Lockdowns are now a part of an official state of Michigan plan for future pandemics.

One page of the plan from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services lists several state responses. These include: “cancelling mass gatherings of more than 10 people” and “limit unnecessary movement in the community/shelter-in-place.” The updated plan was released in December, and it has gone largely unnoticed.

The plan differs from advice given by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which in its latest guidelines, does not recommend shelter-in-place orders in response to a pandemic. Instead, the agency recommends voluntary home isolation and quarantine for those who may have been infected or exposed to someone infected.

While the CDC does recommend school closures and cancelling or postponing large gatherings, these are reserved only for severe or extreme pandemics. The latest plan from the state health department, by contrast, makes no distinctions for a pandemic’s severity and so seem to apply equally to all of them.

Lynn Sutfin, spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, released a statement about the plan. (Note that “NPIs” include shelter-in-place orders.) It reads as follows:

“According to the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness and Advancing Innovation Act, all states are required to have a plan for pandemics. Like all plans, they are guiding resources, meant to be adjusted as needed based on the response. It is an annex to our MDHHS Emergency Operations Plan, as dictated in the Michigan Emergency Management Plan, per the Michigan Emergency Management Act, PA 390 of 1976.”

“NPIs [Non-pharmaceutical interventions] have been included in previous pandemic plans, particularly Pandemic Influenza, and are based off of CDC guidance. The NPIs in the CDC MMWR from 2017 formed the basis of our COVID response. Again that article was published in 2017 and used as a guidance document in developing plans and recommendations.”

“Since the beginning of COVID, CDC has made additional recommendations including NPIs based on the transmission of COVID, burden of disease, severity of illness, and populations impacted. The state of Michigan has used these updated guidelines to respond throughout the COVID pandemic.”

The union pay scale for a teacher in the Troy School District tops out at $91,750.

But according to district records, the highest paid teacher had a gross pay of $116,115. That’s $24,365 more than the highest salary offered in the collective bargaining agreement between the district and the local teachers union.

The difference exists because there are many ways in Michigan’s public sector to make far more money than the base pay specified in union contracts.

In the city of Westland, one police officer took home $221,331 in 2020. He was allowed to cash in $129,661 in unused sick and compensation time he had banked in previous years.

While these examples exceed the norm, the practices they illustrate are commonplace across the state, with municipal employees often collecting extra money beyond their base salary.

In April 2020, early in the coronavirus pandemic, the University of Michigan announced it would freeze its employees’ base salaries. But the word “freeze” did not mean employees couldn’t receive pay increases.

The Mackinac Center for Public Policy submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to discover gross pay collected by U-M employees in a particular department.

The university refused to comply, claiming that disclosing salary information outside of base pay would be an invasion of an employee’s personal privacy, even though salaries generally come from taxpayer dollars.

U-M stated: “Your appeal has been carefully considered and is denied for the reasons stated in Ms. Sellinger’s response of Tuesday, February 2, 2021, specifically, the records are exempt from disclosure pursuant to MCL 14.243(1)(a) (sic), which exempts from disclosure ‘[i]nformation of a personal nature if public disclosure of the information would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of an individual’s privacy.’”

The Mackinac Center for Public Policy sued U-M, and the case is pending. It argues that the university's claims go against the law and cites a series of Michigan case law precedents supporting this. The lawsuit is one of seven the limited-government think tank filed as government bodies narrow the flow of information available to the public through open records laws.