Jack Bog started a discussion about the $1.6 million salary reportedly paid by Portland Teachers Credit Union to its president, Cliff Dias. One reader asked if Mr. Dias's salary is in range with that of presidents of other similar organizations. PTCU has about 1,200 600 (? see below) employees and $1.9 billion in assets and operates 11 offices.
Here's a comparison with what two local banks pay their chief executives.
West Coast Bancorp, the holding company for West Coast Bank, pays its chief executive about $630,000 per year, and has awarded him restricted stock and other compensation totaling about $550,000 for the last three years, for an average compensation of about $810,000 per year, not all in cash. West Coast Bancorp has about $1.8 billion in assets, employs about 700 persons, and operates 52 bank branches. West Coast's compensation committee acknowledged that its president's salary was in the top 25% of the range for the industry (adjusting for size of bank) but believed that his performance made him worth it to the company.
Umpqua Bank and its holding company parent have $4.9 billion in assets, and operate 92 bank branches and 19 stock brokerage offices. Umpqua employs 1,400 persons. Unpqua paid its chief executive about $750,000 in total compensation in 2004 (including non-cash compensation).
The numbers for West Coast and Umpqua are no great secret; both companies have to report them to their shareholders and to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Both companies also link to this information on their websites. I'm not a member of PTCU and I don't know Mr. Dias, but if I were a member I would be interested to hear the board's explanation of why they've chosen to pay their president roughly twice what Umpqua and West Coast pay.
UPDATE: I had assumed without checking that PTCU has about 1,200 employees as suggested by a commenter on Professor Bogdanski's blog, but PTCU itself said four years ago that it had about 350 employees, at a time when it had about $1 billion in assets. I couldn't find more recent information so I'm surmising that it's added employees in rough proportion to its growth in assets.
