{"id":288245,"date":"2026-05-28T23:33:27","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T23:33:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/288245\/"},"modified":"2026-05-28T23:33:27","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T23:33:27","slug":"city-of-miami-launches-employee-web-portal-for-pay-transparency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/288245\/","title":{"rendered":"City of Miami launches employee web portal for pay transparency"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Critics say the City of Miami is spending too much taxpayer money on employee salaries. A recently elected city commissioner agrees, and proposed a pay transparency portal that has just gone live.<\/p>\n<p>A recent report from WLRN News partner <a href=\"https:\/\/coconutgrovespotlight.com\/2025\/12\/22\/inside-city-hall-miamis-growing-200k-club\/\" class=\"Link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Coconut Grove Spotlight<\/a> found that 70% of Miami\u2019s annual budget is spent on salaries, and a growing number of city employees make more than $200,000 per year. While employee pay is usually the biggest expenditure on any large organization\u2019s budget, City Commissioner Rolando Escalona thinks that number is too high.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I do believe that 70% of all the money we collect to go into salaries is a lot of money. We should manage to lower that number,&#8221; Escalona told WLRN in an interview.<\/p>\n<p>In an effort to bring transparency, Escalona proposed an online portal where any member of the public can search a city employee and find their full salary and biweekly pay. That item passed at a February meeting and, after several months of testing, the <a href=\"https:\/\/experience.arcgis.com\/experience\/bd98bab01904474bada23c4f38294fa1\" class=\"Link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">portal is officially open to the public<\/a> as of this Wednesday. <\/p>\n<p>    <img decoding=\"async\" class=\"Image\" alt=\"A chart showing names, positions and annual salaries.\"  width=\"880\" height=\"463\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1780011207_684_.png\"\/><\/p>\n<p>    The new employee salary portal shows annual salary, last paycheck and gross pay to date.<\/p>\n<p>Members of the public can search any city employee, including city commissioners and police administrators, and see their annual salary, last paycheck amount including benefits, and how much they&#8217;ve been paid to date.<\/p>\n<p>For example, Escalona has an annual salary as a commissioner of $58,200. City Manager James Reyes (whose legal first name is Jems), is paid $475,000 per year.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Our residents are busy. Sometimes they just don\u2019t have the time to send two or three emails to get a public records request. So this will make it easier for them,&#8221; Escalona said.<\/p>\n<p>The portal was modeled on a similar tool already used by <a href=\"https:\/\/experience.arcgis.com\/experience\/8abc5731d6ad49408139aa777dfaf4e1\" class=\"Link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Miami-Dade County<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Critics say the City of Miami is spending too much taxpayer money on employee salaries. A recently elected&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76806,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[123,125,124],"class_list":["post-288245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-miami","tag-miami","tag-miami-headlines","tag-miami-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288245\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}