Tonight’s City Council meeting is scheduled to provide early Christmas presents for two lucky recipients…at the taxpayers’ expense, of course.

One recipient is John’s Landscaping, which has provided weekly grass maintenance for City-owned medians and cul-de-sacs for the past two years.  According to the Agenda Cover Memorandum of Public Works Director Wayne Zingsheim, the contract between the City and John’s cotained “an optional one-year extension” which is being exercised for $45,552.

For no good reason we can ascertain, however, that contract wasn’t attached to the memorandum – so we can’t tell whether the option for that one-year extension belonged to the City or to John’s – although it’s our experience that most such contracts like this give the option to the service recipient (i.e., the City) rather than the service provider.

We have no beef with the services performed by John’s. Our beef is with the fact that the amount of the contract and the nature of the services normally require competitive bidding. Consequently, we have to question whether Zingsheim is exercising the City’s “option” so as to end-run the bidding requirement.  And by not attaching the contract to his memo, it looks like Wayne might be trying to hide that end-run from both the Council and the public.

Not good.

The second recipient of early Christmas cheer is City Mgr. Jim Hock, whose new contract is scheduled for approval.  Section I of that contract purports to make Hock’s employment “at will” – meaning it can be terminated by the City at any time for any reason, or no reason at all.  But the very next section of that contract (Section II) turns around and gives Hock a 28-month fixed term of employment, from January 1, 2011 through April 30, 2013. 

So much for “at will” employment, unless we’re talking about the “will” of Mr. Hock.

Under this new contract, Hock keeps his $165,000 base salary, his $5,000/yr pay-down of the $350,000 interest-free mortgage the City gave him, the value of the mortgage interest payments ($10,000-15,000/yr?) he does not have to make under the interest-free loan, his City car (along with insurance, maintenance and gasoline), and 4-plus weeks of vacation.  He also gets some amount of “Deferred Compensation,” although we can’t tell if it is $833.34 or $1,541.27 per month because both numbers appear under the “Category 2” compensation provision of Section III.

If Hock gets all this compensation, he will be one of the higher paid (8th of 17) city managers in this area based on a survey Hock himself did – but only after we added in some of his “special” comp and benefits that he conveniently left out, making it appear that he is undercompensated v. his peers.  And it’s a better deal than CMs in much bigger communities like Evanston and Arlington Heights are getting.

So why is Mr. Hock so special?  We don’t know, because the “Mayor’s Executive Committee” of the City Council – the chairmen of the four standing Council committees, meaning Alds. Allegretti, Bach, DiPietro and Wsol – didn’t provide any kind of “cover memorandum” with the draft contract they negotiated, explaining why they think Hock deserves such a deal.

But perhaps the most objectionable aspect of this contract is Section VII, which ensures that if Hock is involuntarily terminated, even for poor performance or such egregious “cause” as acts of dishonesty or moral turpitude, he gets a minimum of six (6) months of severance, including one additional year for each year of service up to twelve (12) months.  Which means that if this contract is signed and Hock is involuntarily terminated the following day, he will get eight (8) months of severance – $110,000.

That’s $110,000 that the City will have to pay out in addition to whatever it has to pay Hock’s replacement.

We don’t begrudge Mr. Hock fair compensation for services rendered.  But giving him this sweet of a deal for more than two years just doesn’t seem irresponsible, it is irresponsible – especially where: (a) his comp appears to exceed that of most of his peers and most of the residents paying for his lucrative package; (b) the vast majority of Park Ridge residents don’t have anywhere close to that kind of job security and severance benefits; and (c) we can’t think of one exceptional thing he has accomplished since coming here from Michigan.

To the contrary, some of his most notable “achievements” – his proposed “balanced budget” last year that was $200,000+ in deficit, his windfall severance giveaways (to Kim Uhlig, Carrie Davis and Aggie Stempniak) that exceeded his expenditure authority, and his recent endorsement of a $6 million+ cop shop renovation/addition – are things that would come a lot closer to grounds for termination than for a new 28-month contract.

But that’s the way public employment operates in Illinois, as well as in our sleepy little town of Park Ridge.  And that’s why Illinois is broke, and Park Ridge is sliding in that direction.

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