn.

The discovery that such information was not private shocked some readers of the blog, Backroom Deal Breaker, and one posted a message calling it sickening. An anonymous city worker replied, "It's the price we pay for being employed by the taxpayers."

Indeed, basic information about most employees at all levels of government, including their salaries, is generally available to reporters or members of the public, who often must endure a time-consuming process of extracting it from public information officers. Rarely is such data deposited all at once, as a matter of routine, for anyone to look at it.

The civil list is so big  it dwarfs that of New York's largest private employer, Citigroup, which has about 27,000 employees in the city  and has such a lengthy pedigree that it can fairly be said to reflect the evolution of the city itself.

"There is a racial and ethnic mosaic within the civil service that reflects the politics of the city at various points in time," said John H. Mollenkopf, executive director of the Center for Urban Research at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

"It's amazing that specializations that were established 100 years ago survive today  the Irish cops, the Italians in the parks department, the Jewish names in social services," he said. "That reflects, to some degree, the mayors who were in office at the time and what groups formed their electoral base."

Scanning the Police and Fire Department rosters from 2005, for example, finds echoes of the Tammany era, when those agencies were well-known entry points for Irish immigrants. There are 52 McCarthys and 54 O'Connors at the Police Department, far more than at any other agency; the Fire Department has the second greatest number, with 28 and 30, respectively.

Earlier versions of the list, going back 30 to 40 years, have few Hispanic surnames compared with the current list.

And perhaps because of the relative newness of Hispanics in filling the ranks of the civil service system, the average salary now listed for a Rodriguez is $44,000, compared with $53,000 for a Rizzo.

Although formalized under the state civil service law, civil lists cataloguing government employees have been around since colonial times, and were a concept imported from England, where such lists were used to keep track of payments to civilian government employees and pensioners.

A history of New York published in the 1840's cites a civil list from 1693, which noted that "600 pound sterling" was set aside annually for Benjamin Fletcher, New York's "governour in chiefe," while Godfredus Dellius earned 60 pounds sterling for "teaching and converting the Indians."

The 1883 civil service law created rules for the hiring, firing and promotion of public employees, and was intended to clean up what was widely perceived as a corrupt, patronage-fueled system in which fealty to political bosses and family connections trumped merit. A key to the law's success was its requirement of transparency, Mr. Mollenkopf said.

"The fact that what people are making is public knowledge means that everybody knows where everybody else stands, so there are no secret deals," he said. "It makes salary-setting less arbitrary, and if you learn that you're earning less than the standard for your peers, you can argue for more."

Over time, as the city payroll grew, publication of the list took on a life of its own. When the city proposed suspending it in 1943 to save $20,000 in printing costs, labor unions representing the printing trade sued, arguing that not publishing it "would mean unemployment, distress and financial loss."

These days, the list is available on the records department Web site at http://www.nyc.gov/html/records/html/govpub/labor1.shtml

The continued value of the civil list is not entirely clear, because it has failed to keep up with changes in the structure of city government.

Historical quirks in the legislative formation of various agencies, for example, means that the list contains records for the 47,000 employees of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, but has no records for the city's 77,000 teachers or employees of its economic development corporation.Even the rationale for publishing it is lost on some city officials. The Department of Citywide Administrative Services, whose City Record journal produces the list, is obligated by law to continue publishing it each year, said Mark Daly, a department spokesman.

But over at the Department of Records, which maintains the city archives and has copies of the civil list going back to 1883, Deputy Commissioner Kenneth R. Cobb admitted being in the dark about why it keeps showing up at his office every April.

"To be honest, I don't know," he said. "The City Record just keeps publishing it, and we continue to make it available."

More Than 620 People Work in One Building For New York City's Department of Education and "Earn" Millions