With a full-time staff of 68 people, the town of Elon has one of the smaller payrolls a-mong Alamance County’s local governments. The town nevertheless has seven staff members with salaries in excess of $100,000 – a proportion that dwarfs the share of six-figure earners who work for either the city of Burlington or Alamance County.
The salaries and benefits of Elon’s highest-paid staff members are among the details that appear in the latest installment of this newspaper’s ongoing series on local government compensation. Since the middle of February, The Alamance News has steadily published this information, which it has obtained through public records requests to the county’s public sector employers.
In its requests, The Alamance News has sought personnel data that all units of state and local government are required to divulge under North Carolina’s Public Records Law. This information includes the names, titles, and dates of hire for all of a government entity’s full- and part-time employees. The newspaper has also requested each staff member’s annual salary as of February 1, 2025 as well as their total compensation from the previous calendar year.
For the sake of consistency, The Alamance News has asked each local government it contacted to include certain items in the total compensation for each employee. The newspaper stipulated that these figures should contain the staff member’s base wages “plus any amounts paid for additional duties, bonuses, overtime, longevity pay, any healthcare and/or dental care premiums paid on behalf of the employee and his/her family, as well as the employer contributions into any retirement programs (including any 401k programs).”
The newspaper’s request for total compensation has drawn all sorts of responses from the local governments in Alamance County. The county, for instance, supplied figures that were even more comprehensive than the newspaper had sought. Meanwhile, officials in Burlington and Graham have passed along the “gross” wages from each staff member’s W2 form – omitting nontaxable benefits like 401k contributions.
In Elon’s case, the newspaper received total compensation figures that seemed to contain all the requested components – although they reflected each employee’s current wages rather than those from 2024. To further complicate matters, the town’s base salaries included a number of items that the newspaper had sought in the employee’s total compensation.
According to Elon’s municipal clerk Kathleen Patterson, the town’s record keeping software “combines annual salary, longevity, extra duty, etc.” into “salary line item.” As a result, these putative “base” salaries may be inflated with forms of remuneration that other local governments have reported elsewhere.
With this caveat in mind, the data that the newspaper received from Elon shows a relatively large number of employees who make at least $100,000 a year in comparison to other local governments.
At the top of this list of six-figure earners is Elon’s town manager Richard Roedner, whose annual salary of $164,290.03 is far steeper than any other municipal staff member. In fact, Roedner, who joined Elon’s staff in 2020, makes nearly $47,000 more than the next entry – police chief Kelly Blackwelder, who has been with the town since 2005.
Behind Blackwelder are four other department heads who also pull in at least $100,000 a year, according to the town’s personnel records. These top earners include planning director Lori Oakley and fire chief Landon Massey – both of whom joined Elon’s workforce in 2022. Meanwhile, Joseph Trollinger, who was brought in to serve as the town’s finance director in 2024, is credited with an annual wage of $100,000.
This roster of relative newcomers nevertheless includes a couple of more seasoned staff members. In fifth place, for instance, is assistant police chief James Turner, who has been with the town since 2011. In the meantime, the town’s third best-compensated employee is public works director Donald Wood, whose 40th anniversary rolls around later this year.
Together, these seven employees comprise nearly 10.3 percent of Elon’s full-time workforce. Although the way Elon calculates salaries complicates any head-to-head comparisons with other jurisdictions, it may be worth noting that the 48 people in Burlington who make at least $100,000 a year make up just over 7.3 percent of the city’s 654 full-time staff members.
In addition to Elon’s seven top earners, the town’s personnel records also list 12 other employees who top the $100,000 mark based on their total compensation.
Among the items that put these individuals over the threshold is the $8,247.84 that Elon currently pays to provide health and dental coverage ($7,848.72 and $399.12, respectively) for each full time staff member. Also reflected in this calculation is the town’s annual contribution to the state’s retirement system, which amounts to 15.4 percent of each police officer’s wages and 13.64 percent of salaries of other staff members. A third component of total compensation is the town’s automatic contribution into each staff member’s 401k. Under state law, the town must invest a sum equal to 5 percent of each police officer’s salary into this individual retirement savings account. Patterson notes that Elon’s town council has made a “voluntary decision” to extend the automatic contribution to the rest of its full-time workforce.
In an brief follow-up interview with the newspaper, town manager Roedner estimated that there are another dozen part-time employees who are paid on an hourly basis, as well as about 20 volunteer firefighters who are paid on a “per call” basis, that were not included in the town’s submission to the newspaper.
A ranked list of Elon’s seven top earners appears at the end of this story: 
And that list is followed by a listing, by department, of the whole full-time staff along with each staff member’s salary, hire date, title, and total compensation HERE.
