ALBANY -- Doctors at the Downstate Medical Center and top SUNY administrators dominated the list of top earners in state government in 2017.
The highest paid state employee was Carlos Pato, dean of the Downstate Medical Center, who earned $746,625.
Seven of the state's ten highest paid employees worked at the facility, according to state records obtained by the USA Today Network's Albany Bureau under a Freedom of Information request to the state Comptroller's Office.
Pato was one of 20 state workers with gross earnings of more than $500,000 last year.
All of the top-100 paid employees worked for state-run hospitals or universities.
Two were SUNY football coaches: Stony Brook’s Charles Priore who received $418,219 and Buffalo’s Lance Leipold who earned $413,992.
It also included several president of SUNY colleges and universities. Nancy Zimpher, who left as SUNY chancellor last fall, led the pack, earning $628,150 last year, the records showed.
Bahg Sammakia, the acting president at the SUNY Polytechnic Institute in Albany and a former administrator at Binghamton University, earned $493,000.
Binghamton University president Harvey Stenger was not far behind: He earned $476,000, records show.
E L Storie, a psychiatrist for the Rochester Psychiatric Center, earned the most in Monroe County last year: at $295,000.
What's the norm?
The top salaries were far from the average, which was $50,164 last year, the Albany Bureau's review of the data showed.
That was down slightly from 2016 because the state appeared to use more part-time workers last year, pulling the average down.
Still, the number of state workers earning $100,000 or more grew for the third year in a row.
Nearly 40,000 state workers had gross pay above $100,000. That's up 40 percent compared to 2014.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has pressed state agencies to keep spending flat, and he has limited new hiring.
In this year's budget plan, Cuomo said, "The total workforce level for agencies subject to direct executive control is recommended to remain stable, consistent with results for the past six years."
The state, according to budget documents, has about 182,000 full‐time equivalent state employees within 59 executive agencies, state and city colleges and the offices of Attorney General and State Comptroller.
About 94 percent of the state workforce is unionized, while Cuomo controls about 65 percent of the state workforce.
About 3,600 employees earned more than Cuomo, whose gross pay was nearly $179,000 last year.
Pay raises?
As part of budget deliberations, lawmakers and Cuomo have been discussing a pay-raise commission for the Legislature and agency heads.
Lawmakers and commissioners haven't had a pay raise since 1999.
Legislators earn a base pay of $79,500, but most get stipends for leadership posts and $172 a day in per diems for every day they are at the Capitol.
Cuomo told reporters Wednesday he would like to raise the pay of commissioners, saying it is difficult to recruit candidates on the current scale -- which can range from $90,800 and $136,000 a year by law.
"I desperately need a pay raise for the employees in the executive chamber, the executive agencies to be competitive," Cuomo said.
"We're trying to get quality people into state government and frankly, we are wholly non-competitive."
