OKLAHOMA CITY – The $55,000 raise proposed for State Transportation Secretary Tim Gatz would make him among the highest-paid officials in the state’s executive branch of government.
The Oklahoma Turnpike Authority voted Dec. 7 to boost Gatz’s salary from $185,000 to $240,000, if Governor Stitt approves. Southwest Ledger contacted the Governor’s office on Sunday, Monday and again Tuesday about the pay raise recommendation, and was told he had not yet decided.
The only state officials whose salaries would be greater than Gatz’s if the raise is approved would be the director of the Office of Management and Enterprise Services, four health-care executives, the higher education chancellor and the presidents of Oklahoma’s biggest universities, state payroll records indicate.
“We’re below the average on many of our pay scales,” Turnpike Authority Chairman Gene Love of Lawton told the Ledger on Tuesday.
Gatz’s paycheck has nearly doubled in four years; in 2018 he was paid $127,800, according to the Oklahoma Data Center.
“Tim wears three ‘hats’,” Love noted. In addition to his title as the state Transportation Secretary, Gatz is the executive director of both the Oklahoma Department of Transportation (ODOT) and the Turnpike Authority (OTA). “That’s really quite a job,” Love said.
ODOT maintain 30,418 lane miles of state and federal highways, which includes 9,468 miles of two-lane routes and 637 miles of interstate highways, plus 6,800 bridges on those highways. Oklahoma’s turnpike system consists of 11 toll roads totaling 616 miles, records indicate, and the 2.5-mile Gilcrease Expressway in Tulsa is scheduled to open next year.
According to the Office of Management and Enterprise Services, ODOT has 2,281 employees and the OTA has 473.
“The primary purpose” of the pay raise is to get Gatz’s salary “competitive with other turnpike and transportation officials around the country,” Love said. The state Transportation Commission raised the salary to $185,000 in 2018 when Mike Patterson was the ODOT director and the state Transportation Secretary.
“We took the average across the country and looked at surrounding states,” Love said Tuesday. “We looked at similar jobs in Colorado, Texas, Missouri and Arkansas.” With the raise Gatz’s salary would be “right at the average of Arkansas and Missouri.” His current salary is “just not competitive with his peers,” Love said. Even with the proposed pay raise the salary would be equivalent to the average, he said.
Colorado, for example, has fewer miles of turnpikes than Oklahoma does “but that job pays more than Tim’s,” Love said.
“Our turnpike system is also the safest in the country, in terms of deaths per mile,” he said. “And that record is getting better every year as we add more cable barriers and tapered concrete ‘Jersey’ barriers. Eventually we will have them on our entire system.”
The barriers are expensive, Love said, “but how do you place a value on a human life?”
The Oklahoma Public Employees Association realizes that executives “are getting significant pay raises,” OPEA Communications Director Tony DeSha said Monday. “We just want to make sure the state’s frontline staff are also getting pay raises that reflect their market value, too.”
“We are looking at other Turnpike Authority employees for across-the-board pay raises,” Love said. “We’re not sure about the percentages yet, but we’re looking into the requirements of each job.”