New airport chief’s compensation below average despite pay raise
Rosemary Vassiliadis will rank below average among her peers when she becomes Clark County aviation director on June 3 despite a promotion that comes with a nearly 36 percent pay raise.
Vassiliadis’ employment contract, approved Tuesday by the Clark County Commission, includes a salary of $199,205, plus a potential cash bonus of as much as
20 percent. The figure does not include the value of fringe benefits, such as health insurance, pension costs and matching payments into the county’s deferred compensation program.
Airports Council International reports that the average cash compensation — salary plus bonus — for the large airports that responded to the trade group’s annual survey ran $250,594 last year. Vassiliadis would fall below the $227,332 average for midsized airports if her bonus amounted to less than 14 percent.
Retiring Aviation Director Randall Walker has not received a bonus in five years, when the recession hit.
During the 11 months through November, the county-owned McCarran International Airport ranked as the nation’s eighth-busiest airport by passenger totals and No. 23 in the world, the council said.
Walker earned cash compensation of $233,667 this year, his 16th and final year as boss at McCarran. Vassiliadis was paid $146,640 as deputy director.
Vassiliadis, 55, said she proposed her new salary as part of a cost-neutral plan to restructure the department’s hierarchy. That will allow her to apply the difference between her pay and Walker’s to other positions while remaining within the overall budget, which is being trimmed by about $7 million since the July 1 start of the fiscal year because of lower-than-predicted traffic.
No publicly available research lists airport chiefs’ salaries. But fragmentary media accounts suggest that airports controlled by independent authorities pay better, sometimes by a wide margin, than ones owned by local governments.
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the world’s busiest, paid its chief $221,000 a year when it hired a new director in 2010. The city of Atlanta owns Hartsfield-Jackson.
Tampa, Fla., which handles less than half the traffic of McCarran, pays its CEO $315,000 in base salary. Its airport is operated by an authority.
The CEO at the Reno-Tahoe International Airport earned $253,800 in base pay at the start of a three-year contract, with the potential for 4 percent annual raises and a bonus as much as 20 percent, reports in 2010 show.
Reno’s airport, which had 3.5 million passengers last year, less than 10 percent of the 42 million that passed through McCarran, also is operated by an authority.
Contact reporter Tim O’Reiley at
toreiley@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5290.
