State agencies with big salaries

BOSTON (FOX25, myfoxboston) - They’re known as authorities or quasi-public agencies and they operate on the fringes of state government. Some are well-known, but you’ve probably never heard of most of them. What these agencies all have in common is they call their own shots, spend millions of dollars of public money, and hand out huge salaries to their top employees.

Massachusetts has about 50 quasi-public agencies. They’ve been created over the years by the state legislature to perform important government functions, supposedly free of political of political pressures.

But their independence and, for many of them, low profile also allows them to spend money anyway they like. And a Fox Undercover investigation found that one thing they really like to do is give their top employees hefty paychecks.

“This is really the dirty little secret of Massachusetts state government,” says state Senate Minority Leader Richard Tisei (R-Wakefield.) “You have this shadow government operating without any checks and balances, without any accountability, and the problem is getting worse, not better”
By some counts, there are now 52 of these quasi –public agencies, although the truth is, nobody seems to know for sure.

Some of them are high-profile:

• The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, better known as the T;
• The Massachusetts Port Authority, or Massport, which runs Logan International Airport, Boston’s seaport, and several bridges and tunnels;
• The Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, which runs the toll booths on the Massachusetts Turnpike and oversaw the scandal-ridden Big Dig highway project.

Other authorities are very low profile. Ever heard of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative? The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center? How about the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center?
“Most people don’t even know here in the (State House) what half of these agencies do,” says Tisei. “They’re sort of like the forgotten branch of government.”

Earlier this year, one of these obscure public agencies suddenly found itself in the spotlight. It was revealed that Gov. Deval Patrick arranged for a political ally, State Sen. Marian Walsh (D-West Roxbury), to fill a long-vacant post at the Massachusetts Health and Education Facilities Authority.
Walsh’s salary at her new job was to be $175,000, but the appointment caused such a furor that Patrick and Walsh abandoned the idea. Actually, Patrick did an about-face, announcing he would assemble a panel to examine salaries at all of the state’s quasi-public agencies.

Fox Undercover decided to take its own look at the salaries being doled out at the quasi-public state agencies. We obtained current payrolls from 17 agencies and they reveal that top officials at state authorities are making top dollar.

Overall, more than 500 employees at the quasi-public agencies are paid six-figure salaries, the records show.

Our investigation also found:

• The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority has 165 employees making $100,000 or more per year.
•  Massport pays 130 employees $100,000 or more annually.
• The Massachusetts Turnpike Authority’s payroll includes 62 employees paid annual salaries of $100,000 or more.
• Records show three small quasi-public state agencies pay at least one-third of their employees six-figure salaries.
•  The Massachusetts Technology Collaborative has 78 employees and 26 of them earn $100,000 or more, including executive director Mitchell Adams, whose annual salary is $263,925.
•  The tiny Massachusetts Clean Energy Center has only five employees and two of them earn more than $100,000, including interim executive director Patrick Cloney who gets $190,000.
• The Massachusetts Life Sciences Center has 10 employees and seven of them receive more than $100,000 annually, topped by president and CEO Susan Windham-Bannister at $285,000.

And our review found that there appears to be some overlapping duties at those three agencies. The Technology Collaborative, headquartered in Westborough, has a health and life sciences department with four employees and a renewable energy department with a staff of 25.
Despite that, in the last three years, Patrick and the Legislature created two new quasi-public agencies dealing with life sciences and clean energy. The Life Sciences Center and the Clean Energy Center together employ 13 people and eight of them receive six-figure salaries.

“You can go into almost any of these quasi-publics and find excessive salaries that don’t even correspond sometimes to what is being paid in the private sector,” Tisei says.
That’s a problem, Tisei adds, because of state’s huge budget deficit. “The state is broke,” he says.
Some of the quasi-public agencies get their operating money directly from the Legislature. Others collect fees and other payments from the private industries they deal with.

Tisei says, either way, it’s public money. “I think the taxpayers should be concerned about it because ultimately they might not be paying for it directly, but they’re certainly paying for it indirectly.”
The panel Patrick appointed to look into the salaries at quasi-public agencies is not expect to release its findings for at least three months.

No one we talked to at the state authorities would agree to go on camera. Those three small agencies did give us statements saying their investments in the areas of new technology, life sciences and clean energy are important, especially in the middle of a recession.

As for the high salaries, the spokesman for the Life Sciences Center says his agency competes for talent with other states and the private sector, where salaries for comparable positions are substantially higher.

(Fox Undercover Producers: Jonathan Wells and Kevin Rothstein)