QUESTION: How has the sheriff’s office distributed the pay raises that Alamance County’s commissioners approved in July for 75 of the sheriff’s higher-ranking subordinates?
ANSWER: Alamance County’s sheriff Terry Johnson didn’t actually name names of individual employees last month when he secured a nod from the county’s board of commissioners to add 4.5 to 22.5 percent to wages of deputies and jailers with ranks between sergeant and major.
The Alamance News has nevertheless obtained the names, ranks, and salaries of this measure’s beneficiaries, whose added remuneration will absorb $550,000 of the sheriff’s current personnel budget – as Johnson acknowledged in his pitch to the commissioners a month ago.
The newspaper was able to acquire this data under North Carolina’s Public Records Law, which entitles members of the public to certain information about state and local government employees. This law obligated the county’s personnel office to supply the newspaper with the names, titles, and start dates of the affected personnel as well as their salaries – both before, and after, the new raises went into effect.
These individuals, whose particulars are listed below, received their bumps in compensation roughly a month after the county enacted a new annual budget that features a 5 percent “cost of living adjustment” for every sworn jailer and deputy under the sheriff’s command. This 5-percent raise has already been factored into the salaries for 75 people (see adjacent table).
