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The House Office Building in Lansing, where lawmakers and their staff members work.

(Emily Lawler | MLive.com)

LANSING, MI -- The Michigan House of Representatives in June stopped publishing a monthly list of legislative staffers, their titles and salaries online.

That list has been replaced with a more general salary list that includes titles and salary levels but no names. Representative salaries are also listed.

Asked what prompted the change Gideon D'Assandro, a spokesperson for House Speaker Kevin Cotter, R-Mt. Pleasant, said the listing was causing problems.

"The short answer is that posting people's private financial information on the web caused problems for our staff," D'Assandro said.

"We found very few people really used the list of specific salaries for individual staffers, except for prospective employers who wanted to poach our staff and lowball them while doing it. It ended up hurting a lot of staffers trying to get their careers started and also created a sometimes difficult professional environment for people who worked here," D'Assandro said.

The House started issuing the list of staffers and their salaries in early 2011 after individual lawmakers -- former Rep. Tom McMillin and now-U.S. Rep. Justin Amash, both Republicans -- started posting the financial information from their offices online.

The Mackinac Center, a free-market think tank based in Midland, requested the information before it was available online and posted it on its own website. Mackinac Center Policy Analyst Jarrett Skorup said it was disappointing to see the full list of names, titles and salaries disappear.

"We know what our lawmakers make but we should be knowing what their employees and the people who actually work for them make, particularly when you have a political environment where people are constantly switching jobs," Skorup said.

He said it was helpful to see legislative staff who might have political side jobs and also could help illuminate joint offices such as the one former Reps. Todd Courser and Cindy Gamrat were running.

But D'Assandro said the previous information -- names, salaries and titles -- would still be available upon request from the House Business Office.

"Yes, just like always. And that's a key point -- it is all still completely available to the public at any time. Nothing has been made inaccessible. People just need to ask for it now; that's the only difference," D'Assandro said.

MLive requested the information from the House and Senate business offices. The Senate Business Office does not put any information regarding staff salaries online.

Both the House Business Office and the Senate Business Office do release financial information under House and Senate rules. Neither the House nor Senate Business Office considers itself subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

The act subjects a "public body" to FOIA. Legislators are not listed specifically as a public body, and a 1986 Attorney General opinion from former Attorney General Frank Kelley states that "the legislative intent in enacting FOIA was to exclude a state legislator from the definition of "public body."

Neither the act nor the opinion addresses whether the House Business Office or Senate Business Office are subject to FOIA. Sen. Vincent Gregory, D-Detroit, requested a new opinion on whether the Senate Business Office was subject to FOIA last year, but Attorney General Bill Schuette declined to issue one.

In a 2015 report from the Center for Public Integrity Michigan ranked as the least transparent state in the nation, in part due to lawmakers not being subject to freedom of information laws.

Emily Lawler is a Capitol reporter on MLive's statewide Impact Team. You can reach her at elawler@mlive.com, subscribe to her on Facebook or follow her on Twitter: @emilyjanelawler.