Hawaii State Salaries 2013: University Spends More on Fewer Employees
The top 10 University of Hawaii employees make on average almost 13 times more than the bottom 100 workers earn, salary data for 2013 shows.
The highest paid position last year was again the football coach. Norm Chow’s base salary was $550,000.
That’s half as much as his predecessor, Greg McMackin, pulled in until he .
The Warriors have only had one winning season since June Jones departed in 2008 after coaching the team to a 12-1 record the year before.
Chow is readying the Warriors for what is hoped to be a turnaround after they went 1-11 last year.
The football coach aside, the next highest paid positions at UH are more professorial in nature. Teaching medicine and law pays well, as do the top-level administrative jobs.
Here’s a look at the top 10 highest paid workers at the University of Hawaii:
| Rank | Name | Title | Department | Salary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Norm Chow | UH football coach | UH at Manoa Athletics | $550,000 |
| 2 | Jerris Hedges | UH medical school dean | UH Manoa | $505,008 |
| 3 | MRC Greenwood | UH president | Systemwide | $475,008 |
| 4 | Thomas Apple | UH Manoa chancellor | UH Manoa | $439,008 |
| 5 | Michele Carbone | UH Manoa Cancer Center director | UH Manoa | $412,008 |
| 6 | Avi Soifer | UH Manoa law school dean | UH Manoa | $403,128 |
| 7 | Vernon Roley | UH Manoa business school dean | UH Manoa | $375,768 |
| 8 | John Pezzuto | UH Hilo dean | UH Hilo | $341,568 |
| 9 | Peter Crouch | UH Manoa engineering school dean | UH Manoa | $323,424 |
| 10 | Brian Taylor | UH Manoa interim VC | UH Manoa | $321,000 |
UH has steadily employed fewer people but paid higher wages over the past three years.
Employees made on average $7,000 more in 2013 than they did in 2012 based on the upper end of the salary ranges the university provided in response to our open records requests.
The average salary range last year was $64,801 to $88,898. As of June 30, there were 7,268 employees, whose salaries cost $470.98 million to $646.11 million.
That’s up from the 2012 range of $460.01 million to $610.26 million for 7,466 employees. In 2011, 7,510 people worked for the university, costing the state $455.19 million to $600.38 million.
The increase reflects the state’s restoration of 6.7 percent pay cuts that workers endured during the economic recession, and raises for thousands of others under new contracts negotiated with the three unions that represent university employees.
The wide salary ranges make it hard to tell exactly how much the vast majority of university employees make. (State law allows for the disclosure of pay ranges instead of exact salaries for employees who belong to unions.)
Hundreds of employees in support positions for research and instruction each earn between $38,148 and $96,780.
IT specialists and media design positions are making somewhere between $46,512 and $117,984.
Among the only groups of employees with a definitive pay grade are janitors and groundskeepers. They earned $33,228 in 2013 and electricians and plumbers pulled in $46,236.
Here’s the salary database for 2013. You can search by first and last name, department, job title, salary range and year. To compare how this year stacks up to previous years, check out the salary database that covers 2011 and 2012 here.
— Alice Terry contributed to this story.
- Contact Nathan Eagle via email at neagle@civilbeat.com or Twitter at .
