There will probably be gasps of astonishment that the chief executive of Dudley Council, Andrew Sparke, is paid £166,000 a year, while Mary Fraser, in neighbouring Sandwell gets almost 20 per cent less at £140,000.
But what about Katherine Kerswell, Solihull Council chief executive, bringing up the rear on £127,000, which is £8,000 a year less than Birmingham's education director and social care director earn.
And on the subject of Birmingham, Europe's largest council, Elaine Elkington, the director of housing, gets by on £126,000 and is expected to run efficiently one of the largest public sector housing operations in the country.
Much the same could be said about John McGuigan, Coventry Council's vastly experienced director of city development, who over the past 10 years has led an inspired campaign of urban redevelopment, who is paid £103,000. In the private sector, he'd be earning three or four times as much.
The numbers, of course, are meaningless on their own, unless of course your aim is to denigrate public officials en-masse. My view, based on 32 years experience of writing about local government, is that most senior council officials are better qualified, harder working and more motivated than ever before.
Ten years ago, perhaps, councils could have got away with carrying dead wood. But the introduction of Government targets and the Audit Commission's Comprehensive Performance Assessment has concentrated minds. Local authorities up and down the country are re-organising, laying off time-servers and incompetents, and hiring instead private sector high-flyers.
Birmingham City Council is pushing through a business transformation project that scores of other public bodies are already eyeing enviously. Over a 10-year period as much as £800 million will be saved through better IT and other efficiency programmes, enabling cash to be re-directed toward front line services and to keep council tax bills down.
Cynics may scoff, but the next decade really will see the best performing local authorities move away from profligacy towards unprecedented efficiency.
But you can't buy revolutionary change on the cheap. If anyone really believes running organisations with annual budgets amounting to hundreds of millions of pounds can be undertaken satisfactorily by depressing wages, they are mistaken.