Analysis and commentary by Education Policy Director Michael Van Beek figured prominently into media coverage of teacher salaries and health care recently.
His work on the Michigan School District Health Insurance database was cited in The Bay City Times in a story about Bay City Public Schools administrators agreeing to contribute to the cost of their own health insurance premiums. Teachers in the district contribute nothing toward that cost. The same is true for teachers in the East Lansing schools, according to a commentary in the Lansing State Journal. Teachers in both districts are in contract negotiations. Current contracts for those and every other district in Michigan can be found here.
More than any other state, Michiganders identify with the Great Lakes. They are essential to the state's tourism industry and provide extensive recreational opportunities to boaters, fisherman, and those who stroll the many miles of pristine beaches. It seems hard to believe that anyone would want to put the Great Lakes at risk for the unproven development of off-shore wind energy.
Teacher salaries in Michigan rank first in the nation when compared against relative state wealth, The Bay City Times reported. This despite claims by the Michigan Education Association that school personnel have made $1 billion in concessions over the past three years.
Personnel costs, primarily for salaries, insurance and retirement benefits, eat up 85 percent of the Port Huron Area School District's budget, according to this contract analysis by Mike Van Beek, education policy director, that appeared in today's Port Huron Times Herald.
The Macomb Daily reported recently that teachers in Utica Community Schools agreed to $6 million in employee concessions. On the surface, this appears to be a major step towards helping the district balance its budget. In fact, these concessions won't help all that much.
By Jack McHugh
"If the Michigan Legislature is going to interfere to deprive shareholders of the option to remove directors of public companies domiciled in Michigan whenever their boards are challenged, why would investors allocate capital in a state that deprives them of their rights?"
Press Release from Biglari Holdings, as reported by MIRS News
From MichiganVotes.org:
2010 House Bill 6128 (Require MDOT advise and support DRIC "community representatives")
Introduced by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D) on May 4, 2010, to require the Michigan Department of Transportation to give advice and support to "community representatives" (presumably from labor, environmental, and faith-based organizations, although the term is not defined) in negotiating "community benefit agreements" with the private developer of a new Detroit River bridge (who also would be an MDOT contractor). The bill does not actually require the developer to conclude such an agreement, however.
A new paper from the National Institute on Retirement Security observes that state workers receive an average of $22.17 an hour in wages, local workers receive $22.15 an hour, and private sector workers receive $20.57 an hour. But even so, they argue that public-sector employees receive wages that are 11 percent to 12 percent below private-sector averages. They do this by adjusting wage rates to account for demographic differences between the two groups, such as sex, race and educational attainment.
Every week, MichiganVotes.org sends a report to newspapers and TV stations showing how just the state legislators in each publication's service area voted on the most important and interesting bills and amendments of the past seven days. The version shown here instead contains a link to the complete roll call tally in either the House or Senate. To find out who your state senator is and how to contact him or her go here; for state representatives go here.
A new study by Johns Hopkins University's Center for Data-Driven Reform in Education casts more doubts on the commonly held belief that expanding state-funded preschool programs is a "can't miss" venture. This new report found that only three of 28 programs studied showed "strong evidence of effectiveness" once their participants finished kindergarten.
The New York Times has addressed an issue Labor Policy Director Paul Kersey first wrote about more than a month ago — that of the union's demands for an end to concessions despite being the beneficiary of GM and Chrysler bankruptcy restructuring.
"The bankruptcies were structured to protect the union interests at the expense of the creditors and investors," Kersey told The Times. "So I don't see there being a whole lot of public support for them pursuing a restoration of the concessions."
A film studio that has experienced problems in the past is in danger of being evicted from city-owned property in Allen Park due to lease problems, according to The Detroit News.
Unity Studios could be forced to leave by June 7 if the issue is not resolved.
Today's editorial in The Detroit News is titled "Reforming education retirement benefits has turned into money grab" and both cites and draws heavily from this Michigan Capitol Confidential article by Jack McHugh, senior legislative analyst.
The Mackinac Center Legal Foundation and the Michigan Press Association jointly filed an amicus brief at the Michigan Supreme Court seeking to protect the Freedom of Information Act, according to the Livingston Daily Press & Argus.
"The Freedom of Information Act provides Michigan residents with an affordable and effective way to monitor the actions of public officials," Patrick J. Wright, director of the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation, said, according to the Livingston Daily. "When the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled that public employee communications, such as e-mails on a government e-mail system, can be barred from public access simply by declaring the communications 'personal,' FOIA was largely gutted."
Teachers in Utica Community Schools, the second biggest district in the state, agreed to about $6 million in contract concessions Monday, including a salary freeze and paying more toward the cost of their own health insurance premiums, according to the Macomb Daily.
(Editor's note: A version of this article appeared in the May 9, 2010, Macomb Daily.)
About 70 percent of the Utica Community Schools' annual $260 million budget goes toward paying employees covered by its current collective bargaining agreement for teachers and a few other employee groups. (The budget figure does not include debt service payments on past construction projects or other capital expenses.) Yet few people know what is in this or other school labor contracts. This analysis of Utica's is part of an ongoing series.
A new report from the Kalamazoo-based Upjohn Institute found that millions of dollars in tax credits given away by the Michigan Economic Growth Authority created just 18,000 jobs over 11 years, according to The Detroit News. Michigan continues to lead the nation in unemployment.
Anyone who is concerned about protecting the Great Lakes from diversions should be worried when the state Legislature has to resort to a non-binding House Concurrent Resolution as a last line of defense against large scale diversions from Lake Michigan. House Concurrent Resolution 49, introduced by Rep. Rebekah Warren, D-Ann Arbor, urges the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Council to scrutinize carefully the proposed the 18.5 million gallon per day diversion at Waukesha, Wis. The resolution passed the House with a slightly modified version passing in the Senate.
Generous unemployment benefits and extensions could be causing people to illegally turn down job offers, according to The Detroit News.
The extension "is the most generous safety net we've ever offered nationally," Senior Economist David Littmann told The News. Littmann also noted that about 15 percent of Michigan's economy is "underground," and involves trading services and bartering that is not reported to the government.
New school fiscal data from 2008-2009 are available from the Michigan Department of Education, including average teacher salaries. The Michigan Education Association is claiming that school employees have made $1 billion worth of concessions over the last three years, but this latest report shows average teacher salaries continuing to grow.
There are good reasons why so many Americans are disgusted by the current state of politics, and a story in today's MichiganCapitolConfidential.com captures many of them. It describes progress in the Legislature of a modest school employee pension reform proposed by Gov. Jennifer Granholm. Here's the gist: Most Democratic and many Republican lawmakers are self-interestedly serving the system, not the people.
News reports often refer to the larger figure in the headline as the amount of underfunding in Michigan state and school employee pension funds.
However, the figure includes not just pension liabilities, but also future retiree health benefits, which according to a recent Michigan Supreme Court case are not considered an enforceable obligation on the state and its taxpayers. When the amount not set aside for these non-obligations is removed, the actual retirement benefit obligation pre-funding shortfall is $11.5 billion.
The Royal Oak Daily Tribune and the Macomb Daily both editorialize today against Senate Bill 1285, introduced by Sen. Bruce Patterson, R-Canton, which would mandate that newspaper publishers charge a deposit on each paper sold equal to 50 percent of the paper's cost and use the money to create recycling programs and redemption centers. Any unclaimed deposit money would be turned over to the state and put in the school aid fund.
Senior economist David Littmann told The Oakland Press that Thursday's large stock market drop is an indication the United States could face a "very, very serious secondary recession."
Rep. Tom McMillin, R-Rochester Hills, has introduced a resolution that would withdraw Michigan from the Midwestern Greenhouse Gas Reduction Accord. Similar resolutions will be introduced by legislators in Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota. Gov. Jennifer Granholm joined the governors of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa and Kansas in signing the accord, which calls for a 20 percent reduction of CO2 emissions below 2005 levels by 2020 and would require extensive economic pain with little to no environmental gain.
