Pruitt most overpaid CEO, again

In case you missed it, most news outlets gave up on actual reporting during the last couple of weeks of 2009 in favor of year-end wrap-ups and the decade-in-whatever lists. Most of that stuff is filler, not really worth the time it takes to phone it in.

But there were a few exceptions. For example, anything appearing in SN&R, and then the Sacramento Business Journal’s 2009 Book of Lists. I love this thing. This is not year-end fluff, but 150-plus pages of serious bidness.

Want to know what was the fastest-growing company in the Sacramento region last year? It was Solar Power Inc., of Roseville, which expanded by 983 percent from 2006 to 2008.

Average monthly rent in Davis? $1,354. West Sacramento? $751. Best place to work (among large companies) according to employee surveys? Paramount Equity Mortgage. Woo-hoo! Cost to join the Del Paso Country Club on Marconi Avenue? A whopping $75,000, but monthly fees are just $575. Indispensable information.

My favorite list is the ranking of the highest-paid executives (among publicly traded companies) in the region. As usual, the top pay spots are lousy with honchos from The McClatchy Co., parent company to The Sacramento Bee. And at the very top of the regional food chain is McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt, the man who can do no wrong. While McClatchy newsrooms were getting brutalized, Pruitt made $2.7 million last year, including salary, stock and other compensation.

It’s nice to know that some things never change. Pruitt has been at the top of the Biz Journal’s list for some time now, in both good times and in bad.

In 2010, McClatchy, like all newspaper companies, is re-examining every aspect of its business. And it expects its workers, those who still have jobs, to do ever more with less. And yet it pays its executives very much like it did in the old days—when newspapers were practically printing money along with the headlines. In December, the company larded Pruitt up with another 450,000 shares of company stock, worth $3.42 a pop. Sure, Pruitt took a 15 percent cut to his base salary last year, earning just $1.1 million in that category. And he didn’t get his usual bonus, either. Things are tough all over.

Compiled from Snog.