EXography: 19 U.S. cities have proportionately bigger workforces than bankrupted Detroit

by Luke Rosiak, Washington Examiner, July 22, 2013

Detroit declared bankruptcy due in no small part to $3 billion in unfunded public employee pensions owed a sprawling city workforce that kept growing even as the city’s population shriveled, but a Washington Examiner analysis found that 19 major American cities have even bigger ratios of such workers to residents.

The Examiner used the Census Bureau's 2011 Annual Survey of Public Employment and Payroll to rank every U.S. city with a population of 200,000 or more.

Some of those cities managed to get along fine with comparatively few municipal employees, such as San Diego, which has 9,501 employees for 1.3 million residents, or one for every 137 residents.

But others like San Francisco had a bureaucracy seven times as large, with one of every 28 of the city's 800,000 residents on the city payroll.

Remarkably, the Census Bureau excluded from these figures all teachers and education professionals, which make up the largest group of local government employees.

The figures also do not include separate government divisions that comprise significant portions of many urban public workforces, like the 1,200-employee Baltimore City Housing Authority, the 1,000-employee Philadelphia Housing Authority and the 2,300 employee Chicago Park District.

Transit systems, such as the 9,500-worker Chicago Transit Authority and New York's 7,000-person Port Authority, are also not counted.

read … Washington Examiner

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#62 -- HONOLULU

Residents per employee -- 102

Population: 953,207

Employees: 9,281

Annual payroll: $554,356,008

Average salary: $60,572

LINK: What's not included?

LINK: Back to map