Local

Here are the City of Boston’s top-earning employees

More than 30 people made over $300,000 last year.

By Susannah Sudborough

March 31, 2022

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In most municipalities across the state, employees in two particular departments make up the vast majority of the top earners who work for the local government.

A Boston.com analysis of the City of Boston’s employee payroll data for the end of 2021 found that Boston’s breakdown is similar to most municipalities.

It might surprise some that the vast majority of top-earning public employees — both in Boston and across the state — are police officers and firefighters.

The only major difference in Boston is that police officers earn consistently more than firefighters, though firefighters are easily the second-highest-paid department in the city.

In fact, in Boston, of the top 100 earners, all but 15 are police officers. Expand that to the top 1,000, and only 16 are neither firefighters nor police officers.

Perhaps counterintuitively, the reason police officers and firefighters are paid so much is not due to high base salaries. This is not to say that they aren’t well compensated. Their salaries typically range from $70,000 to $200,000 dollars, with the majority making six figures.

The reason police officers and firefighters make so much money is because they earn tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes amounting to over $100,000 additional dollars over the course of a year, in overtime pay and detail pay.

Take, for example, Police Officer Sefa Kwasi Dugbazah, the officer who earned the most detail pay last year. His base pay is about $92,000. Last year, he earned nearly $180,000 just in detail pay, plus about $15,000 in overtime pay.

That means that last year, Dugbazah earned about $195,000 outside his base pay, essentially tripling his salary. His total earnings amounted to about $305,000, meaning about 64% of his total earnings were earned through overtime and detail pay.

Overall, Dugbazah was the 34th highest regular earner working for the city last year.

In another example, Police Lt. Stanley Demesmin, the policeman who earned the most in overtime pay last year, earned about $168,000 in overtime pay. He also earned nearly $25,000 in detail pay.

His base pay is about $142,000, meaning he earned more than his base pay just in overtime pay last year. Of his nearly $380,000 total pay, about half was made just through overtime and detail pay.

Overall, Demesmin was the fourth-highest regular earner working for the City last year.

Dugbazah and Demesmin were far from the only employees making this much money in overtime and detail pay last year. In the police department alone, 35 policemen made over $300,000. The highest base pay among these officers was about $165,000.

Also among policemen, 58 made over $100,000 in overtime pay, and 14 made more than $100,000 in detail pay. Far more made tens of thousands of dollars in each category.

Another noticeable trend among high-earning city employees is that they are overwhelmingly men. This is representative of the gender disparity in both the police and fire departments.

In fact, the only woman in the top 50 earners was Boston Public Schools Superintendent Brenda Cassellius, who ranked 33rd overall in regular earning employees by earning about $305,000 last year. She had the highest salary of any city employee, at $280,000.

Superintendents being among the highest-earning employees working for a municipality is standard throughout the commonwealth.

On the other end of the spectrum, among the lowest-paid city employees, are all kinds of Boston Public Schools employees. Among the lowest earners are teaching assistants, paraprofessionals, cafeteria workers, and custodians.

Many of these employees work for less than $20,000 in base pay, and far more work for less than $30,000 in base pay, though not a majority.

Importantly, the top two earners in Boston last year were not regular earners. Richard Beckers and Jacqueline McGowan were both paid about $1.25 million by the city last year as the result of a lawsuit that found they were wrongly accused of using cocaine when they were police officers in the early 2000s.

Last year, the City of Boston employed about 20,000 people full-time.

Here are the top 100 earners: