As I picked up from The Daily Politics, the city has released its list of employees with their base salary in 2009, something I believe it is required to do by law. The list is in PDF format, which means it cannot be sorted, summed, or averaged. One cannot find the median pay for a title and/or a department, or calculate one title’s share of the total pay in a department. On the other hand the list is in alphabetical order by name, which means it is easy to find someone's name and cluck about their individual pay. If you're not out to gossip, each individual's name is a useless piece of information. And while the department each employee is in is spelled out, their title is not. I'm not sure if there is a glossary, or where it is.
The compensation data is also incomplete. The Department of Education is not included. And the base salary is the only compensation figure given, which gives a very misleading view of what people earn in government, because government employees like most of their pay hidden and/or tax free. In the form of overtime, health insurance, pension contributions, years in retirement, and days off.
More complete information could certainly be provided with a little effort. The city knows total pay from its W2s, knows days off from its personnel records, knows its average cost of health care and knows its pension costs by title as a percent of payroll. Both health care costs and pension costs are, in reality, much greater for employees closer to retirement, but the city could at least provide an average by title. The cost of retiree health care could be allocated to those who are working in the same title, next to the cost of contributing to their pensions.
If the city is going to do this, or be required to do this, it ought to include the schools, and it ought to make the information complete and usable. And is there really a purpose to listing people by name, other than perhaps those who make the most money?