Not only does Santa Clara pay its police the second-highest average salary in the state, it has also been offering its utility employees increasingly cushy salaries.
While Silicon Valley Power (SVP) only added 29 employees from 2015 to 2023, it doubled its payroll over the same period. This trend mirrors citywide spending.
In 2015, SVP paid its 178 employees $21.9 million in salary, according to Government Compensation in California. By 2023, that number had ballooned to $44.6 million. That year, SVP employed 207 people.
Adjusting for inflation, $22 million is equivalent to $28.2 million in 2023, according to the Consumer Price Index, provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Public salary figures from 2023 are the most recent available. Figures for how many employees SVP has added since 2023, and how much its total salaries have grown since then, are not yet publicly available.
However, SVP’s director, Manuel Pineda, has repeatedly emphasized to the Santa Clara City Council that the city’s public utility is growing at breakneck speed, saying it plans to double its load over the next decade.
Among that growth is a slew of data centers demanding an increasingly large amount of energy.
During SVP’s bi-annual update earlier this month, Pineda told the council that SVP has added another 12 employees in 2024 and 24 employees in the previous two years, dating back to 2022.
Just using numbers from 2023, that means — conservatively — SVP salaries are outpacing inflation by nearly $17 million in less than a decade.
Taking a look at how much SVP is paying in overtime offers a bit of insight into the phenomenon.
In 2015, SVP was paying employees $3.2 million in overtime; by 2023, that number had climbed to $10.7 million.
Overtime pay has also caused total pay to swell, catapulting SVP employees to the top of the city’s salaries. Of the top 50 Santa Clara salaries in 2023, the city paid 29 of them to SVP employees, including the 12 highest.
SVP has 17 employees that, in 2023, earned $400,000 or more, topping out at $729.858. Rewinding to 2015, the top SVP employee earned just $327,919.
For comparison, nearby public utilities in Palo Alto and Alameda have no employees that earn that much.
Salaries do not include benefits.
Palo Alto, which, according to recent Census data, has a population of 65,000, paid $100,000 or more in benefits to 51 utility employees. On the other hand, Santa Clara, a city with a population of 132,000, paid that much to 37 employees. Alameda, a city of 78,000, had no employees in 2023 who earned $100,000 or more in benefits contributions.
One SVP employee, Steve Hance, listed in 2023 as a “temporary employee,” earned $228,685 in benefits while collecting just $162,373 in salary, according to Transparent California. Hance has since become SVP’s senior electric division manager, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Palo Alto’s power company employed 259 people in 2023 and still only paid $34.6 million in salaries. Meanwhile, Alameda employed 88 people the same year and paid a comparatively meager $11.3 million.
Given these figures, at an average of $215,654, Santa Clara pays its utility workers the highest salary among the three. This is roughly $82,000 per employee more than Palo Alto’s average of $133,590, and roughly $87,000 more than Alameda’s average of $128,409.
In addition to an average of $70,417 in benefits contributions, in 2023, Santa Clara shelled out $737,708 in “lump sum” payments and another $1.2 million in “other pay” to SVP employees.
Assuming SVP’s new employees only earn the average salary, adding 12 employees in 2024 means ratepayers will be on the hook for another $2.6 million in 2025. But given SVP’s explosion of top-tier salaries in recent years, that number is likely to be much higher.
Contact David Alexander at d.todd.alexander@gmail.com
