Costa Mesa City Employees Average $146,863 Annual Compensation

Union Watch
Oct. 12, 2012

A recently released study by the California Public Policy Center (CPPC) entitled “Costa Mesa, California – City Employee Compensation Analysis,” using actual payroll data provided by the city, has calculated the average total annual compensation for an employee of that city to be $146,863 during 2011. Anyone wishing to review their calculations can download the spreadsheet by clicking on this link: Costa_Mesa_Total_Employee_Cost_2011.xlsx.

In earlier UnionWatch summaries of CPPC compensation studies, we’ve used headlines referencing total compensation of $175,000 per year, both for Anaheim and for San Jose. Those figures, even higher than Costa Mesa’s, were based on assuming that CalPERS will eventually have to lower their earnings projections from 7.5% per year to 4.5% per year, and if they do, the average total compensation the workers in those cities receive, around $150,000 per year, will have to be increased to at least $175,000 per year in order for them to meet their negotiated pension benefit obligations. Costa Mesa is in the same boat. Here is the unadjusted, current and exact total compensation averages for all three cities – and it is unlikely these three amounts are unrepresentative of most California’s cities:

San Jose: Average total compensation, all workers = $149,907
Anaheim: Average total compensation, all workers = $146,551
Costa Mesa: Average total compensation, all workers = $146,863

In all three cases, as documented in the CPPC studies, this average total compensation is more than twice the average household income earned by private sector taxpayers in each city.

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