In Wayne County, it can pay to retire

It turns out Turkia Mullin’s $200,000 “severance” check is only one of dozens of potentially controversial separation payments made to Wayne County administrators this year.

About 40 employees — high-ranking appointees of County Executive Robert Ficano’s among them — received up to 24 weeks of their salaried pay in addition to payouts of their unused sick and vacation time when they retired or left earlier this year, says Matthew Schenk, Ficano’s chief of staff.

As many as 20 of them have returned to the county on separate contracts, collecting both pensions and wages funded by taxpayers, he confirms. This at a time when union workers have taken 20 percent pay cuts during the last two years, although the cuts were reduced to 10 percent last week.

 Schenk spoke to Metro Times and other media after appearing today at a Wayne County Commission meeting where he discussed the Mullin payment and the ongoing internal review of how it occurred. Commissioners said they convened the special committee because of public outcry about Mullin and their own questions about county contracts.

Schenk said he could not put a dollar value on the roughly 40 other separation payments. He was also unable to put a value on Mullin’s unused sick and vacation time payments, a question commissioners have specifically asked.

“That’s part of the internal review,” Schenk said.

It came to light in recent weeks that Mullin received the $200,000 severance payment when she voluntarily left her job as the county’s economic development director to take a job with the airport, another county entity. After first saying she deserved the money, she then announced she would return the funds.

She’s not alone

A review of records obtained by Metro Times finds payments to other county employees who retired or left jobs could also total multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Those unused sick leave/vacation payouts and the up-to-24-weeks-of-salary payments are guaranteed as part of the existing “executive benefit plan,” a several-page document that covers employment provisions of high-level, at-will employees in the county’s executive branch.

But certain terms of the plan only covered such employees of county officials elected in November 2010 — Ficano and Sheriff Benny Napoleon — and granted the up-to-24-week payments to those who left between Nov. 1 of last year and April 1 of this year. Per the benefit agreement, if they quit or retired in that five-month window, they received a “lump sum payment at the time of separation equal to two weeks of wages for each year of service, not to exceed (24) twenty-four weeks.”

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