New defunding tool: Salaries of Planned Parenthood affiliate CEOs (and how to easily find them)
I was interested to read yesterday that one reason the New Hampshire Executive Council decided to defund Planned Parenthood of Northern New England was due to the exorbitant $250,000 salary made by this supposed nonprofit’s CEO, Steve Trombley (pictured right).
Trombley’s salary is more in the news today. From the Concord Monitor:
[Council member Dan] St. Hilaire said he would also prefer the money go to an organization headquartered in New Hampshire. And Trombley’s $250,000 annual salary is abnormally high compared with other health care groups funded by the council, he said.
Trombley said he was hired by a professional recruiting firm that based his salary on the going rate for similar positions.
“We don’t make money at our health centers,” Trombley said….
That may or may not be true, but the CEO sure does. And Trombley neglected to mention he was hired away from Planned Parenthood of Illinois and that he apparently took a pay cut to move. (As an aside, Pro-Life Action League speculates Trombley was demoted for major screw-ups in Illinois.)
From PP of IL’s 2009 Form 990 (click to enlarge)…
In light of Trombley’s salary, his words of concern for women sound hollow. Quoting NHPR:
And Steve Trombley, the organization’s CEO says, if the funding doesn’t come through, patients like that woman with the change will have to go elsewhere.
“We will not be able to continue to see the more than 15,000 patients we see every year in our New Hampshire locations. In terms of where we would not continue services, we do not know the answer to that yet. But we do know that this will have a devastating and significant effect on a number of women and families in this state.”
But not on Trombley’s salary, I note.
PPNNE’s expenditures are now generally being scrutinized as well. Quoting NHPR again:
Kevin Smith from the conservative advocacy group Cornerstone Action doesn’t buy the claim that Planned Parenthood will have to cut services.
Smith says the organization shouldn’t be spending 28% of its budget on administrative costs, including salaries, advocacy, marketing and fundraising.
“So if they are saying by losing this contract they now can’t help women’s healthcare, that’s just a complete fallacy. It shows they are sacrificing women’s health for their own political power or their own salaries. And that’s just not right.”
Cornerstone further reported on its website:
In their most recent Annual Report from 2009, PPNNE reported that of their $18 million dollars in revenue, $3,126,841 (or 16.9%) was spent on general and administrative costs, public policy advocacy spending was $714,877 (or 3.9%), over $597,000 (or 3.2%) was spent on marketing and communications, while $568,397 (or 3.1%) was spent on fundraising.
As you can see, Planned Parenthood’s financial information is great fodder to push back at its hand-wringing.
And much of this information can be found online. PP annual reports, although puffed up, contain useful info.
And IRS Form 990s can be found at Guidestar.org. That’s where I retrieved Trombley’s salary package while at PP of IL. The 990s are available free at Guidestar after filling out a registration form. (Other information costs $ but not that.) Type in the name of the Planned Parenthood affiliate and do some digging.
[Photo via Nashua Telegraph]
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
Wow Jill you found Dead Babies R Us Steve Trombley with his head still feeding at the PP trough. Good work. So much for all those poor women PP is trying to help. What a joke!!
Steve Trombley, wasn’t he involved in the Aurora PP thing? Yeah, that name rings a bell. Apparently recycled to the North East. ;)
Andy, yep. Read all about his history with the Aurora PP by doing a search on my blog.
Wow! I looked at a few of the 990’s. The CEO salaries are mind boggling. Some were making upwards of 350,000 per year. And they are supposed to be non-profit? Crazy!
PEOPLE! It takes skills and education to run a non-profit. That kind of budgetary responsbility comes with fair compensation. Trombley’s salary might be a tad high, but this is not a good avenue to take when looking to shut down an organization. It just looks like haters hating.
The salary is rather high, considering that PP doesn’t pay its lower-level staffers much.
The problem is that they get ridiculous salaries and then whine that they need my tax money. I have a right to complain about that. If they want to pay them this amount, fine, they just shouldn’t be asking me to help.
Jacqueline, I think this route is highly legitimate and relevant when you consider I’ve brought up the point that abortion = $$ to MANY pro-abortionists, who then insist that they lose money on the deal and remind me that PP is a non-profit.
How much do heads of other nonprofits make? The ones that don’t kill children?
The CEO’s of the largest charities in the USA, Feed the children and United Way make in the mid 200’s, the American Cancer Society Division CEO’s make close to 400,000 each. The CEO of the Red Cross makes close to a Million per year which is infuriating all by itself. Uggg! So, I guess overall the salaries are not that unreasonable but the others don’t kill babies either. I just don’t want to give PP a dime of my money.
PP is number 22 on the list for size so they may be a little high.
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2005/14/Revenue_1.html
It’s interesting to note that the CEO of Catholic Charities, #5 on the list as far as size only makes a little under $150,000 per year.
And the director of Habit For Humanity makes around $180,000 per year, both larger than PP Federation.
“How much do heads of other nonprofits make? The ones that don’t kill children?”
If they don’t get tax payer money, does it even matter?
“Wow! I looked at a few of the 990?s. The CEO salaries are mind boggling. Some were making upwards of 350,000 per year. And they are supposed to be non-profit? Crazy!”
The organization is non-profit. That doesn’t mean its officers work for free. Being an executive of a large, national non-profit isn’t like volunteering at a soup kitchen for a few hours a week; it’s a full-time job that involves real work.
Joan@ I understand that but I don’t want to pay them with my tax money and shouldn’t have to.
People shouldn’t make any money at all to kill children- granted. But that’s not the argument. The spurious argument being made is that these professionals make too much money for working at a non-profit. What people don’t realize is that running a non-profit involves a special set of skills and years of experience- It’s much harder than running a business. I would like to see you guys try to oversee the United Way, Red Cross or even a local affiliate. It takes a minimum of a Master’s degree which often includes taking a substantial debt- debt that has to be paid.
I work as a consultant for non-profits and when I have full-time contracts, my rate nets a six-figure salary. I won’t apologize for it. It’s FAIR. It took me years and tens of thousands in grad school loans to get these skills to do this job and being solely responsible for a multi-million dollar grant is STRESSFUL. Being an abstinence grant, too, there was a political component that weighed heavily on me as well. I won’t apologize for my salary. I have taken substantial pay-cuts to fund pro-life programs, but paying me below what I deserve doesn’t negate our organization’s claim to federal grant money. If we killed babies, that WOULD negate our claim. But my salary is irrelevant. PP’s salaries are irrelevant.
“PP’s salaries are irrelevant.”
No, they aren’t.
Charities are routinely required to spend less than x% on admin in order to get good ratings for bona fide use of funds. It doesn’t matter how wonderfully qualified executive personnel may be, they shouldn’t suck up more than x% of the organization’s total budget.
Jacqueline your point is well taken. Hippie is right too that no matter how qualified a person is, a legitimate charity can’t be spending more than a certain percent on it’s admin costs and still get good ratings. The bigger picture here, to me, is the amount being spent on political advocacy, marketing, admin costs, etc coupled w/ PP admitting that the first thing to go in a belt tightneing environemnt is the very service they claim to exist to provide makes it starkly clear that PP exists for no other purpose than to advance it’s own political power and abortion ideology.
I teach non-profit management to university juniors. Yes, there is a ratio of costs, but this short-sided and old-fashioned way of judging organizations is rapidly being debunked. People are learning that this ratio of direct program costs to indirect costs is problematic because it takes people to deliver social services and fundraising to pay those people. Non-profits are an organism. Every aspect is needed to fulfill its mission.
Even if you harp on these ratios, PP is not violating that standard of administrative costs to program costs. They are also not violating the ratio of fundraising costs to program costs. Actually, since they have all my tax money (and yours), they hire well-educated and highly-skilled people to make sure they meet these standards on paper. If you walked into a tiny CPC with 2 paid staff, where the executive director has a sweet, loving heart but never had any education past high school and has no clue what she’s doing, their paperwork is a mess or non-existent. I had 2 students do an audit/interview for their mid-term paper in my class of a local CPC, and it didn’t have a 990. Those with a 501 (c) anything status by law have to have and present a 990 on request to anyone who asks. They didn’t. This CPC contacted me and asked me to consult with them and help them become compliant, but they are almost too big a mess. I’d rather start from scratch than sort through their shoeboxes of reciepts (given they even have shoeboxes with receipts). My whole life is dedicated to the pro-life movement, but some causes might just be lost. People, regardless of their intentions, if they don’t know how to follow the law should NOT be taking people’s money. Tax-funded organizations are forced to meet these standards, which is why PP does meet these standards.
What I’m saying is that PP is guilty as sin of so many things that can and should be used against them. Salaries ain’t one of them. Going this route just makes us look desperate for anything to pin on them. This takes away from the serious violations where we’ve caught them red-handed. The basis for shutting down PP is not that their staff makes more money than we think they should. The basis should be that the kill and destroy.
It’s not the $, it’s the %, to me. I don’t care *who* you are or *what* you do, I wouldn’t give a dime to a NON-PROFIT that spends more than 10% in it’s administration, and I prefer those who spend more like 6-8%. Now, it that 10% admin. allows them to pay there CEO $25,000 or $1,000,000, I’m okay with that. Given the good charities I am aware of it is not unrealistic to expect them to operate on 10% for administrative services and have the rest of the funds go to whatever cause the non-profit supports (and overhead like rent). I realize others might be comfortable with higher or lower numbers, which is why I don’t agree with the fedeal government mandating tax payments to any non-profit. Non-profits should get their money from those who support their causes (which can absolutely include state voters). That PP, on top of everything else, spends more than a quarter of their intake on administration is just another nail in the coffin, it’s not the coffin itself though (that would be baby-murder).
Jespren,
Your standard is only realistic in VERY LARGE organizations. No community-based organization can spend that little with an office, electricity, phones and someone to run the show. Only when you are super large and can have tons of programs will you be able to only spend 10% in oversight. By your standard, you can’t support a soup kitchen, a homeless shelter or anything that isn’t a federal affiliate (if that!).
Jacqueline, you’ll note I made a point to differentiate rent and other overhead from administrative costs administrative costs are usually reported as salary, marketing, and fundraising. Rent, electric, and other fixed bills are overhead, and, while I certainly check to see how much a charity is spending on that, that would vary depending upon size, area of location, and specifics of a charity. For instance, a church might spend almost all of it’s budget on overhead, especially if they rent their building, while I am familiar with a family store/food pantry that spends nothing on overhead, as even (what little) space they are in is donated by an affiliated church. It’s actually far more likely that smaller organizations will meet my expectations than large ones, because small organizations tend to use part time or volunteer help and advertize cheaply/little. Yet I believe the small, local, primarily volunteer charities do far more ($ for $) than do big conglomerates.
Btw, the largest soup kitchen/homeless shelter in my home area during high school advertized 97 cents on the dollar went directly to buying food or other meal-based necessities (like plates). Everything else was donated or took just 3% of their intake.
“What I’m saying is that PP is guilty as sin of so many things that can and should be used against them.”
So was Al Capone. But they could prove tax evasion, so that is what they used. If the non-abortion family planning providers only spend 10% on admin, and the state can use that criteria to defund PP, I like it. It means abortion is less profitable, so fewer folks are incentivized to promote it. It also serves to reduce their ability to lobby for contracts because they can’t spend too much on non-program activities. There is nothing immoral about preferring service providers who spend less on admin and lobbying the gov’t for abortion and more money from gov’t contracts. It is a shrewd strategy.
I use Charity Navigator to find out information about national charities. My wife has given (she sponsors a child) to CFCA (Christian Foundation for Children and Aging) for about 10 years. Link is here: http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=3502 though I am a member of Charity Navigator so it may not work for you.
Their CEO only makes 100k which is puny compared to most. I used to give to St Jude’s Childrens Research Hospital mostly because I felt they were doing good work. I stopped when I found out how much the CEO and others in charge make (over 400,000) and also the fact that Marlo Thomas (yes, THAT GIRL!) who is in some way connected to it, is a pro abort. I could not believe it, but it is true.
Anyway Charity Navigator is a pretty good site for checking on things about charities. I note that for CFCA 94 percent of the funds go into the program. For comparison sake, at St. Jude it’s only 73 percent.
Hippie, if they were guilty of it, then it would work. They aren’t. It just makes our other accusations of real crimes less credible.
Helpful blog since I’m planning a trip with my ten yr old granddaughter.
Antone, what are you talking about?