Reporters from the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram this spring requested payroll records from 12 governments and public school districts in the greater Portland region.

Those communities included Biddeford, Cape Elizabeth, Cumberland, Falmouth, Gorham, Portland, Saco, Scarborough, South Portland, Westbrook, Windham and Yarmouth. The newspaper analyzed these public records to identify trends, such as overtime spending and gender representation among top earners.

The newspaper used these records to compile a sortable list of public employees making more than $100,000 each year. The data reflect the actual amount of money each employee took home in a year. It excludes some people who have six-figure salaries but only worked part of the fiscal year. For example, Portland Superintendent Xavier Botana has an annual salary of more than $148,000, with a possible performance bonus of $7,400. But he didn’t start his job until July 1, so he took home slightly less than $69,000 during 2016. He will be one of the top earners in 2017, when he receives a full year of pay.

The newspaper requested these earnings reports in a flexible electronic format, such as in an Excel spreadsheet. Where possible, those spreadsheets have been converted to databases that can be easily searched and sorted.

Not all communities were able to comply with that request, however; some records have been published as PDF documents that can be viewed but not sorted. The one exception is the record provided by the Gorham school department, which was not suitable to be published in any format.

The data also account for extra earnings such as overtime, stipends and retirement payouts.

 

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