Con Edison's Leaders Get Special Bonuses for 2012 Last year was undoubtedly a challenging one for Consolidated Edison. There were heat waves and storms, a monthlong lockout of its unionized workers and the devastating effects of Hurricane Sandy. Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times Looking north near Union Square on Oct. 30, 2012, during a power failure from Hurricane Sandy. Kevin M. Burke, Con Edison's chief executive. Locked-out union workers outside Consolidated Edison's offices in July. Its leaders got more than $600,000 in extra bonuses. The response to the hurricane from Con Edison and other utilities led Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to appoint a commission to investigate "the failure of utility performance" last year and to threaten to revoke their franchises. But the utility's directors had a much different appraisal: They gave Con Ed's top executives more than $600,000 in extra bonuses for "exemplary" performance in 2012. The bonuses illustrate how wide the gap was between the public perception of how Con Ed performed last year and the positive self-image flowing through the company's headquarters near Union Square in Manhattan. The chairman of the compensation committee of the company's board of directors said he believed that "most people" thought Con Ed had managed well last year. "In our judgment, the company performed in exemplary fashion," the committee chairman, George Campbell Jr., said. About 1.1 million of Con Edison's customers lost power because of Hurricane Sandy, including more than 230,000 in Manhattan whose electricity went off after a substation near the East River flooded. It took the company four days to restore most of the power lost in the city but more than 10 days in parts of its suburban territory in Westchester, Rockland and Orange Counties. The discretionary payouts came on top of the annual bonuses the executives received. Kevin M. Burke, the company's chairman and chief executive, got an additional $315,000, taking his total pay for the year to $7.4 million, the company's annual proxy statement shows. Mr. Campbell, a former president of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, has been a director since 2000. He declined to discuss how the directors arrived at their decision to give an additional 20 percent in bonus money to the senior executives. He said the reasoning was "spelled out in great detail" in the proxy statement. But the 93-page document includes just two brief mentions of the extra payouts for "guiding Con Edison of New York through significant challenges" last year. "These challenges included a series of extreme weather events including heat waves, a nor'easter and Superstorm Sandy, the most destructive storm in the history of the company's service area, and a monthlong work stoppage," it says. The bonuses stood in stark contrast to how the top officials of the Long Island Power Authority were treated after Hurricane Sandy; under intense pressure from Mr. Cuomo, several LIPA officials, including its chairman, Howard E. Steinberg, resigned late last year. "In a sense, Con Ed is blessed that LIPA did so poorly," said James T. Slevin, a vice president of Local 1-2 of the Utility Workers Union of America. Mr. Cuomo; the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn; and other elected officials said the bonuses were premature - if they were deserved at all. "Ratepayers should not have to pay a single penny of any bonuses Con Ed is awarding its senior executives," the governor said through a spokesman, Matt Wing. Frankly, the shareholders may want to wait until the investigation by the Moreland Commission finishes its independent assessment of Con Ed's performance during Superstorm Sandy. In the less-than-intuitive way that utilities account for their spending, expenses come either from rate-paying customers, who supply most of the companies" revenue, or from shareholders. State regulators prohibit companies from charging bonuses and other variable pay to the ratepayers. Mr. Cuomo was not the company's sole critic; Ms. Quinn and other elected officials faulted Con Edison for not having been properly prepared for the hurricane, as well as for taking the unusual step of locking about 8,000 of the company's unionized workers out of their jobs during a contract dispute. On Thursday, Ms. Quinn responded to questions about the payouts by saying: "A fair bonus for a job well done on the response to Sandy is one thing, but rewarding themselves based on the lockout is an outrage. These bonuses are excessive, unreasonable and an insult to the rate-paying public. Con Edison is seeking a $400 million increase in the rates its customers pay annually. But Ms. Quinn said, "New Yorkers should not be asked to shoulder a rate increase when top executives are paying themselves these extraordinary sums of money." Con Edison's executive-pay practices had already earned the company low marks from monitors of corporate boards. GMI Ratings gave the company a grade of "D," citing it for, among other flaws, having over half of its directors on the board for more than 10 years and three of them for two decades.