New Dallas-Fort Worth website posts city employees’ salaries online

by Sarah Blaskovich

Talk of salaries has always been hush-hush. But not for long: You can see your local tax dollars hard at work at DFWSalaries.com, a website that posts the hourly wage of every city employee in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. From administrative assistants up to the city manager, it's all there, including employees' first and last names.

The website was created by a man who lives in Plano and hopes that the site will promote transparency in government. After all, that's technically your money (or some of it, at least) that's financing those city employees. But never before has anyone taken those figures -- seemingly, private information -- and posted on the Internet for all to see.

In his defense, city employees' salaries are not private information. Those figures and many more in state and local governments are technically public information under the Public Information Act (Texas Government Code, Chapter 552). Before now, those figures were only obtained by a rare few who were curious enough to submit an open records request. That's exactly the same method the creator of DFWSalaries.com employed for most DFW cities -- but then he pasted it onto the world wide web.

The website includes the salaries of some 50,000 people. And ironically, after disclosing the identities of many, the site's founder is concealing his own, for fear of retaliation. The irony continues: He works during the day as a compensation analyst for a “major private company” in Dallas, so he definitely cares about this stuff.

He spoke with Pegasus News about creating the site, asking to keep his name private. “There are 50,000 people out there [on his site], and it might rub a person or two the wrong way,” he says. Here's what we can tell you about him: He began compiling information for DFWSalaries.com as a side project, started after he recently graduated from the University of North Texas with a master's in public administration.

Editor's note: Concealing his identity means that we have to refer to him with weird formalities, like calling him “the site's creator.” To give him an alias would take away from the mystery of this story. You can do your own detective work to figure out who he is, but you'll find that even whois.com search will show you that the registrant is “Domains by Proxy, Inc.”

How to use the site

The website is a simple search tool that categorizes people's salaries first by city, then by department and position. If you wanted to look at all the salaries in any given city, the query also allows you to pick the city and hit “submit,” thereby opening up an alphabetized list of every employee in that city and their salaries.

Unsurprisingly, the website has been loved and hated. The site's creator intended first to educate the public about what people in a city job make. “More often than not, people immediately associate local government with poor pay. This website shows that while there may be low-paying positions, there are several which pay surprisingly well.” His second intent was to promote fair and competitive pay. He hopes DFWSalaries.com will be a tool for HR managers to evaluate how competitive their salaries are in the market. (There is also data coming for other major cities in Texas, as well as a soon-to-be posted state employee website. When the creator of DFWSalaries.com finishes those projects too, “competitiveness” can be assessed statewide. More about that later.)

Though people have been quick to complain, few are willing to do it on the record. A call to six cities resulted in one call-back, from Tom Bryson at the City of Farmers Branch.

Bryson is director of communications, who said he was unfamiliar with the site beforehand. “This is a serious undertaking,” he said, scanning the site. “Let me just speak broadly and say that transparency in government is the way our government is set up. Our records are public information, and what we make is public information. The fact that it is on the Internet is part of the public process,” he said.

He was quick to point out that he's not endorsing the site. (And honestly, Bryson and many other city spokespeople are in a catch-22 on this one: They're probably not thrilled that everyone knows how much they make, but to publicly denounce the site would imply that they don't support the Public Information Act.)

The cities that didn't return phone calls were Dallas, Grand Prairie, Fort Worth, Lewisville, and McKinney. They were chosen randomly.

The creator of the site said many people have supported his new venture, though the ones in opposition “are just a little louder than others.” He points to one man who wrote scathing emails, calling the site creator “a jerk.” But after about three email conversations back-and-forth, the man began asking for the URLs of the other Texas salary sites. He was mad, but he also realized he could spy on other cities and see if he was making the right amount.

“He told me he's now thinking about applying for a new job. Clearly there's value in it,” said the founder of DFWSalaries.com. “This site is a way of driving home what a city does and where the money goes.”

A quick history

The website went live a little more than two weeks ago, after months of research and open records requests. His inspiration came as he was doing research as a grad student at UNT and stumbled upon SeeThroughNY.net, a site that lists all of New York state's city, state, and teacher payrolls.

“I thought it was a pretty good idea,” he said, “so I kicked it back to the chair of the department.” His professor shared the idea with a group of UNT alums, to find that about half loved the idea and half hated it – similar reactions to what people think of DFWSalaries.com now that it's live.

“The 50% who liked it are the ones making decisions,” he said. “The 50% who didn't like it are lower on the totem pole and think it's an invasion of privacy – which I understand.”

The decision to include city employees' first and last names was the toughest part of the project, he said. “It's personal data, but it's also taxpayer money. Including names adds a significant value to the site by making it more tangible to the everyday citizen. It also allows for greater analysis down the road,” he says. “From a compensation standpoint, and for recruitment and retention purposes, including all of his information is incredibly valuable.”

The greatest criticisms he's received is that the site is an invasion of privacy. He said he'd consider privatizing the site, which he says would be a “happy medium” for all involved.

What now?

The biggest drawback to DFWSalaries.com – and of websites like it – is that it fails to explain why a job merits a certain pay scale. The site as it stands now simply shows what a job pays, without illustating how qualities like education or experience factor into the decision. The man who created the site agrees. “In a perfect world, I'd like a 10-year education history and a timeline of when you came to the city,” he said. “No one I know has that information out there.”

He says it will help that he's creating HoustonCitySalaries.com and Texas-Salaries.com, which can serve as benchmarks against what Dallas-Fort Worth cities are paying their workers. He also has plans to post similar websites for San Antonio and Austin.

The site also will need careful updates to meet the ever-changing payrolls of each city. Bryson, for instance, said that some information for Farmers Branch is outdated. “I don't know what the update frequency is, and I couldn't tell who has [created the website]. That's not really relevant as long as there's good faith to keep it reasonably accurate,” Bryson said.

It doesn't matter who you are, you know you want to look. Happy hunting.