{"id":221382,"date":"2026-06-17T14:17:13","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T14:17:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/221382\/"},"modified":"2026-06-17T14:17:13","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T14:17:13","slug":"16-allegheny-county-workers-topped-50k-in-leave-cash-outs-pennsylvania","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/221382\/","title":{"rendered":"16 Allegheny County workers topped $50k in leave cash-outs | Pennsylvania"},"content":{"rendered":"

(The Center Square)\u2014 Sixteen Allegheny County\u00a0workers\u00a0received more than $50,000 in unused leave last year, and all worked in the police department, sheriff\u2019s office or jail.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The top nine spots in the western Pennsylvania county were dominated by\u00a0the police, according to an investigation by The Center Square, which obtained the data from a request under the state\u2019s right-to-know law.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sergeant Christopher McHenry earned the most at $80,083. Officers Richard Keebler, Kirk A. Ruckel, and Kevin McCue each received more than $71,000. The\u00a0exception was Douglas E. Clark, a sergeant in the sheriff\u2019s office, who\u00a0cashed out $70,914. Those\u00a0sums amounted to half to two-thirds<\/a> of their $110,000-plus annual salaries last year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

County policies suggest the largest payouts were driven largely by accumulated sick leave. The county tightly caps unused vacation time. By contrast, many police, sheriff’s office, and jail employees may cash out as much as half a year of unused sick leave when they leave county employment.<\/p>\n

Where the money went<\/p>\n

Mark Moses, a former city treasurer and author of The Municipal Finance Crisis<\/a>, said leave cash-out policies allow some employees to take home more money than higher-salaried officials.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis shows where the money is going in the organization,\u201d he told The Center Square in an interview.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Eight of the largest leave recipients earned more compensation last year than County Executive Sara Innamorato, Warden Trevor Wingard, and County Solicitor Rosalyn Guy-McCorkle, each of whose salary was in the $150,000 to $160,000 range last year. The latter officials oversee a county of 1.22 million, the 39th largest in the country.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Another five police cracked the top 50. In addition, 17 of\u00a0the 50 came from the sheriff\u2019s\u00a0office or jail department.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

To put those figures in perspective, employees from the three departments\u00a0represented\u00a021% of the county\u2019s workforce, or 1,223 of 5,900, last year. Yet they accounted for 60% of the 50 employees who cashed out the most money from unused sick and vacation leave.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The police department\u2019s dominance wasn\u2019t confined to the top earners. Police department employees received $825,548 in unused leave last year, more than twice as much as the next two departments combined.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sheriff\u2019s office workers cashed out $379,478, while those from the District Attorney\u2019s office received $373,794. Jail department employees received $328,200.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Like city, like county<\/p>\n

The\u00a0pattern mirrored one that\u00a0The Center Square\u00a0found<\/a> in Pittsburgh last month.\u00a0Allegheny County\u2019s payouts for unused leave were even larger. It paid $3.3 million to 475 employees, while the Steel\u00a0City paid $2.3 million to 200 city workers last year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Leonard Gilroy, vice president of government reform for the Reason Foundation, said the large payouts show the folly of governments showering generous benefits on their workers.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cMost types of employees don\u2019t work at a place based on their benefits,\u201d Gilroy told The Center Square in an interview. \u201cGovernments need to compete with the private sector for workers, but the idea that they are going to win because of super generous benefit policies is not supported by the evidence.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

An email and phone call to the Allegheny County\u2019s controller\u2019s office were not returned.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Caps hard and loose<\/p>\n

Gilroy noted that most governments no longer permit retiring employees to rack up $200,000 to $300,000 in unused leave in their final year on the job\u2014amounts he described as \u201ccrazy\u201d for taxpayers to pay. Like Moses, he described Allegheny County\u2019s policies on unused leave for retiring or departing employees\u00a0as partially reformed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The county places a hard cap on unused vacation leave for many police, sheriff’s office and jail employees covered by collective-bargaining agreements. Employees generally cannot carry vacation leave from one year to the next, and payouts are typically limited to unused vacation from the current year when an employee leaves county service.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0county\u2019s cap on unused\u00a0sick\u00a0leave is far looser.<\/p>\n

Many employees for the three departments\u00a0may\u00a0cash out as much as half a year\u2019s worth of\u00a0sick\u00a0leave. The amount depends on the bargaining unit.<\/p>\n

Police officers, sergeants, and lieutenants, as well deputy sheriffs, sergeants, and lieutenants, are permitted to receive as many as 132 days of unused sick leave. Those covered police\u00a0employees are paid at their daily rate, while covered sheriff’s office\u00a0employees are paid on a sliding scale.<\/p>\n

Correctional officers\u00a0may be paid for as\u00a0many\u00a0as\u00a0130 days based on their hourly rate.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Steven G. Craig, an economist at the University of Houston, said most governments and businesses have adopted the opposite approach.<\/p>\n

\u201c(S)ome institutions, including firms, have combined sick and vacation days into one pool,\u201d he told The Center Square in an interview. \u201cFor those that have not done that, they usually only pay for vacation days, not sick days.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Among the top earners, retirement eligible employees held only a modest financial edge. Police officers Keebler, Ruckel, and McCue started in 2006. Yet they cashed out $71,000 to $73,000, only\u00a0a few thousand dollars more than their counterparts Brad L. Martin, who started in 2014, and James P. Grill, who started in 2012.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Large leave cash-outs, the records suggest, are not confined to employees at the end of their careers.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(The Center Square)\u2014 Sixteen Allegheny County\u00a0workers\u00a0received more than $50,000 in unused leave last year, and all worked in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":221383,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[693,28,30,29],"class_list":["post-221382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-investigations","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221382\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/221383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}