An analysis by a conservative advocacy group indicates a more than 70 percent jump in payroll costs at the Maine Turnpike Authority over a twelve-year period. The Maine Heritage Policy Center crunched salary data between 1998 and 2010. Its report comes as a committee that monitors the performance of state government prepares for a hearing on Turnpike Authority operations Friday.

The state Office of Program Evaluation and Government Accountability, or OPEGA, recently did its own review of the Maine Turnpike Authority. Among other things, it discovered wasteful spending on travel and meals, largesse the agency says it's curtailed, and too little competitive bidding on contracts.

One area that seemed--well, normal--was annual growth in employee salaries. But a new study from the Maine Heritage Policy Center appears to call that assumption into question. "We have discovered that the Maine Turnpike Authority's top brass have been rewarding themselves with huge pay raises," says Maine Heritage's CEO Tarren Bragdon.

Bragdon says that in 1998, the total payroll at the Turnpike Authority was roughly $17 million. By 2010, it had climbed to $29 million. Some MTA executives, the report goes on to say, got 123 percent salary raises.

And Sam Adolphson, with Maine Heritage's open government program, says they prospered without ever advancing to new positions. "These increases are even out of line with the high overall increase of MTA payroll and they're way out of line with the private sector increases of 46 percent."

"A lot of the people at the Turnpike have been there for some time, and they've worked their way up the ladder and they're compensated properly," says Scott Tompkins, the MTA's spokesman.

Tompkins doesn't deny there's been a steep climb in compensation at the Authority for executives, toll takers and others. But he says there's a reasonable explanation for it. "When you look at health insurance costs over that time frame, the average is about 8 percent a year that health insurance has gone up," he says.

Critics of the report say it's typical of many produced by so-called think tanks that have ideological leanings. Sam Pizigatti is an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.

"This paper, unfortunately, presents a distorted view of the paychecks going to MTA people," Pizigatti says, "mainly because it confuses and clouds the issue by combining salary and benefits and presenting that total of salary and benefits as if it were what people were receiving in their paychecks--which they're not."

The Maine Turnpike Authority, created in 1941, manages and maintains the 109-mile toll highway from Kittery to Augusta. The Authority is an independent agency that gets its operating funds from revenue bonds and tolls. Its status, as a partially taxpayer-funded organization, has fueled critcism of the MTA and its management, in the wake of the earlier OPEGA report.

Scott Tompkins says the Authority knows it must make improvements. "Our consulting engineer will be putting more of the consulting contracts out to bid for construction inspection, construction management," he says. "And we're tightening the spending policies, in terms of expenses, for travel, meals and purchasing."

Despite the MTA's independence, the Legislature does oversee the Authority's annual spending plan. State lawmakers and MTA management will get a chance to talk about the agency's plans to address its shortcomings at an OPEGA hearing Friday in Augusta.