Through a series of Freedom of Information requests starting in April of 2011, I obtained a good deal of information on the compensation of City of Lansing employees. In the first request, I asked for the following for all employees who were on the payroll in 2010:
That information was received as a computer file in text form. Here it is exactly as received. I loaded the file into Microsoft Excel and spent hours arranging the data, trying to come up with helpful ways to present it. Links to those presentations are below. Here is the original file as converted to Excel, before any of my manipulations.
2010 Wages
I also calculated average salaries and earnings by position for the Police and Fire departments. Contracts and Benefit Descriptions
Concessions negotiated with unions were announced June 28, 2011. Articles on the concessions appeared in the Lansing State Journal on June 29 and August 9, 2011. Union contracts for cities and counties all over Michigan can be found here on the Mackinac Center’s website. Pensions For pension details for some recent City of Lansing retirees, click here. The City has 2 separate retirement systems, the Police and Fire Retirement System and the Employees Retirement System (ERS). Membership in the Police and Fire Retirement System is restricted to Fire Department employees who hold the rank of firefighter or higher and Police Department employees who hold the rank of patrolman or higher. A description of the Police and Fire system can be found in this summary on the City's website and in section B of the actuarial valuation for the Police and Fire system. The Employees Retirement System includes these groups: Teamsters, Exempt, District Court, Executive Pay Plan, Police 911, and UAW. Elected officials are excluded, but they are in a defined contribution plan to which the City contributes an amount equal to 6% of gross salary. A description of the Employees Retirement System can be found in this summary on the City's website and in section B of the actuarial valuation for ERS. Pensions are calculated by multiplying FAC times service (in years) times a "multiplier". FAC is short for "final average compensation". For City employees, FAC is the annual average of the highest consecutive 24 months in the last 10 years. Police and firefighters can retire at any age with 25 years of service, and the multiplier is a whopping 3.2%, more than double the 1.5% for state employees. Michigan state police also can retire after 25 years, but instead of calculating pension by multiplying years of service times FAC times a multiplier, they simply get 60% of FAC. Lansing's public safety workers get 80% of FAC (.032 x 25 = .80). That means their pensions are 33.3% higher than state police pensions. State police, however, don't contribute to their pension system, while Lansing firefighters contribute 7.58%, police supervisors contribute 8.5%, and police non-supervisors contribute 9.52%. And although Lansing public safety pensions increase by $525 a year compared to $500 for state police pensions, Lansing's increases don't start until age 60, while the increases for state police start within 2 years of retirement. The life expectancy of a male who reaches age 50 is 81.6, which means that if a Lansing public safety worker retires at age 50, he will receive a pension for 31.6 years - 6.6 years longer than he worked. I calculated life expectancy at age 50 at this Social Security Administration site, using the current month for birth month, the 1st for birth day, and 1962 for birth year. The multiplier for ERS varies depending on employee group and hire date:
While the Police and Fire System has the highest multiplier at 3.2%, ERS offers the earliest eligibility. Except for UAW members, employees hired before 10/1/1990 can retire when age and service equals 65. For example, if you were hired at age 25, you could retire at age 45 (20 years of service + age 45 = 65). Or if you were hired at age 20, you could retire at 42½ (22½ years of service + age 42½ = 65). If you are UAW or you were hired after 10/1/1990, you can retire at age 50 with 25 years of service. And anyone can retire at age 58 with 8 years of service. Employees in either system can reduce their retirement eligibility age by purchasing up to 5 years of service. City employees contribute a percentage of earnings to the retirement system. The percentages vary by employee group, as shown in this document provided by the City. For pension details for some recent City of Lansing retirees, click here. |
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