Data App: Even More Salaries

This week we added more than 20 new public agencies to The Texas Tribune's government salary database, increasing the number of employees whose pay is included by roughly 70,000. 

The application now features data on more than 620,000 employees from 88 school districts, cities, community colleges, universities, state agencies and transit authorities.

The new entities added are Alamo Colleges, Carrollton, Collin College, Collin County, Dallas County Community College District, Denton County, El Paso County, Grand Prairie, Grand Prairie ISD, Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA), McAllen, Mesquite, Pasadena, Richardson ISD, Rockwall ISD, Tarrant County College, Texas A&M University-Commerce, Texas Transportation Institute, the University of North Texas, the University of Texas at El Paso, the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas and Waco.

We've also updated payroll records from more than 20 entities: the cities of Amarillo, Arlington, Austin, Brownsville, Corpus Christi, Dallas, El Paso, Fort Worth, Garland, Houston, Irving, Plano and San Antonio; Capital Metro (Austin), Dallas Area Rapid Transit, Metropolitan Transit Authority (Houston) and VIA Metro (San Antonio); the Texas A&M System, Texas A&M University, the University of North Texas Health Science Center, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Texas System.

Adding the extra entities offers a more complete picture of public payroll in Texas. Before the update, 12 of the top 25 highest-paid public employees contained in the database were either university coaches or athletic directors. Today, 18 of the top 25 are professors or administrators at the major University of Texas health science centers in Houston, San Antonio and Dallas.

The highest-paid employee in the database remains UT football coach Mack Brown, though his $2.5 million salary is now listed lower than before because the update doesn't include incentive pay. (The database now only includes base salary for all employees.) The highest-paid academic is now Dr. Rod Rohrich ($1.7 million), who chairs the plastic surgery department at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. His annual compensation is more than that of the highest-paid university administrator in the database, Scott Ransom ($900,000), the president of the University of North Texas Health Science Center. 

The agency page inside the application also now has the date of the latest update, allowing users to see when the data were last collected and added to the database. This column will fill out as our staff acquires new and updated records from the agencies under the Texas Public Information Act.

Please let us know if you have feedback or corrections or if you’d like us to include another public agency.