Dearborn city officials say a recent online story about the 2011 salaries of City of Dearborn employees is inaccurate and issued a release to share the extensive checks and balances regarding compensation outlined in Dearborn’s City Charter.

The Mackinac Center for Public Policy recently posted a story reporting that Dearborn’s top city administrators saw lucrative pay increases while many lower-paid Dearborn employees took pay cuts in 2011.  According to the report, while Mayor John B. O’Reilly’s salary stayed relatively the same — “his gross income increased by $500 in 2011 from the previous year, seven top administrations saw their gross income increase by 8 percent to 12.8 percent from 2010 to 2011.”  See story HERE.

In a release issued Thursday,  Dearborn officials say the City Charter gives the Mayor authority to appoint a chief labor negotiator, who negotiates with unions on the administration’s behalf to determine annual salary adjustments for fulltime city employees. Negotiated settlements must then be approved by the City Council.

Under the City Charter, the Mayor does not have authority to give annual raises to people in appointed positions.

Instead, the City Charter specifies in Section 6.8 that people in appointed positions may receive an average of up to the same annual increases and decreases negotiated with city unions and approved by the City Council.

People in appointed positions wait until multiple union contracts are settled when the average of the annua increases can be determined, city officials explained.

According to the city, appointed employees had not seen an annual salary increase since 2007. Annual salaries for appointed employees stayed the same in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

In 2011, with the resolution of union contracts covering 2008 and 2009, general employees, as well as people in appointed positions, received retroactive pay for those years. This occurred in a single budget year, according to the city press release.

The union settlements meant that from 2007 to 2011, employees’ salaries increased a total of about 3 percent for that period, and therefore so did appointed salaries. There is no salary increase in place for 2012, the city press release said.

However, Dearborn officials say the Mackinac Center’s inaccurate report implied that appointed positions had received double-digit increases in their annual salary in just one year from 2010 to 2011.

The inaccurate report purposely implied that gross earnings and salaries are the same, Dearborn officials said. In reality, gross earnings include other significant factors, like the retroactive payments in 2011.

The city explains that gross earnings in any given year also can include longevity payments to employees serving 10 years or longer, and factors that can vary from year to year, such as overtime for qualified employees, the choice to cash in paid time off (PTO) days, and minor payments, like mileage.

To clarify what the inaccurate online report should have listed as the 2010 and 2011 annual salaries, consider an example of one of the appointed positions featured in that story. Dearborn provided the information below:

The City Charter allows the Mayor, with Council approval, to set the salaries for appointed positions only once at the beginning of each elected term. It is a checks and balance provision that protects the taxpayers and doesn’t make department head salaries a controversial issue, the city states in the release.

According to the city, the last two opportunities to set department head salaries were in 2006 when the late Mayor Guido was in office, and in 2010 after Mayor O’Reilly was elected. However, due to the faltering economy, both Mayors declined to recommend one time increases for department heads as they began their new terms.