Editor's note: Texas Watchdog is a non-profit journalism group based in Houston, whose mission is to promote government transparency. Click here for the database.

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El Paso County had 70 employees making $100,000 or more in 2007 -- many of them lawyers and doctors, county records show.

Meanwhile, 71 employees -- all of them in the county sheriff's department -- made enough overtime that year that they boosted their normal yearly pay by a third or more, a Texas Watchdog analysis of county pay data shows. Seventeen employees boosted their pay by 50 percent or more, and a couple nearly doubled their regular pay by working overtime.

An analysis by Texas Watchdog of county salary data shows that the most highly paid employee in county government in 2007 was the county medical examiner, Dr. Paul Shrode, who was paid $225,805.86.

With its story, Texas Watchdog is also publishing today a searchable database of salary information of county workers who were paid $85,000 or more in calendar year 2007. The $85,000 figure -- the same as that used by The El Paso Times in its recent analysis of El Paso city workers' pay records -- is roughly in line with the median value of an owner-occupied home in El Paso County, $87,600, as calculated most recently by the U.S. Census Bureau.

As anyone who remembers seeing "Quincy, M.D.," knows, medical examiners are the people government entrusts to perform autopsies and find out how dead people have met their ends. They are real, live doctors -- pathologists, to be precise -- and, as anyone who's paid a doctor bill lately can attest, MDs do not work cheap. (The chief medical examiner of Harris County, Luis Arturo Sanchez, was paid $271,142, according to the Houston Chronicle's online county employee salary database.)

As the county's most highly paid worker, Shrode's paycheck is smaller than that of El Paso's most highly paid worker, El Paso Public Service Board chief Ed Archuleta, whose base pay is $250,000 a year, the El Paso Times reported a few weeks ago. (The Times also has a searchable database of city workers' pay.)

Shrode was the subject of some controversy a couple of years ago when he was accused of padding his resume with a false claim that he had a law degree. Media reports at the time said county commissioners pressed him on his credentials but found that a pathologist in Texas is required to be a doctor, and is not required to be a lawyer, and Shrode stayed on.

A spokeswoman for Shrode's office returned a message Wednesday that I had left at her office, but she and I had not been able to connect by the time this story published. When we hear back, we'll update this story.

Following Shrode on the list of the county's most well-paid employees are three top officials in the district attorney's office -- John L. Davis, $154,454; Marcos Lizarraga, $146,322; and George Havlovic, $144,998.

However, they fact that they come in at Nos. 2, 3 and 4 on the list is a glitch -- because their boss really makes more than they do.

El Paso County DA Jaime Esparza actually makes $157,809.99 per year, but most of his pay comes from the state, and just a portion of it is paid by the county, explained Esparza's spokeswoman, Renee Railey. Thus, he shows up in the county pay records as being paid $31,783.21. His state pay is available through Texas Watchdog's searchable database of state employee pay records (click here).

The three assistant DAs are followed in the list by 11 judges -- criminal, civil and probate -- and the public defender at No. 16.

Sheriff's department rakes in OT

The highest paid non-lawyer on the 2007 list appears to be then-Sheriff Leo Samaniego, who ranked at No. 22 on the list, making $134,410.73. Samaniego died in late December 2007 after a battle with cancer after more than two decades on the job. He had announced in mid-September of that year that he would step down from office on Dec. 31, 2007.

The sheriff didn't make a nickel of overtime, but many people in the sheriff's department did.

Of the top 100 county overtime earners -- measuring overtime as a percentage of their regular pay -- only two of them didn't work for the sheriff's department: A juvenile probation detention officer and a pool maintenance technician for the county's rural parks and pools.

The top overtime earner in the county was Juan Cervantes, a sheriff's department detention officer. In addition to his salary of $47,707, he also made $41,833 in overtime -- that's 86 percent of his regular pay -- for a total of $90,387.

Eighty-seven Sheriff's Department employees made 30 percent or more of their regular pay in overtime. Overtime pay for that group alone collectively came to $1,496,048.36. That amount of overtime would pay the flat salary of 48 workers paid the same as the county's most lowly paid detention officer, who made $30,755, Texas Watchdog found.

A public information officer for the sheriff's department referred Texas Watchdog's questions to the county human resources director, who said she wasn't living in El Paso in 2007 but would look into it. Again, when we get an update, we'll update this story.

FURTHER DOWN THE LIST

Some of the more well-known folks in county government didn't rank all that high in Texas Watchdog's analysis.

County Judge Anthony Cobos is at No. 308 on the list, making $70,099.27 in 2007 -- just a few dollars less than a detective for the sheriff's department and less than $100 more than a court reporter. Former County Commissioner Miguel Teran made $60,362.36, ranking at No. 532 on the list; Commissioner Daniel Haggerty and former Commissioner Luis Sarinana made $55,445.07; and Commissioner Veronica Escobar made $53,346.34.

Compared to the overall job outlook in El Paso County, county government jobs pay pretty well. Of the 2,899 county workers paid in 2007, 90 percent of them made more than the county's overall per capita income figure of $15,492. And 73 percent of those jobs paid better than the national per capita income average of $26,178.