On December 15th, I wrote “AATA Treasurer Ted Annis Pushes Increased Fiscal Transparency.” In that piece, I outlined the changes Annis wants to see the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority (AATA) make in order to provide the public with a more robust variety of data about the taxpayer-funded entity’s finances. One of those changes was to publish online the names, titles, and compensation of all AATA personnel beginning in January 2010 with 2009 payroll information. The Chair of AATA’s Board, Paul Ajegba was quoted in a December 17th AnnArbor.com post as saying this in response to Annis’s proposal to make salary data public and posted to AATA’s web site: “Board Chairman Paul Ajegba said he had concerns that posting salary information on the Web site would be ‘not good for morale.’ He said the agency already is transparent because all of that information is available through the Freedom of Information Act.”
First Ward Council member Sandi Smith has a long lost brother, it would appear. The FOIA twins. Both believe that Ann Arbor citizens can damn well file Freedom of Information Act requests for information if they damn well want to know anything about how their hundreds of millions of tax dollars are spent.
For the moment, let’s give Ajegba a pass for the FOIA remark. Let’s zero in on the fact that he believes if AATA employees could find salary data, we might have to give them all scrips for anti-depressants—well not all of them. Ajegba’s comment can mean only one thing: there are salary gaps at AATA that the Chair of the Board would like to keep hidden from view. You remember salary gaps, right? They were those discrepancies in pay between women and men, minorities and whites, that were prevalent from the 1940s-1970s. Same job. Same title. Same qualifications. Women were paid 50 cents on the dollar. Blacks, about the same. White men, after all, had families to support. Women were just hanging around the office water coolers waiting to earn their M.R.S. degrees.
Thanks the corner of Gott (in Himmel) and Miller that Ann Arbor is a bastion of liberality, passionate progressive values and social equality. Give me the tax returns of the Ann Arbor Ecology Center, headed by Mayor Hieftje’s BFF Mike Garfield or Avalon Housing, headed by Jayne Miller’s new BFF Michael Apple, and I’ll bet you my “I Like Ike” button that if the salary information from those non-profits became available to the public, that information might not be good for worker morale at those places either.
Ok, in a minute I’m going to tell you the employer in Ann Arbor where there is the largest salary gap between men and women who hold the same job titles and qualifications. It’s actually an employer in the industry in the United States with one of the longest-standing and largest persistent salary gaps. However, let’s get back to the Eisenhower presidency, crinoline, Caddys with big fins, and Paul Ajegba. If releasing salary information to the public would be “bad for morale” at AATA, maybe what needs to happen is that the AATA Board needs to rectify the salary gaps instead of keeping the gaps a secret. No, that’s logical. Sorry. Sexism and racism are not logical. Pay parity for women and men, minorities and whites? I must be a Commie.
Well, I have to tell you that I don’t have the tax returns for Avalon Housing or The Ecology Center. Yet. I do, however, have the 2008 tax returns for Ann Arbor SPARK (download the 990 here). You remember SPARK, right? The economic development boondoggle where the welfare daddies exaggerate to keep the public money flowing into their coffers. Since I am just that kinda person, (and know that you might be, as well) I looked at the salary data for those manly men and working girls employed by CEO Michael Finney at Ann Arbor SPARK.
It was like having Old Fashioneds with Dwight D. and Mamie. In 2008, for every $1 dollar earned by SPARK’s managing director, a man, the woman with the same title was paid $.54 cents. In fact of the five employees who draw paychecks higher than $100K, three men took 75 percent ($544,930) of the money allocated for salaries, and the two girls (both managing directors) split the remaining 25 percent ($208,552). CEO Michael Finney’s friends on the compensation committee paid him $258,423 in 2008, or 34 percent of the total $753,482 allocated for salaries for staff earning over 100K. Then, in the middle of the worst recession in 70 years, those same pals on the SPARK compensation committee gave Finney a $30,000 bonus. Taxpayers are a generous bunch, especially when they have no idea how their money is being spent. Michael Finney, however, is well aware of the salary gap, because he signed the tax return and, one has to imagine, read it.
As for Finney’s bonus, it couldn’t be linked to revenue gains, because Ann Arbor SPARK revenues dropped from $7.3 million in 2007 to $6.6 million in 2008. Compensation for staff, however, increased from $1.2 million in 2007 to $1.7 million in 2008. Nice work if you can get taxpayers to foot the bill for it.
Hiding behind the skirts of FOIA, as AATA’s Ajegba suggests his Board do to keep employees and the public ignorant, is nothing short of perpetuating a system that allows for the exploitation of workers. Eisenhower’s not president, and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 was signed by President Barack Obama on January 29, 2009. Michael Finney could use some training in equal pay for equal work, and the girls at Ann Arbor SPARK should take a minute and read about equal pay lawsuits.
If AATA is guilty of the same Old Boy pay differentials, perhaps labor lawyer and AATA Board member David Nacht could look forward to rustling up some business from among the disgruntled AATA staff. In the meantime, Paul Ajegba’s ”concerns” that posting salary information on the Web site would be ‘not good for morale’ should be taken by the other Board members, AATA staff and taxpayers alike that while low morale is not illegal, pay discrimination is, and hiding it is not an option because AATA’s money comes from taxpayers; taxpayers have a right to know and so do the employees.
Oh, and I promised to tell you the Ann Arbor employer with the largest persistent pay gap? It’s the University of Michigan. As an industry, higher education has one of the most pronounced and longest standing pay gaps between men and women and between whites and minorities in the United States.
Imagine what Miss Mary Sue C. would earn if she were a man. At least U of M publishes its salary data each year so everyone can see the ugly truth about racism and sexism and the art of avoiding pay equity. Click here to view the University of Michigan’s 2008 salary spreadsheet.
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A2Politico thank you very much for these pieces about SPARK and the AATA. It is absolutely ridiculous that Michael Finney was given a $30K bonus. It’s a scandal that he earns $250K at all. It’s obvious that SPARK is in the business of giving away tax money without bothering to provide anything but fantasy reports that make it appear as tough the group create thousands of jobs. Does anyone there even track the actual number of job created?
As for the AATA Board Chair and morale, the fact that AATA is funded by the public doesn’t give him the luxury to hold up attempts to make financial information more transparent or more easily accessed by the people who are footing the bills.
Good for Ted Annis for bringing this up, and let’s hope the AATA Board and new Executive Director implement the suggestions one and all.
Comment by A2Dem — December 17, 2009 @ 2:19 pm
A2P, could you please post the individual salary data for the SPARK folks, indicating their genders but not their names?
Comment by David Cahill — December 17, 2009 @ 3:48 pm
I’ve linked to the 990 in the piece. You can download the file as a .pdf and read the return.
Comment by A2 Politico — December 17, 2009 @ 4:33 pm
Thanks. This shows a disturbing pattern of gender difference in compensation for what seems to be the same job.
Comment by David Cahill — December 18, 2009 @ 8:58 am
While your at it, publishing salaries at the U (they used to be published annually in the Michigan Daily) would be a wake up call to anyone who believes there are no pay discrepancies between men and women.
Comment by UMich91 — December 18, 2009 @ 9:48 am
I don’t think the old-fashioned was Eisenhower’s drink, but I’m having trouble finding out what was. In the Army he drank a lot of Coke. He did have a drink with dinner most days but sources don’t say what it was.
Comment by Jim Rees — December 18, 2009 @ 9:55 am
@6 Jim, Mamie’s favorite drink was a bourbon Old Fashioned. She was a BIG tippler, but the Press kept it quiet. As for Ike, I’ve read that he was a scotch rocks guy, but only in moderation.
Comment by A2 Politico — December 18, 2009 @ 10:07 am
Re [5] Salaries at the U are still on The Michigan Daily site in a searchable database. Not sure how to post a link her but I will try… Michigan salary Supplement
Comment by Tom Hollyer — December 18, 2009 @ 10:07 am
@5 I have salary spreadsheets for U of M going back to 2003, the better to see how the Mayor and his wife’s salaries have risen faster than the other lecturers in their categories….I have linked to the 2008 U of M salary spreadsheet in the piece above. It’s an Excel spreadsheet, so have fun. A great game is to sort by department and appointment title and watch where the women and minorities fall in the salary list. I must reiterate that if you got salary data from most any university in the United States, you would see similar trends. According to data from the Department of Education, in the U.S., 79 percent of tenure-track faculty are white, and of that group, 64.8 percent are white men. Tenured faculty in the United States? 80 percent are white men.
Comment by A2 Politico — December 18, 2009 @ 10:20 am
Who writes your headlines? This one is a prize winner. Have you checked on Concentrate Media? They have a “Mad Men” theme going. (http://concentratemedia.com/blogs/posts/Chad%20Wiebesick1084.aspx) The blogger gives Spark a nice mention.
Mad Men is a great television show, but as you show pretty cleverly aspiring to go back to the 50’s is not a benefit to women or minorities. One imagines however that at Spark the good old boys are still living in the past along with those mad men from Mad Men.
Salary gaps at AATA? I dare you to FOIA the AATA salary data you trouble-maker. Better still, I dare AATA to give it to you and let you go through it like you went through Spark’s 990.
Anyone from AATA reading this blog?
Lilly Ledbetter should be invited to give a workshop at Spark!
Comment by Yale89 — December 18, 2009 @ 10:37 am
Thanks for this post. There are so many other groups that our tax dollars could support. I checked out the AA.com series you recommended in another post, and it’s clear to me that our town could be doing plenty more for the social service agencies, including giving them all of the tax money that goes to Spark.
AATA pay data should be public, as should pay data of city employees. If they want to use tax dollars, the board members and city staff have to be prepared to have their pay be public information. Thanks for the U of M spreadsheet. I work there and found the information useful.
Comment by DGB — December 21, 2009 @ 10:26 pm