EDITORIAL: North Las Vegas salaries are shockingly high

The quickest way to convince someone that many government employees are overpaid is to show them data on what government employees make. Consider Clark County’s third-largest city.

The Review-Journal’s Mary Hynes recently reported on payroll data from the city of North Las Vegas. Its top employees raked in massive amounts of money last year.

Leading that list was former City Manager Ryann Juden. He left the city last year, and his contract included severance equivalent to a year’s worth of pay. That led to him collecting $1.1 million in total pay and benefits. Some will argue that Mr. Juden had a number of impressive accomplishments during his tenure. Along with former North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee, Mr. Juden brought the city back from the precipice of insolvency. But that salary number leaves a bad taste.

But the city is setting itself up for future financial hardship with its top payouts. Mario Perez, a police captain, cashed in with $668,200 in pay and benefits. That included a $285,000 leave payout. Police Lt. Mark Suranowitz was right behind him, raking in $618,750. Micaela Moore, the city manager and previous city attorney, and Travis Anderson, deputy fire chief, each made slightly under $615,000 in total compensation.

These staggering amounts reveal a disregard for the taxpayers who fund their salaries. The census reports that the median household income in North Las Vegas was under $77,000 in recent years. You can appreciate the work done by police, firefighters and even city managers and still acknowledge the obvious: These public employees received compensation that was much more than generous, to say the least.

Making it worse is that many top earners will immediately retire into six-figure yearly pensions for the rest of their lives. That would be scandalous enough if Nevada’s Public Employees Retirement System were fully funded. It’s not. Contribution rates, with half coming from taxpayers, just jumped again.

There’s little interest in fixing this problem. Government officials usually act as if their hands are tied, and there’s some truth to that. They can’t reduce PERS unilaterally. They can’t change past union contracts that lavished exorbitant benefits on employees, including lucrative sick-leave payouts. There have been some improvements on that front. NLV’s police contract has some modest limits on sick-leave payouts for officers hired in recent years.

But government officials can inform the public about why these compensation packages are so gratuitous. They can call on the Legislature to reform PERS. They can push for more public access in union negotiations.

It’s past time to stop the public sector’s disdain for the taxpayers.