While some of its dues-paying members are taking pay freezes, top executives of the Michigan Education Association took salary raises ranging from $13,591 to as high as $48,385 in 2014, according to the financial reports the union recently filed with the U.S. Department of Labor.

Rick Trainor, the MEA’s secretary-treasurer, had the biggest increase. His salary jumped 44 percent from $109,911 to $158,296. Nancy Strachan, the MEA vice president, saw her salary increase 16 percent from $124,603 to $144,700. Steve Cook, the union's president, had his salary increase 11 percent from $182,698 to $203,144. Gretchen Dziadosz, the MEA’s executive director, saw her salary increase 6 percent from $211,267 to $224,858.

The salary increases for the union's top executives come at a time when the MEA is experiencing a loss of membership, an increase in school employee union dues and escalating costs of retirement benefits given to its own employees. As a result, the union's total liabilities have continued to increase; up to $206 million this year.

Many MEA members are taking pay freezes or cuts, largely due to rising costs of the state-run school employee retirement system, and in some cases so their districts can have a balanced budget.

The MEA has similar risings costs – health care costs for its own retirees increased by nearly $21 million in one year. According to the new report, the union's net worth (assets minus liabilities) fell another $22.5 million into the red, now standing at a negative $134.8 million.

The MEA also reported that its membership dropped from 147,659 in 2013 to 142,555 in 2014. But none of that prevented giving large raises to its top executives.

Despite the double-digit percentage increase in salary, Cook’s annual pay isn’t nearly as much as his predecessor, Iris Salters. In 2011, Salters made $235,447 in salary as the president of the MEA. But the MEA had 11,000 plus more members three years ago.

The MEA did not respond to a request for comment.

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MEA Spends More On Salaries, Benefits Than Member Representation

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A House bill has been introduced that would allow local governments to post legal notices on the Internet instead of in hard-copy newspapers by Jan. 1, 2025. The bill is believed to have a good chance of moving in the December lame-duck legislative session.

Under House Bill 5560, local governments would phase-in specified protocols for posting notices online over the next 10 years. These protocols would be more stringent for some kinds of notices than for others.

Newspapers, which are already struggling to compete against Internet sites for advertising dollars, have a great deal at stake concerning the legal notice posting issue. Their main argument against House Bill 5560 is that the integrity of the legal notice posting system could suffer if the hard-copy print requirement ends.

Local governments have been required to post legal notices in hard-copy newspapers for decades. This requirement is costly for taxpayers since they are on the hook to pay the costs to newspapers. However, one of the advantages of a hard-copy posting requirement is that the notices cannot be altered after they have been published.

A concern about having notices posted online, instead of published in hard-copy print, is that over time it could lead to government officials becoming less careful about the accuracy of posted notices. This might occur as a result of the officials knowing that mistakes in notices posted online can be covered up by fixing them even after the notice had already been posted for a period of time.

In such a circumstance, members of the public could read a notice that contains misinformation, act on that misinformation and afterward never know for certain if they’d originally misread the notice or if the notice had originally included misinformation that had later been corrected.

Against this are the arguments that people are increasingly getting most of their information over the Internet and by being allowed to post legal notices online, instead of in hard-copy print, local governments are likely to save taxpayer dollars.

House Bill 5560, sponsored by House Local Government Committee Chair Amanda Price, R-Holland, was introduced May 8, 2014. Price could not be reached for comment.

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Bill Would Bring Public Notice Rule Changes