TVA’s Bill JohnsonThe new head of the Tennessee Valley Authority was paid nearly 50 percent more than his predecessor even though he was on the job only nine months of the year and has vowed to cut the agency’s overall payroll.
TVA said in a regulatory filing Monday it paid its chief executive, Bill Johnson, more than $5.9 million from when he began his job in January through the end of the fiscal year in September. Johnson’s predecessor, Tom Kilgore, was paid just under $4.03 million in his last full year on the job at TVA before retiring at the end of 2012.
Although Johnson is the highest paid federal government employee in the country, his pay this year was still 13 percent below the industry average for utility CEOs. Compensation consultants Towers Watson said the average head of a comparable size investor-owned utility was paid nearly $6.8 million in total compensation in 2012.
Johnson’s pay at TVA also was only a fraction of what he made in his previous job. The 59-year-old attorney was paid a severance of $44.4 million after three days leading Duke Energy, which bought out Johnson’s old firm, Progress Energy, last year.
The TVA Act prescribes that the federal utility pay competitive levels to private industry. In its year-end financial report released Monday, the TVA board said Johnson met all of his initial performance goals to qualify for year-end bonuses.