Four of the 10 highest-paid municipal government employees in Western New York are Erie County Sheriff’s officers, according to a new report. Most of the rest are Buffalo cops and firefighters. The state’s most generous paychecks are doled out in Long Island.

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The highest-paid government employee in Western New York last year was the Erie County Sheriff’s sergeant in charge of investigating vehicular accidents, according to a new report from the Empire Center for Public Policy.

In third place: a sergeant who five years ago pleaded guilty to driving while impaired after he crashed a county-owned vehicle.

Two more sheriff’s officers — a jail sergeant and a captain in charge of the investigative services division — also finished in the top 10, according to the report, which the Albany watchdog produces annually using state payroll data.

Rounding out the list are a couple of division chiefs with the Buffalo Fire Department, a Buffalo police detective assigned to provide security at the Seneca casino downtown, a South Buffalo police captain, a Village of Depew police detective and Erie County’s health commissioner.

Biegasiewicz is also president of the Erie County Sheriff’s Police Benevolent Association, the union representing most of the department’s officers. 

Naegely — who in October 2020 crashed a sheriff’s vehicle on Jewett Holmwood Road in East Aurora and pleaded guilty to DWI the following year — is a union vice president.

Left: Erie County Sheriff John Garcia, Sgt. Simon Biegasiewicz, Undersheriff William Cooley. Photo: Erie County Sheriff’s Office. Right: Sgt. Aaron Naegely. Photo: Erie County District Attorney.

Pyc, the Depew detective, is president of his department’s union.

Burstein’s pay reflects a high base salary. The others make the list thanks to generous overtime earnings.

While individual Erie County employees dominated the regional top 10, the Empire Center found the City of Buffalo’s employees ranked first among local governments for average pay at $83,528.

That average was lifted significantly by police and fire salaries. Nearly half the city’s 2,831 employees worked in the police and fire departments, where they earned far more than their peers — an average of $111,079 last year.

However, that figure was substantially lower than police and fire employees in surrounding towns and villages. Public safety workers in Cheektowaga, Amherst and Hamburg — both the village and the town — all made more than their counterparts in the city. 

Orchard Park’s cops and firefighters averaged $145,727, which was tops in the region — and nearly $20,000 more than the average for their colleagues across the state.

Buffalo’s payroll costs taxpayers $850 per resident, the Empire Center reports. Erie County’s 5,326 employees cost taxpayers $394 per resident.

The Empire Center’s annual report looks at employees for all governments outside New York City and its five boroughs, using payroll data municipalities report to the state pension system. The dollar amounts do not include the cost of fringe benefits such as health insurance and pension contributions.

School districts and public authorities, such as the New York Power Authority and the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority, were not included in the report.

The report, released last week, covers the state’s 2025-26 fiscal year, which ran from April 1, 2025 to March 31 of this year. It comprises data covering 179,222 workers. 

Among the report’s findings:

The state’s municipal payrolls added up to $12 billion.
For cops and firefighters, the average salary statewide was $125,366.
For all other government workers, the average was $57,983.
400 workers across the state made more than $300,000.
1,567 made more than $250,000, which is what the governor earns.
About one in five employees made more than $100,000.
Police and fire comprised 13 percent of the public workforce in the state and about 25 percent of the payroll cost.

All but 50 of the public employees who made over $300,000 worked on Long Island, most of them as cops in Nassau or Suffolk counties. 

Long Islanders also accounted for three-quarters of those who earned more than the governor last year.

In fact, Nassau County employees had the highest average pay — $114,732 — among the 57 counties outside New York City. Suffolk County ranks third on that list, behind Westchester County. 

Erie County ranked ninth with an average pay of $70,591.

As a region, Western New York ranked third in the number of government employees and average salary, behind Long Island and the Hudson Valley.

The Empire Center’s report does not include Erie County Medical Center and Roswell Park Cancer Center, whose executives and physicians are perennially among the state’s highest paid employees.

Thomas Quatroche, ECMC’s president and CEO from 2016 until this past June, made $2,244,467 last fiscal year, according to the Empire Center’s records. That made him the highest paid public employee in the state.

Candace Johnson, the head of Roswell Park, was second that year, collecting $1,955,419. Five more Roswell Park doctors, all making over $1 million a year, also fell on the list of 10 highest-paid public employees.

The Empire Center found 5,720 people who appear to have been on the payroll of two or more governments last year. Most of those involve part-time jobs, according to the report’s authors — like when a police officer in one municipality moonlights for a department elsewhere.

They offer as an example the case of Thomas Groneman, who earned $369,690 last year as a Suffolk County police officer and an extra $5,377 as a cop for the village of Head of the Harbor.

Daniel Moyer, meanwhile, appeared on the payroll of 14 towns and one village in St. Lawrence County in the state’s North Country, where he is a dogcatcher. His combined pay last year was $57,402.

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posted 32 minutes ago – October 28, 2026