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Who benefits from Lansing's new city charter? October 20, 2025
Are you excited about the new city charter? Either am I.
The people who are excited are the unions. That is because of this change:
Here is the web page for the Charter Commission. It includes a link to the proposed charter with changes in red.
Under the new charter, when the City selects a bidder for a project or purchase, it will base its decision on who provides the "best value" rather than the lowest price, and that will be determined with a scoring system included in an ordinance passed by City Council in August. Here it is. As I said in my September 21 story, only 40 points out of 100 are for price. The other 60 are for non-monetary criteria. Twelve points are awarded for offering healthcare, retirement plans and prevailing wage.
How a contractor compensates its employees should be of no concern the City of Lansing. Same goes for the preference for using W-2 workers as opposed to 1099 workers.
Another factor worth 8 points is "participation in an apprenticeship program that is registered with the United States Department of Labor (USDOL) Office of Apprenticeship or by a State Apprenticeship Agency recognized by the USDOL Office of Apprenticeship." This one is very important to the unions, and I don't know why. It must some how put non-union contractors at a disadvantage. All of the nine citizens who spoke about the responsible bidder ordinance at the August 25 city council meeting were in favor of the ordinance. All were union members.
We know the unions support the new charter from the flyers we've been receiving in the mail. Example:
In case the "endorsed by" symbols at the bottom are too small for you to read, I've blown them up for you:
The Capitol City Labor Program is the union for Lansing police; IBEW Local 352 is the union for the Board of Water & Light.
The people of Lansing need to look out for themselves rather than the unions. We need to insist on selecting contractors based on who can do the job at the lowest price. To select based on other criteria is unfair to the low bidder and the taxpayers.
This reverence for unions among city leaders is killing us financially. Lansing is over half a billion dollars in debt due to under-funded pensions and retiree health care - all because unions were persuasive in collective bargaining sessions and the City's negotiators were pushovers. (Some were union members themselves). Unions soon realized that retirement benefits were easier to sell than salary increases, partly because it was difficult to estimate the cost and partly because those costs seemed far down the road. They fooled the City into paying police and firefighters to retire rather than work. They could retire at any age with 25 years of service. (In 2011, there was a push to lower the service requirement to 20 years!) The benefit multiplier was 3.2% (compared to 1.5% for state employees). The final average compensation period was a short 2 years. When a retiree died, the spouse could receive half the benefit and there was no reduction in the initial benefit to pay for it. In some cases, pensions exceeded salaries.
Here are some of the firefighters who retired before age 47:
And here are some of the police who retired before age 47:
As you can see, most of them purchased service to get out early, most likely because they were in a hurry to start a new job. For example, Michael Yankowski took a job in November 2019 as Assistant Director of Institutional Ethics and Compliance in MSU's Office of Audit, Risk and Compliance at a salary of $125,000.
(I started compiling all this data on retirements in January 2010 and quit in September 2022.)
Lansing voters: Look out for yourselves. Reject this new charter. If there is anything really good in it, we can amend the current charter through petition drives.
Also, someone needs to find out how much this whole charter revision process has cost us.
Send comments, questions, and tips to stevenrharry@gmail.com or call or text me at 517-730-2638. If you'd like to be notified by email when I post a new story, let me know.
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