Today, the City Council will hold a hearing on pay raises for certain elected officials, including themselves. They are also proposing some other bills that are meant to increase transparency and reduce conflicts of interest within the body.

One bill that caught my eye seeks to “require the financial disclosure forms of elected officials to be made available for public inspection on the conflict of interest board’s website.” At first blush, this sounds great. But I noticed something was missing… The bill included no mention of the data being released in a machine readable format. I see PDFs in our future!

I’m disappointed to see that the council routinely drafts bills without this important caveat. Transparency without machine readability is not real. Take, for example, the Citizen Complaint Review Board- an agency designed to provide oversight and transparency over police complaints. Want to know the monthly number of complaints filed against the police each month for the last four years, or what percent of those ended in charges? No problem just open 48 PDFs one at a time and scroll until you find the appropriate table, which will have the monthly value you seek. Don’t have time to do that? Either does anybody else.

You see, PDFs are where information goes to die, rather than to be used. Despite this, New York City continues to use PDFs to release so much of its own data and the Council does not seem to include this important caveat in so many of its important information sharing bills.

With the hearing coming, I set out to find more information on NYC salaries to understand the context of the proposed Council salary increase. While doing research, it came as no surprise that I could only find the data in our city budget– in PDF format. Luckily, there are talented people out there that can extract the data, and in this case Chris Whong and other members of BetaNYC wrote a scraper and released a copy of the Salary portion of the City Budget.

The budget shows average salaries for each job title in the City, as well as the number of positions needed with that position. A list of the positions with the highest and lowest salaries can be seen below.

Note that Council Members are not on this list. In fact, the budget shows 6,404 people with 316 unique job titles that have base salaries more than the Council Members, or 2.3% of all city workers. If the salary increase is approved, that number would dramatically drop to just 816 city employees with higher salaries, putting Council Members in the top 0.3% of city employees. In short, the Council Members would be jumping ahead of the 87% of city employees who currently get paid more than them. The jump would be from red bar to green bar in the histogram below.

The list of job titles with average pay higher than the Council Members is varied, and I’ve listed the most common titles below. Those in red would still be paid more even after the raise while those in black would fall behind.



While looking at Council pay, it was also interesting to see that Council Member’s staff (outside of the Speaker’s office) are not listed as salary items in the budget. I found an alternative source for that data and learned that Council Member’s staff are paid significantly less than most NYC employees. The median salary for Council Member staff is around $35,000. This is less than one fourth of what the Council Members are proposing as their new salary. It’s also less than 87% of all New York City Employees and its about half the median income of all New York City Employees.



City Council Members play a vital role in our city, as the boots on the ground that interact with and represent all New Yorkers. Given that, there is reason to believe that a raise may be justified for them (and one day for their staff). But what is not justified is the continued lack of machine readable language in transparency bills. If we are going to have intelligent debates about the future of our city, we will need the data to back them up.

Sources/Tools:

-Analysis done in Beaker Notebook

-Tables made in Excel

-Raw Data for City Budget is here

-Raw data for Council Staff Salaries scraped from Empire Center Website.

Caveats:

-Budget only provides Average Salaries per title. For this analysis, I assumed each person got the same salary given their title though there may by some variance there.

-City Council Pay includes some part time workers but they are not specified in the data. However, if you conservatively remove the salaries that are less than 25K, the median only goes up to 40K. So the analysis is not greatly affected. Of course if we were not scraping this data, we would be able to do this more carefully.

-Rankings are based on Fiscal 2015 budget (latest available), while Council Staff salaries are form Fiscal 2014 budget (latest available).