Boulder City hasn’t grown in years. The same can’t be said for its public payroll

Unlike neighboring Las Vegas, Boulder City has a small-town feel and wants to keep it that way.

It puts the brakes on growth, and its population barely budged over the past decade or so. Nonetheless, city government has spent millions more on its workforce in recent years.

Employees of Boulder City grossed $21.1 million in earnings in 2022, up 25 percent from about $16.9 million in 2018, according to payroll data the Las Vegas Review-Journal obtained through a public records request.

In 2022, the latest year provided to the newspaper, 16 city employees earned more than $100,000 in regular pay.

Boulder City, some 30 miles southeast of the Las Vegas Strip, had 14,890 residents as of 2022, down slightly from 15,023 a dozen years earlier, U.S. Census Bureau data shows.

Under its growth-control ordinance, Boulder City will issue no more than 120 permits each year to commercial homebuilders.

As described in Boulder City’s municipal code, the goal is to preserve the city as a healthy, spacious and “carefully-controlled community primarily by preserving its small-town atmosphere and character and avoidance of uncontrolled and rapid growth.”

City Manager Taylour Tedder said payroll climbed because staffing levels increased, mostly before he took the job in 2021, and because new contracts took effect in 2022 that boosted pay by as much as 5.5 percent for city employees.

Boulder City had 161 full-time workers in 2018, and 203 by 2020, according to Tedder, who said the city currently has 208 full-time employees.

He said city staffers, even today, handle multiple jobs each.

“We’re always operating in a lean fashion,” he said.

Here were Boulder City’s top-10 earners in 2022, as measured by regular pay listed in the data provided to the Review-Journal:

— Taylour Tedder, city manager: $144,720.38.

— Joseph Stubitz, utilities director: $134,784.65.

— Bryce Boldt, administrative services director: $122,776.17.

— Timothy Shea, police chief: $122,105.16.

— Vincent Albowicz, police lieutenant: $121,913.72.

— William Gray, fire chief: $119,862.21.

— Roger Hall, parks and recreation director: $117,900.36.

— Jim Keane, city engineer: $116,773.84.

— Aaron Johnson, police commander: $114,530.12.

— Brittany Walker, city attorney: $114,527.06.

Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342.