In the Sunshine: What Escambia County and Pensacola's Elected Officials Actually Earn

The year was 1976. Reubin O'Donovan Askew, a Pensacola kid who shined shoes and sold his mother's pies on the streets of East Hill to help make ends meet, who went on to law school and then to the Florida Governor's mansion, put a question on the state ballot. He called it the Sunshine Amendment. It passed with 78 percent of the vote.

It required public officials to disclose their personal finances. It banned gifts to legislators. It created the Florida Commission on Ethics. Combined with the Government in the Sunshine Law passed a decade earlier in 1967, which opened government meetings to the public, Askew built the transparency architecture that Florida still operates under today.

Askew moved to Pensacola in 1937, attended Pensacola schools, got his start in public life as Assistant County Solicitor for Escambia County in 1956. The city that raised him became the beneficiary of the principles he carried into office. He died in 2014, leaving behind a framework that says, plainly: you have the right to know what your government costs and who is being paid what from your tax dollars.

The Flightline is going to use that framework. This is the first piece in our Let the Sunshine In, a recurring transparency feature that will use Florida's public records laws to report on government pay, spending, contracts, and decisions that affect every person living in this metro area.

What This Database Is, and What It Isn't

The salary search on this page covers every elected and appointed official in the City of Pensacola, Escambia County government, the school district, the Emerald Coast Utilities Authority, and the state legislative and judicial offices that directly represent Escambia County. That is 41 confirmed positions, each with a named person, a title, a salary, a year, and a source document you can click to verify.

It does not include the roughly 10,000 general employees of the county, city, school district, ECUA, and Sheriff's Office. Those records exist, Florida law requires them to be public, and they are accessible through the Escambia County employee wage database, GovSalaries, and other sources linked at the top of this page. The Flightline's confirmed index covers the decision-makers: the people elected or appointed to govern, and what the public pays them to do it.

The Numbers

Start at the top. Sheriff Chip Simmons earns $251,114 in FY2025-26 under the Florida EDR formula. That's the highest elected office salary in Escambia County, higher than the mayor, higher than county commissioners, higher than school board members. It reflects Florida's statutory recognition that the sheriff is a constitutional officer running a full law enforcement agency with hundreds of sworn employees, a jail, and a budget that exceeds $100 million annually.

The county's constitutional officers, sheriff, tax collector, property appraiser, supervisor of elections, clerk of courts, are all paid under Chapter 145 of the Florida Statutes. Their salaries are set by a formula: Escambia County's population size places it in a specific group, and that group has an assigned base salary and annual factor. These are not locally negotiated. Escambia County commissioners have no authority to cut or raise them. The Legislature sets the formula; DMS certifies it annually; EDR publishes it in October. Pam Childers, Gary Peters, Scott Lunsford, and Robert Bender each earn $182,644 this fiscal year from that formula.

County commissioners earn $104,696 each. All five, Stroberger, Kohler, May, Hofberger, and Barry, draw the same figure. That salary has grown roughly 19 percent since FY2020-21, when it was approximately $87,930. The formula adjusts it annually based on the average percentage increase in state career service employee salaries.

City of Pensacola is different. Mayor D.C. Reeves earns $134,000, a salary set by city council ordinance in July 2022, the first raise since 2010. The nine city council members each earn $38,204, tied to the school board formula per a charter amendment effective after the 2024 election. Before that change, council members had earned $13,998 for years, a figure so low it effectively limited who could afford to serve.

How Escambia Compares

Escambia County has a population of approximately 321,000. That places it in the same general tier as Sarasota County (430,000), Alachua County (296,000), and Brevard County (631,000), mid-size Florida counties with similar service demands and operating complexity. Sarasota County commissioners earned $112,580 in FY2025-26. Alachua commissioners, same EDR population formula, earned $98,450 in the most recent available comparison year. Escambia's $104,696 sits between them, appropriate to its population bracket.

The sheriff comparison is more striking. Escambia Sheriff Simmons earns $251,114. That is more than the sheriff in Alachua County ($240,632) and broadly consistent with what the formula produces for counties of Escambia's size and assessed value. For context: the Escambia County Sheriff's Office operates a jail that housed more than 1,200 inmates on any given day in 2024 and employs more than 1,000 people. The sheriff's salary, though large by local standards, is not large for what the office administers.

Where Escambia looks underpaid by comparison is at the legislative level. State Representative Michelle Salzman and Alex Andrade, both of whom represent Escambia districts in Tallahassee, each earn $29,697 per year. That figure has not changed since 2010. It is below the county's median household income of $67,500. It ranks Florida's legislature among the lowest-paid in the country, New York legislators earn $142,000, California legislators $128,000. The argument that Florida runs a "citizen legislature" is accurate in one sense: you genuinely cannot support a family on $29,697 a year. The practical effect is that only the independently wealthy, the retired, or those with sufficiently flexible employers can afford to serve.

The ECUA Question

The Emerald Coast Utilities Authority board is elected, five members, one per county commission district, and paid on the same formula as school board members: $50,299 each in FY2025-26, plus a $200 monthly expense stipend. ECUA serves roughly 250,000 customers, manages water, wastewater, and sanitation for most of Escambia County, and oversees an operating budget exceeding $150 million annually. The board sets rates that directly affect what residents and businesses pay every month for water and garbage pickup. Fifty thousand dollars a year is not a lot of money to govern a utility of that scale. Whether that is appropriate compensation or a structural barrier to attracting experienced oversight is a legitimate question.

What the Median Tells You

Escambia County's median household income is $67,500 (Census ACS 2024). Pensacola's city median is $74,212. The Pensacola metro area averages $27.13 per hour, 17 percent below the national average of $32.66. Against that backdrop, commissioner salaries at $104,696, sheriff salary at $251,114, and superintendent at $210,938 are materially above what most Escambia residents earn. That is expected. Governing complex institutions requires experienced people, and experienced people have market options. The question is not whether officials should be paid more than the median. The question is whether the ratio is defensible and whether the compensation structure attracts and retains the quality of leadership the public needs.

The direct taxpayer cost for all 41 elected and appointed officials in this database runs to approximately $4.3 million annually in base compensation, before benefits, before retirement contributions, before the overhead of running their offices. That figure covers the sheriff at $251,114 through the seven City Council members at $38,204 each. It represents less than half a percent of the combined annual operating budgets of the county, city, and school district, somewhere north of $1.5 billion when you add them together. Viewed that way, the cost of elected leadership is not the issue. The issue is whether that leadership is well-structured, well-compensated relative to the responsibility it carries, and accountable in the ways that justify the investment.

The case for concern is at the bottom of the pay structure. School board members at $50,299 and city council members at $38,204 are governing institutions with thousands of employees and hundreds of millions in annual budgets, for salaries that would not support a family in this market without supplemental income. The 2024 charter amendment that raised council pay from $13,998 to $38,204 was a meaningful step. It is still not a living wage for someone trying to serve without another income source.

Why This Matters

Reubin Askew's argument was that disclosure prevents misdeeds more than it exposes them. The theory is sound: when people know they are visible, they behave differently. Salary transparency is the most basic form of that visibility. If you don't know what your sheriff earns, you can't have an informed opinion about whether that amount is appropriate for what the office does. If you don't know that your state representative earns $29,697, less than a starting county employee, you can't understand the structural bias that puts part-time representation in Tallahassee effectively out of reach for most working people.

This database is a start. The Flightline will update it when EDR publishes new salary figures each October, when council or commission votes change local salaries, and when public records requests surface new information. We will add contract employees and appointed department heads as we obtain and verify their compensation. We will report on the trend, whether Escambia County is paying more or less over time relative to comparable jurisdictions, and what that means for who is willing to serve.

Reubin Askew grew up selling magazines on East Hill to help his mother pay the bills. He went on to reshape how Florida handles the public trust. The least we can do is make sure his home city can see, clearly, what it pays the people who hold that trust today.