2019 BWL employee wages...and some questions

August 14, 2020

Thank you, David Price.

Mr. Price is chairman of the Lansing Board of Water and Light. After upholding BWL's denial of my FOIA request for 2019 payroll information in July, he reconsidered and asked the BWL to provide a report that includes much of the information I requested, in electronic format. I received the file August 6. Here is the accompanying letter.

The file lists 693 employees. I've sorted it in several sequences:

Name
RA and Job
Salary
TotSal
OT-Prems-AdtlPay
IVP

I had some questions about the file and I put them in a letter to Mr. Price. Here is the August 13 email response.

Mr. Harry,

As you know, the Freedom of Information Act provides a mechanism for access to public records. The BWL has provided the records you requested in accordance with the Act and its obligations have therefore been satisfied.

That said, the three Spreadsheet captions with meanings that are not self-evident stand for: Column F: RA (Responsible Area); Column I: OT-Prems-AdtlPay (Overtime-Premiums-Additional Pay); and Column J: IVP (Individual Variable Pay).

As to your assertion that your email messages are not reaching me or the BWL, I cannot speculate as the reason, but I can assure you the BWL is not blocking receipt of emails from you.

Thank you,

M. Denise Griffin, Corporate Secretary on behalf of and with permission of David Price, BWL Board of Commissioners’ Chairperson

A couple of my questions went unanswered. I'd said I'd determined that TotSal is the sum of Salary, OT-Prems-AdtlPay and IVP. If Salary is annual pay rate, TotSal would seem to be a meaningless figure, since it would not reflect actual pay for the year. An example of a case where Salary would not reflect actual pay would be a new hire who started mid-year or an employee who terminated during the year. Price didn't touch on that in his response.

Since the employee with the lowest TotSal was $48,925 - same as his Salary - I suspected that the file excluded employees who were hired or terminated in 2019. I said I would like them to be included along with hire and termination dates for all employees. That got no response, either.

So thanks again, Mr. Price, for providing an electronic file for free rather than a pile of paper for $1,527.12. But you are still not being open with the people of Lansing. You will do no more than required by state law (the Freedom of Information Act). Are you saying that it is none of our business? Or are you hiding something?

There have been two previous stories on my quest to get BWL salary information:

7/24/2020

FOIA does not require a public body to answer questions

7/31/2020

Beware of the Board of Water and Light

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