Barbara Hansen made $114,815 in 2010 as general manager of Detroit Transportation Corporation. DTC exists to operate the Detroit People Mover, the municipal rail system that serves downtown Detroit.

Hansen also received a $14,696 pension contribution made by her employer last year. It is a benefit DTC employees get that far exceeds the private sector. The DTC contributes 12.8 percent of W-2 wages for employees’ pensions, more than double the payment made to a typical private sector employee with a retirement benefit.

“That’s not where you want to be,” said Rick Dreyfuss, a pension expert and adjunct scholar at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. “That wouldn’t be sustainable in the long term.”

In 2010 the DTC contributed $517,852 to employee pension plans for 81 employees, according to documents received in a Freedom of Information Act request. Had the DTC contributions been more in line with the private sector, the transit system could have saved $250,000.

The DTC’s outsized pension contributions are part of a $5.7 billion-a-year gap between what private sector and public sector employees receive in benefits.

A 2010 study done by the Mackinac Center compared public employee retirement benefit costs to private sector employers. It used a survey of 24 large Michigan companies with a combined total of more than 600,000 salaried employees. The average employer retirement contribution for those private sector employees was just over six percent.  The Mackinac Center study also notes that typical Fortune 100 workers covered only by a defined-contribution “401k” type retirement plan receive company contributions of 5.77 percent of pay for their retirement funds.

According to 2009 data provided to the Federal Transit Administration, the People Mover required a $6.2 million operating subsidy from Detroit taxpayers and another $4.3 million from the state of Michigan for a total operating cost tax subsidy of 81 percent. Fares from riders contributed just 7 percent of the People Mover’s operating costs.

The operating expense to move the average rider one mile on the People Mover was $4.28. The People Mover operates a single line in downtown Detroit that is less than 3 miles long.

For comparison, fares from users of the Chicago Transit Authority’s rail system and buses paid 39 percent of the total operating costs in 2009. Moving the average rider one mile on the CTA’s rail lines required 38 cents.

The Detroit Department of Transportation operates buses within the city – many of which ride directly underneath the People Mover’s single track. Fare revenues amounted to 16 percent of DDOT operating costs in 2009. DDOT’s cost to move one passenger one mile was 82 cents.

The Detroit Public Schools could be faced with a staffing dilemma in a couple of years if steps are not taken to reduce the number of teachers employed by the district. If projections of dwindling student counts are accurate, the district could soon have 1,800 more teachers than it needs, with the annual bill to pay them costing in the range of $100 million.

Detroit Public Schools had 5,029 full-time teachers and 88,774 students in 2009-10, according to the Michigan Department of Education. But DPS officials estimate that there will be 58,517 students enrolled in 2014. This would mean that the district would have lost 61 percent of its student enrollment since 2003-04 when it had 150,000 students.

Measured by how similarly-sized American school districts are staffed, this would leave DPS 57 percent overstaffed with teachers. School districts with student enrollments close to Detroit’s projected 58,500 have about 1,800 fewer teachers than DPS currently has. In 2008-09, there were four schools in the country with student enrollment between 57,000 and 59,000. Those districts averaged 3,212 full-time equivalency teaching positions. 

• The Tucson Unified District in Tucson, Arizona, had 57,391 pupils and 3,352 full-time teacher positions.

• The Santa Ana Unified district in Santa Ana, California had 57,439 students and 2,579 teachers.

• The Garland Independent School District in Garland, Texas, had 57,510 students and 3,785 teachers.

• The Douglas County School District in Castle Rock, Colorado, had 58,723 students and 3,133 teachers.

The most recent ranking of school district financial data by the Michigan Department of Education is for 2008-09. It reports that the avereage teacher salary at the Detroit Public Schools was $71,031.

At this average salary, employing those 1,800 teachers will cost the district nearly $128 million extra each year.