Public employee salaries are public records.
In Belfast, getting one apparently takes months.
Early this year, a requester asked for a record showing City Manager Erin Herbig’s salary and total compensation. That led to a months-long odyssey in document dumps, shifting explanations, fee demands and misdirection — until the Maine Attorney General’s Office got involved.
It started on January 21, with a request for Herbig’s compensation, contract, amendments and Council authorizations. The requester later provided this publication with the correspondence documenting what happened.
Belfast responded broadly with large batches of lengthy manager’s reports and other public materials. On February 17 alone, the City sent 24 attachments — a year of manager’s reports — in twelve emails.
The City attempted to send them starting on February 9, but struggled because several emails bounced because they exceeded Gmail’s file size limits.
It took eight days to send them. Then Belfast essentially said: sorry, time’s up.
Under Maine’s Freedom of Access Act, the first two hours of staff time spent on requests are free. Belfast said those two hours had already been consumed by the broad production and any further work would require payment.
It didn’t matter that Belfast had filled that time by sending a giant file dump of documents the requester had not actually asked for.
In its later explanation to the Attorney General’s Office, the City said it had “already exceeded two hours of staff time on this portion of the original request” and therefore could not justify spending additional time without compensation.
At some point in Herbig’s tenure, all manager’s reports, minutes and agendas covering 2011 through 2023 that had been available on the City website were removed.
Belfast restored the files it transmitted and another year’s worth to the City website and told the requester, essentially, that the rest of what she needed was there — now that late-2021 through 2023 had been restored. The requester had not asked for two years of manager’s reports, but Belfast had decided that the requester searching through them was how the request would be fulfilled.
The requested information was supposedly somewhere in all that material — there were just a few thousand pages to sift through to find it.
Except it turns out Herbig’s actual salary wasn’t in there.
On February 18, one day after the last file dump, the requester clarified and narrowed the request to one existing electronic record showing Herbig’s current base salary and total annual compensation as actually paid.
The requester said a payroll-system record, compensation report, compensation schedule, employment agreement or equivalent would do — and no new record needed to be created.
On February 26, Belfast responded that the requested records were already somewhere among the documents it had compiled. The requester could continue searching through them or pay another $25 for an hour of staff time to locate them.
The requester narrowed the ask again to one existing payroll-system record or equivalent — if it exists, send it. If it doesn’t, say so.
On March 17, Belfast said fulfilling even that request would require two hours to search and compile personnel records and another two hours for City Attorney review and redaction. The City demanded $100 in advance.
On April 7, Belfast repeated the four-hour estimate and $100 demand. The requester then asked whether Belfast used a computerized payroll system and, if so, why producing or printing a record showing one employee’s compensation required hours of staff time.
Maine law expressly contemplates clarification of records requests, and the Maine Supreme Judicial Court has said further efforts to clarify a misunderstood request “are to be encouraged before judicial remedies are invoked.” The Court has also held that deliberately impeding a valid request may support a finding of bad faith.
The correspondence provided to this publication contains no City answer.
In April, the requester asked Maine’s Public Access Ombudsman for assistance.
When Belfast began its FY26-27 budget hearings in May, City Administration’s salary information was handled differently from most other departments.
The City Manager was listed as “Contracted.” None of the other four employees in that office had salaries listed either, while ordinary employees elsewhere were routinely identified by name, pay range, step and compensation.
The requester had separately sought the City’s salary schedules and been told they were somewhere among the previously compiled records, and that finding them would require additional staff time and payment.
During the budget hearings, Councilor Neal Harkness asked for the salary schedules for newly elected Councilor Dan Miller.
Herbig immediately knew where they were — she said, on the spot, that the schedules had been approved in December and that she would get them over to him.
On May 6, Belfast sent this publication a formal “Guidelines for Communications with the City” letter complaining about the “volume, frequency, and repetitive nature” of its communications. I replied that the letter was nonsensical and ran afoul of long-established law. The City then had its attorney send a follow-up response that identified no legal authority supporting the City’s position and attempted to justify its actions.
I had submitted three FOAA requests as a journalist over four months. Two of the requests were fulfilled by the City publicly posting the requested documents on its website.
The City’s letter, attorney’s response and its communications with the Attorney General’s Office were building a narrative: the public is the burden. Residents ask too much, journalists consume too much staff time, and hard working City Hall is left struggling to keep up.
In both cases, the record shows something else that readers can see for themselves: Belfast creates the burden itself — by turning simple requests into sprawling administrative exercises, then pointing to the unnecessary work it performed as evidence that the requester was the problem.
In May, the Attorney General’s Office began testing Belfast’s explanation.
In explaining its handling of the request to Public Access Ombudsman Brenda Kielty, Belfast supplied a chronology of the entire affair — the requests, responses, failed email transmissions, repeated document-production emails and fee demands.
The City closed its explanation this way:
“A tremendous amount of time and energy has been spent attempting to satisfy the Requestor within FOAA guidelines.”
That much was indisputable — I read all the emails. Belfast indeed had spent a tremendous amount of time and energy.
What remained baffling was why so much of it had been necessary to answer such a simple request.
On May 19, Public Access Ombudsman Brenda Kielty wrote to the City. If one document would satisfy the compensation request, she said, “it is hard to see how four hours are required.”
Belfast maintained that the information had already been provided or could be found in Manager’s Reports and salary-and-wage schedules.
Kielty humored them and went looking.
On May 21, she wrote that she had pulled up the December 16, 2025 Manager’s Report and found the salary-and-wage chart Belfast had referenced:
“However, I could not find any reference to salary/wage for individual positions. Have I missed something?”
Belfast explained that the City Manager’s contracts contained references to applicable lines of the salary-and-wage chart. The requester pointed out that the employment agreement they had located dated to 2022, established an initial range and step, contemplated later step increases and salary reviews, and still did not establish what Herbig was actually being paid in 2026.
On June 24, Kielty’s language became considerably less diplomatic:
“I do not see the basis for the City to not produce a record that reflects the requested information, which has been asked for clearly and repeatedly. Public employee compensation is not confidential and should not be hidden from view by sending a requestor on a treasure hunt.”
Then she adds, as its own paragraph:
“I feel that this has gone on too long.”
On July 6, Belfast finally disclosed Herbig’s salary.
The requester pointed out that an email stating the number was an answer, not the public record that had been requested.
172 days after the initial request, on July 13, Belfast finally produced the paystub.
Keep in mind, everyone involved worked very hard.
The requester clarified and reclarified the request. City staff searched and sent. The City Attorney became involved. Emails went back and forth for months. The Maine Attorney General’s Office got involved — the Public Access Ombudsman went looking herself.
Just shy of six months later, all of that work finally produced the answer:
$124,176.
The requester had also asked for Herbig’s total compensation.
Herbig’s 2022 employment agreement sets her initial salary at Range 14, Step 8, but also provides for later step increases and salary reviews. It ran through March 8, 2025 and automatically renews for successive three-year terms unless notice of nonrenewal is given. The agreement calls for an annual performance evaluation and salary review around renewal. In other words, the 2022 contract established a starting point and was not a record of Herbig’s actual 2026 compensation.
Beyond salary, Herbig’s 2022 agreement provides a $3,850 annual car allowance for use of her personal vehicle on City business. Travel outside a 50-mile radius of Belfast is additionally reimbursed at the City mileage rate. The agreement also requires a City retirement contribution of at least 8 percent of base pay, or the percentage provided to other administrative employees if higher.
Herbig’s June 25 paystub shows a $511.03 employer-paid “E/MATCH” on $4,776 in gross salary, which is 10.7 percent. Annualized, that is about $13,287. The paystub does not identify exactly what that employer match represents, but it appears to be a retirement plan contribution.
Those three known components — salary, vehicle allowance and employer match — bring Herbig’s annualized compensation to $141,313, before health insurance and other employer-paid benefits.
That is more than twice Belfast’s $67,679 median household income — for one employee.
And for anyone at City Hall convinced that this publication has some personal axe to grind over the City Manager’s compensation, there is an awkward fact. In more than 175 articles, I never requested Herbig’s salary or contract. I never asked anyone else to request it, encouraged it or coordinated it.
The compensation became a story because somebody else asked for an ordinary piece of public information and Belfast made obtaining it extraordinary.
There is nothing extraordinary about asking a government for payroll records. Governments routinely publish the same information themselves.
At some point, this stops being a clerical problem.
Look at the ridiculous amount of work Belfast created for itself over one incredibly simple request.
And after all that?
Belfast produced a single paystub.
This post was originally published by The Belfast, Maine Conversation. To receive regular coverage from the Belfast, Maine Conversation, sign up for a free subscription here.