There’s a saying that goes: “The way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.”

That’s an apt metaphor for how PublicWatchdog often focuses on the “small things” like City funding of community groups, or whether Park Ridge Senior Services, Inc. deserves a contract with the Park District, or how District 64 can’t run a lunchtime supervision program.  Because if government truly is broken, as so many people think, it got that way incrementally (i.e., one bite at a time); and, therefore, that seems to be the only way it is going to be fixed.

Last week we addressed what some might regard as significant misconduct by three of the top City employees – Fire Chief Mike Zywanski, City Mgr. Jim Hock, and Deputy City Mgr. Julianna Maller – who sat silently during the City Council meeting on May 2 in response to Mayor Dave Schmidt’s simple, straightforward question:  How were the “Ground Rules,” that require the City to keep the details of its negotiations with the firefighters union secret, agreed to?  Implicit in that question is who agreed to those Ground Rules, and the mayor subsequently asked expressly by what authority any City staffer could agree to them.

This apparently was done back in January, without prior mayoral or Council approval and without even letting the mayor or the Council know about it until a few weeks ago.  Despite Chief Z, Hock and Maller all being members of the City’s negotiating team and, presumably, having been present when those Ground Rules were agreed to, not one of them owned up to proposing or agreeing to those Ground Rules.  Instead, Hock claimed that’s the way negotiations were done, and he asked for time to investigate.

But only two weeks later at the May 16 Council meeting, perhaps after those three had some time to figure out their best CYA story, Chief Z obtusely explained how he was the one who proposed and agreed to the Ground Rules.  We’re guessing that Hock and Maller, most likely after consulting with City Attorney Everette “Buzz” Hill, figured that Chief Z, as the “new guy” and carrying the goodwill all firefighters seem to have acquired since 9/11, would catch less flak for this screw-up than they would.

So Chief Z wore the jacket this time, not that there’s much consequence to it.

It’s troubling enough that at a time when “transparency” and “accountability” are being stressed as key factors in how government should be run, three of our top (and most highly-paid) public officials would propose and agree to keeping these labor negotiations secret until a deal, or impasse, had been reached.  It’s even more troubling when public officials seem to believe they can do what they want and then conceal it from our elected representatives with impunity, as Chief Z, Hock and Maller did starting back in January and continuing all the way to May 16th.

Given that the wages and benefits paid our public employees, including our unionized ones, involve the public purse about which there should be no secrets, however, there’s no good reason why such collective bargaining shouldn’t be held in meetings open to the press and the public. 

Let the City decide, as part of its very public budget process, what wage and benefit terms are affordable and in the best interest of the taxpayers for the coming year, and only for the coming year.  The City should then publicly offer those exact terms to the union representing the particular bargaining unit; and then let that union make its case, equally publicly, to those same taxpayers if it thinks its members deserve more than what the City offered.  Maybe all this could be done as part of the budget process.

That way, everything is face-up on the table and visible to the people who are paying the bill. 

And by doing this every year for that coming year rather than for 2-3 years at a time, both the City and the unions know what the City’s financial condition is like on a real-time basis – so the City doesn’t lock itself into a multi-year contract that it may find itself incapable of performing due to the demands of unexpected future occurrences and expenses.

Simple and neat.  No secrecy, no misdirection, no game-playing.

And one less opportunity for Chief Z, Hock and Maller to lie to the Mayor, the Council, and the taxpayers about who did what.

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