Eric Litke

USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin

When it comes to overtime, no one compares to one Fond du Lac cop.

Officer Jed Martin led the state with a weekly average of 34 overtime hours in 2013 — accumulating $73,611 in overtime pay — based on salary data obtained from more than 100 of Wisconsin's largest municipalities.

This year, he's working more.

The seven-year veteran averaged nearly 42 hours of overtime per week through the end of November, topping $90,000 in overtime compensation, according to records obtained by the Gannett Wisconsin Media Investigative Team. Martin worked an average of 11 hours a day, seven days a week this year, in addition to paid time off for vacation, sick days and holidays.

Martin is among more than 26,000 employees from 110 cities, towns and villages whose salary data the I-Team compiled through public records requests. Thedata revealed employees accumulating eye-catching sums through retirement payouts and administrators paid well above their peers in similar cities. But no city employee matched Martin for hours worked.

Assistant Chief Steve Klein of the Fond du Lac Police Department said Martin was sent home a couple timesin recent years when supervisors felt he was too tired to perform his duties, but the department is otherwise bound by union contracts requiring overtime be awarded to the most senior officer who puts in for the extra work. Martin's assigned position is third-shift patrol, but he routinely works the shift before or after as well.

"We do require that they have at least eight hours of rest in between (work days), and our supervisors monitor that closely if someone is showing signs of fatigue or reduced alertness," Klein said. "There was probably two times I'm aware of that based upon the amount of hours that (Martin) was putting in that we sent him home and had made arrangements for another officer to come in and cover."

Martin, who was paid a total of $135,000 last year, declined comment when contacted through Klein.

The department has about 75 officers, and Klein said it has operated six to 10 officers short for the last several years. He said a rigorous hiring process and retirements have stalled efforts to increase staffing. Six posts remain vacant.

Police top overtime ranks

Despite the heavy hours, Martin ranked second for overtime earnings in 2013, behind $91,058 accumulated by Milwaukee police Lt. Ken Grams.

Grams' higher base pay meant he worked fewer hours to reach the higher total.

Among all studied municipalities — which includes every municipality with a population of 10,000 or more — Milwaukee police tallied 85 of the top 100 overtime amounts in 2013. Madison had four employees in the top 100, and Fond du Lac had three. Appleton was the only other city in the top 25, with police Sgt. Cary Meyer totaling $48,165 in overtime.

But on a per-employee basis, several smaller municipalities were heavier users of overtime.

The town of Grand Chute in Outagamie County and the village of Ashwaubenon in Brown County ranked fourth and fifth for average overtime per employee, among those receiving overtime in 2013. They averaged $7,667 and $6,618, respectively.

The Dane County cities of Middleton and Verona topped the list at more than $9,000 per employee, followed by Mount Pleasant in Racine County, at $8,679.

Among municipalities with at least 100 employees receiving overtime, Baraboo, Manitowoc and Marshfield used the extra pay the least — averaging $2,000 per employee.

Many receive retirement payouts

Municipal salary records showed many Wisconsin public employees dramatically boosted their wages in 2013 by cashing in accumulated leave time at retirement.

Two Madison assistant fire chiefs were the runaway leaders in that category, as both James Keiken and Paul Bloom topped $110,000. Keiken's payouts and other earnings totaled $168,000, the second-highest 2013 gross pay across all 110 municipalities even though he left in June of that year.

Manitowoc Fire Chief William Manis ranked fourth in gross compensation at $153,000 due to $60,000 in payouts for accumulated leave when he retired in November 2013. Grams, the Milwaukee police lieutenant, ranked first with a gross of $180,000 during last year.

In Muskego in Waukesha County, Police Chief Paul Geiszler got a payout of $72,000 in 2013 for unused leave time following his December 2012 retirement.

Other city employees garnered payouts without leaving their positions, including a $10,000 payout of unused vacation for Menomonee Falls Village Manager Mark Fitzgerald.

Several cities have full-time mayor, administrator

Comparing pay for top municipal administrators can be difficult because organizational structures vary widely.

Peggy Steeno, director of administrative services in the city of Menasha, oversees finance, as well as IT and human resources, making her position a hybrid of typical finance director and city administrator positions. She said Menasha, like many other communities, has combined some departmental oversight to cut costs and attract better candidates for remaining positions.

Among the 78 city administrators in the I-Team salary data, Brian Yerges' 2014 base pay ranks 24th at $115,000 even though his Sheboygan County city of Plymouth has only 8,000 people. But his responsibilities include managing city utilities — a job previously filled by another full-time employee.

In Fond du Lac, Finance Director Hal Wortman has the third-highest salary for that position at $119,000, but he also oversees the city clerk's office and holds the title of director of administration.

One of the rarest administrative approaches is employing both a full-time mayor and a full-time city administrator, a setup used by Kenosha, Racine, Sheboygan and Waukesha, based on data provided to the I-Team.

Don Hammond, president of the Sheboygan Common Council, said Mayor Michael Vandersteen can spend more time promoting economic development, but he has fewer direct responsibilities with an administrator on board.

"The disadvantage obviously is a lot of the day-to-day operations happen within the city administrator structure and (for the mayor) a lot of those duties don't exist so it's an expensive position to have at times," Hammond said.

The shared authority is sometimes reflected in salaries.

Sheboygan's $51,000 mayoral salary is far below comparable cities, and the $100,000 city administrator salary in Racine is also relatively low. Kenosha and Waukesha pay both positions in line with similarly sized cities.

Population, economy impact administrative pay

Top administrative jobs generally pay more for larger cities, and higher median incomes tend to trigger higher pay as well. Affluent Milwaukee suburbs often appear near the top of the rankings.

Fitzgerald, from Menomonee Falls, has the highest 2014 base pay at $154,000, among the 108 municipalities that provided 2014 data and employed an administrator or manager when the records request was filed in February. Glendale and Burlington were also in the top 10.

Beloit is the exception. Despite ranking 19th in population and having a median household income $16,000 below the state average, the city manager, police chief and fire chief are all within the eight highest salaries for their position. The city's assistant fire chief,at $117,000, makes more than all but five chiefs statewide.

Beloit City Manager Larry Arft said the administrators are all "within the salary range" identified by a 2013 study that compared salaries to similar positions in Wisconsin and Illinois, where salaries skew higher. He said the salaries "pale in comparison" to private-sector managers with similar responsibilities.

"There's an effort to pay the managers an amount that's commensurate with the responsibilities of the job, the size for the organizations they're managing and also to provide some salary spread so subordinates with less responsibility don't make more money," Arft said.

On the other side, Green Bay administrators are far below many of their peers despite serving in the state's third-largest city. The police chief ranks 22nd in 2014 base salary, the fire chief 14th, and the city attorney 25th.

Eric Litke: 920-453-5119, or elitke@gannett.com; on Twitter: @ericlitke.

About this series

Gannett Wisconsin Media I-Team reporter Eric Litke's story and newest digital database examining more than 26,000 city, village and town employee salaries is the fifth installment of an occasional watchdog series examining public employee pay in Wisconsin called "What We Pay."

The series allows readers to examine the compensation received by the public employees their taxes support. Each installment will include a story and a searchable online database with information such as employee name, title, current and prior year salaries, overtime/extra pay and health insurance costs.

The Gannett Wisconsin Media Investigative Team obtained the data by filing more than 200 public records requests with various public entities.

How we did it

The Gannett Wisconsin Media Investigative Team assembled an unprecedented salary database of Wisconsin municipal employees by filing 110 public records requests with the state's largest cities, towns and villages.

The requests were filed beginning in February and took an average of 31 days to fill. Publication of the project was delayed by a handful of slower municipalities and the time-consuming process of organizing data provided in a wide variety of files and formats.

Municipalities were far more willing to provide records free of charge than when similar data was requested two years ago, with 94 providing it at no cost and only six exceeding a charge of $100. In 2012, 25 of 91 municipalities requested payment, and 16 were over $100.

Twelve entities responded in a week or less, including Marshfield, the village of Howard in Brown County and the town of Greenville in Outagamie County.

Five entities took more than three months, with Kenosha the longest at nearly five months after it initially provided different data than requested. The others over three months were the cities of Menasha, Wauwatosa and Chippewa Falls and the town of Lisbon in Waukesha County.

No municipalities balked at providing the data, unlike two years ago when the I-Team had to involve an attorney before two entities provided employee names.

Officials in several municipalities, however, said their software could not produce the requested items. Two entities did not provide 2014 projected base salary, 13 did not provide 2013 base, five did not provide 2013 gross pay and two did not provide 2013 overtime and comp time payouts.

All but six provided health insurance cost to the municipality, though many of those provided a per-employee average instead of actual cost.