County Manager Wanda Greene‘s annual salary is $228,743.
Buncombe County Sheriff Van Duncan makes $122,337 per year.
Those numbers and lots of others are surveyed and published, along with data from other N.C. counties, on an annual basis by the UNC School of Government. But there is no such resource for the city of Asheville.
This year, Asheville Unreported requested the information from city government. According to the online conservative news organization, the request took two months to fulfill. Initially, the media outlet had to agree to pay the cost of city staff time to generate the report that didn’t exist at the time. The city has since notified Asheville Unreported that it will not bill for the report after all, since the task did not meet the threshold at which the city requires payment.
The list of salaries reveals sizable pay raises for the city’s top staff over the past three years with City Manager Gary Jackson‘s overall compensation rising from $222,732 to $227,831. It also shows some potential disparities in the payment of department heads. Chief of Police Tammy Hooper was allocated $192,502 in total compensation for the 2015-16 fiscal year, a marked increase from her predecessors. Meanwhile Fire Chief Scott Burnette earned $147,364 in the same year.
Click here for the full listing of top city employee compensation by position, originally published by Asheville Unreported.
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