Thomas J. May, in a letter to state Attorney General Martha Coakley, disclosed Wednesday that he earned nearly $3.8 million in his last three months as chief executive of NStar, before the Boston utility merged with Northeast Utilities last year and May assumed leadership of the combined company.
Those earnings, combined with the $4.2 million May earned at Northeast Utilities after the April 2012 merger, would bring May’s compensation last year to about $8 million — more than $1 million less than he earned in 2011 running the smaller NStar. Northeast Utilities had earlier refused to disclose May’s NStar earnings because the utility no longer exists as a separate public company and the Securities and Exchange Commission does not require such reporting.
Comments
How much is too much? My humble opinion, Mr. May's compensation is obscene. Shame on those who have oversight within Nstar and Northeast Utilities. Shame on state regulators who believe that this compensation is "reasonable". I have the vision of Mr. May as a pig feeding at a trough filled with money eating as much as his can while the state regulators are standing outside the pig pen praising the fat and plump the pig.
In the letter, May said he did not receive any “special bonus payments in cash, deferred income, or stock in relation to the merger.” If it's not special, then he should give it back. I just had a rate increase. Now I know where that came from. On another note, here is one of the competitors for green electricity that is available to all nstar and national grid customers. You can ask your electric company to get your electicity from wind or solar power instead of coal and other fossil fuels. It's cheaper with Mass Energy. http://www.massenergy.org/renewable-energy
This is a crime. Thank you Matprtha Coakley for bringing us the truth. Now please give me one reason why the 1% shouldn't have increased taxes.
I can't help but wonder why there is no outcry over the salaries of athletes and entertainers, yet when a head of a corporation makes signigficantly less than those people he is considered greedy and overpaid.
Because this gentleman is the director of a monopolistic and necessary public utility, and his compensation is linked to whether the little old lady next door will spend the winter shivering in the dark, that's why. I don't have to watch the Kardashians or Tom Brady, but boy do I need my heat and electricity.
Good point martdec. While executive compensation has gone to the extreme, and boards haven't been doing their job while feeding at the same trough as executives, if you've ever run a business before you know that they don't run themselves. Even in a virtual monopoly like NStar, the CEO has to lead the company and bring in the right management team to run the business effectively.
$8 million for May does seem extreme but, as martdec says, there's no outcry for the crazy money entertainers, including athletes, make. Personally, I'd prefer to overpay for someone who impacts my, and the "little old lady next door", lives than to see a no-talent tv star like Kardashian making twice that much for providing nothing of value.
Thanks to Martha Coakley for challenging the big boys. Job well done! Now, why do we all simply accept this flood of money as business as usual? The money has to come from some place! Check your pockets...
I would love to hear what you folks think WOULD be appropriate pay for running an organization the size of Nstar or Northeast? This witch hunt is part of the class warfare that will cost this country dearly.
Fact: the top 10% of earners in the USA earn 43% of the total wages and pay 71% of all the federal taxes. The May's pay more than their fair share. The Coakly's of this country just like to scratch that ignorant itch you all have to want to blame your day to day challenges on those who have been more sucessfull.
Keep it up and future generations will suffer for your shortsights. Shame on Martha Coakley for this selfish, self serving, grandstanding, pandering bull s---- !!!
This is the kind of rant that is the basis of the Republicans grasp on power. If the writer isn't in the 1%, he's fooling himself that he'll get there one day.
I agree with your greater point but I don't feel that Coakley did anything wrong by asking NStar to report May's compensation for the last quarter before the merger. Being a virtual monopoly, NStar's executive compensation should be transparent to its customers. If it were a private company I'd be in full agreement with you.
Executives deserve to be compensated for the skills, talents and experience they bring to an organization. Running a company is no easy task but 99% of the population will never understand that since they'll never been in that position. I don't think people are jealous, they just don't understand the magnitude of what most CEOs are responsible for. Whether they deserve the level of compensation that's commonplace today can be debated. Personally I think boards have gone too far in what they award.
The General Manager of a municipal utility in Massachusetts earns $100,000 to $150,000 per year.
Last year, NStar charged 23% more than the average Massachusetts municipal utility for the same electricity (see http://www.massmunichoice.org/)
More on municipal utilities in today's New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/14/business/energy-environment/cities-weigh-taking-electricity-business-from-private-utilities.html
Patrick Mehr, Massachusetts Alliance for Municipal Electric Choice
Good info. Very enlightening.
This amounts to larceny from the users who fund this enterprise. AG Coakley is to be praised for bringing this outrage to light. No surprise he was unwilling to reveal this grand theft. Now he should return this largesse to those he has gouged. This shameless greed must be checked and stopped!
If there turns out to be no footnote to this "disclosure" of amounts well beyond $3.8 million and/or accelerated stock/deferred compensation/incentive/bonus vesting or something else for Tom May when the full proxy statement is filed with the SEC, Hub Man will happily donate $20 to the Good Neighbour Energy Fund. I hope Globe and other journalists keep reporting on this informed by a rebuttable hypothesis that NU ordered up a "quick and dirty data dump" to be obscured by Pope Francis's election.
If Martha Coaply believes that Mays earns too much and is thereby cheating the rate payers and a lower pay would grant them some relif, she should also investigate the Union pay scale. I suspect there is a greater potential for relief than going after one person. This excessive pay thing cuts both ways.