It is rumored that Governor-elect Whitmer is thinking about splitting up the 14,000 employee Department of Health and Human Services. Chad Livengood does some good reporting on this in Crain’s Detroit. It is a good piece and worth a read.
He reports that the agency has a 160 page organization chart and the director has an annual salary of $175,000. He reports that there are many Detroit area non profit CEOs with smaller numbers of employees and budgets that make much, much more than that. Same would have to be true of some of west Michigan non profits.
This proposal by Whitmer is very interesting and deserves exploration by her and her policy team. That agency is too big and too diverse. Reorganizing it makes some sense.
I also think the salary issue must be investigated if you are going to attract big talent to run that organization or its replacements. This is a very important agency with life saving functions and it deserves to able to attract the very best talent available.
Interesting to note that I doubt there is a university president in Michigan with equal numbers of employees making that low of a salary. I know there are smaller universities and colleges paying their presidents a lot more salary and they deserve it. But so does a state agency director with huge numbers of employees and budgets.