Question 1: Break down Auburn’s total city payroll for us.

 

Auburn spent a total of $22.2 million on payroll last year. 59 people made six figures, and then there’s another 194 people making more than $40,000.

 

There’s a lot of different factors that go into that. Only $16.4 million was for “regular pay.” There’s also $1.2 million spent on overtime. $1.5 million spent paying for vacation and holidays. $360,000 spent paying out unused vacation and sick time to employees who left their job.

 

Question 2: How much money did the highest earners make?

 

The top two earners in the whole city were two Battalion Chiefs at the Fire Department, and that’s because of overtime payments and sick time cashouts.

 

Donald Flanagan’s base salary was only $100,000, but once you factor in his overtime and the sick time payouts he got when he retired, he ended up earning $180,000. Same thing with Scott Pray, who earned only $86,000 in regular pay but ended up making $165,000 in total.

 

Those are both people who served the city for 30 years, so it takes time to get that kind of take-home pay. But it shows there are ways for city employees to almost double their base salaries.

 

City Manager Philip Crowell made $163,000. That includes $15,000 of paid vacation and $3,600 for his car allowance.

 

Question 3: Usually by now you’d have payroll data from Portland and Lewiston to share with us. But your team still doesn’t have those numbers, right?

 

Portland and Lewiston still have not answered our open records request for their payroll or their checkbook.

 

In Portland, we filed those requests in the beginning of January. We emailed them again this week to ask why there’s such a long delay, but they didn’t respond.

 

We haven’t been waiting quite as long in Lewiston, we filed our requests in the spring.

 

But there are plenty of huge cities around the country with much more complex payroll records that send us their data in a week or less.

 

Fiscal Year 2026 is going to begin for both Portland and Lewiston in just over a month. But taxpayers still don’t know how much employees were earning in fiscal year 2025.

 

Question 4: So what data can you share with us about those other cities?

 

Even though not every city has answered our records requests, we do have info on pensionable income from all around Maine, because we get that data directly from the state government. That leaves out some bonuses and stipends, but it includes all the salary that will eventually count toward employee pensions when they retire.

 

We can see that at least 140 city employees earned $100,000 or more in Portland last year.

At least 35 people in South Portland

85 in Lewiston

55 in Bangor.

 

But like we just saw in Auburn, some of the highest earners are likely getting large chunks of their salary from other sources. So we still need Portland and Lewiston to release their records so we can get a full view of the payroll.