We selected 25 contracts from municipalities throughout Michigan for our review.[*] These contracts were selected from a broad cross section of municipalities, primarily based on geographic diversity and population size. Three of the contracts reviewed were for cities with a population over 100,000 people, 10 were for cities with populations between 50,000 and 100,000, and 12 were for cities with populations under 50,000. Contracts were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act or downloaded directly from a city’s website, if available.
Given the differences and ambiguities in contractual language, there were some terms that were difficult to classify in a binary way. Thus, rather than limit our analysis to whether a contract definitively contained a term, we added a category for when it was unclear whether the relevant language fell within one of the examined categories or when the language only partially matched the categories being reviewed.
We reviewed contracts for seven problematic policies commonly found in police collective bargaining agreements:
[*] The agreements reviewed were from: Bay City, Clinton Township, Dearborn Heights (officers and command), Eastpointe (officers and command), Grand Rapids, Jackson (officers and command), Kalamazoo, Madison Heights, Marquette, Midland, Novi (officers and command), Portage, Royal Oak, Saginaw, Taylor, Traverse City (patrol and sergeants), Troy (officers and command), West Bloomfield and Wyoming. Copies of these contracts can be found at https://www.mackinac.org/30978.