More MTA employees got on the track to hefty six-figure salaries last year, with one in four pulling in at least $100,000, according to the Empire Center.
Payroll records from the 2014 calendar year released Thursday show 21,352 Metropolitan Transportation Authority workers earned six-figure incomes. That is a hike from the one in seven employees who reached that figure in 2013, according to the center.
The top five employees are agency executives — ex-Metro-North chief Howard Permut, MTA chair Thomas Prendergast, Capital Construction President Michael Horodniceanu, Metro-North executive Richard W. Staley, and retiring NYC Transit President Carmen Bianco.
But the 20 top paid staff include foremen and technicians.
Eduardo Vargas, an hourly paid machinist with Metro-North, earned $309,183 — a big raise over his $205,303 pay in 2013, according to payroll records.
MTA police were the best paid workforce out of all the MTA agencies, with an average pay of $135,598, according to the data.
Overtime, meanwhile, cost the MTA $849 million.
A Metro-North Railroad track supervisor, Robert M. O’Connell, took the crown for most overtime, with $184,634 added to his base pay of $77,478. There were 65 other employees who cleared $100,000 in overtime, according to the center.
O’Connell told the Daily News he pulled long weeks and worked round the clock in a part of the Bronx that needs repair, like fixing concrete ties and switches on tracks. And when snow storms battered the rails, he helped clear it out. He’d catch sleep in his 2006 Ford Trailblazer during off hours, he said.
“I don’t see my family for days at a time,” he said. And what I do needs to be done.”
Working so many hours was also the result of a smaller workforce, he said.
Last year was the most overtime money made in his 37 years with the MTA.
“A lot of the money I made last year, I would have had somebody else do it,” O’Connell said. “But there wasn’t nobody else.”
Asked about the extra hours, Gov. Cuomo said he would not say whether the extra pay was too much for the money-hunting transit agency.
“We will make sure that the MTA has all the money they need to operate the system efficiently and effectively,” Cuomo said. “However, we’re not going to throw money at problems either.”
MTA spokesman Adam Lisberg defended the agency’s cost-cutting, with more than $1.3 billion slashed from the MTA budget since 2009.
Meanwhile, the boom in six-figure salaries last year came from $431 million in retroactive pay, according to the Empire Center. This back pay put thousands of workers over the $100,000 mark, Lisberg said.
“When the MTA settled several outstanding labor contracts last year, tens of thousands of employees who had gone years without a raise received one-time-only payments for retroactive wage increases,” Lisberg said.
