Some people in Park Ridge might consider the City’s spending of $48,101 as pretty much a drop-in-the-bucket number, especially when compared to the City’s $60 million 2012-13 budget.

But that $48,101 takes on much more significance as a symbol of the flawed decision-making that has plagued, and often even defined, previous City Councils – and that seems to continue to plague and define some members of the current Council and the bureaucrats who run City government on our “dime,” figuratively speaking.

In literal terms, that $48,101 is the total cost of the raises the Council approved Monday night for non-union City employees: a 1% raise for those employees who merely “meet expectations,” and a 2% raise for those who “exceed expectations.”  Ironically, although not surprisingly, that approval came on a 4 to 2 vote (Alds. Joe Sweeney, Rich DiPietro, Sal Raspanti and Marty Maloney v. Alds. Jim Smith and Dan Knight, Ald. Marc Mazzuca absent) only minutes after a discussion of how Crook County was now projecting $220,507 less revenue from the hapless Uptown TIF than has been budgeted this year. 

Meaning that the Council majority voted to pay out an additional unbudgeted $48,101 in salaries while knowing that it now will have $220,000 less revenue from which to pay them. 

If that sounds shortsighted and irresponsible, that’s because it is.  And, unfortunately, it’s been the City’s practice for the past decade and beyond.

Like their counterparts in Chicago and Crook County, over the past decade or longer the City’s elected officials and bureaucrats, with a few notable exceptions, virtually institutionalized a process of giving raises to union employees, which in turn led them to give raises (albeit in lesser amounts) to non-union employees, which in turn led to further raises for union employees, and so on in an upward spiral.  As can be seen from a schedule recently produced by the City, since 2008 – in the teeth of this recession – the City’s unionized firefighters and police have received raises totaling 13% through next May; unionized public works employees have received raises totaling 12.75%, with more on the way; and non-union personnel have received raises totaling between 7% and 9%.

During that very same period the City, while continuing to raise taxes by approximately 3.5%, was cutting back on various services as Mayor Dave Schmidt led the fight to escape from a decade of deficits totaling multi-millions of dollars that had put the City’s finances in a figurative iron-lung.

In addition to all those raises, City employees also got credits toward their guaranteed defined-benefit pensions that are virtually extinct in the private sector, in part because not only can they be taken as early as age 55 but, also, they have been reported to provide the beneficiaries with as much or more money in pensions than they made while actually working! 

Additionally, unlike almost all private-sector workers, City employees are virtually fire-proof because of poor performance, which would explain why so few of them leave the City for similar positions in other communities.  Plus, City employees run no risk of their employer packing up and moving to Mexico or Malaysia; or of filing for bankruptcy – at least not until after the City bleeds the taxpayers dry.

So although the Council majority wasn’t deterred from those $48,101 in raises by this $220,000 revenue shortfall, it seems to have been mightily impressed by the “white paper” authored by the City’s H.R. Manager, Cathy Doczekalski, and its H.R. Consultant, Michael Suppan, which begins with the flippant, almost dismissive “[t]he process of giving pay raises…[has] been happening since before the birth of Christ.”

Doczekalski and Suppan go on to salt their report with certain buzzwords/phrases – e.g., “loyal”/”loyalty,” “hard working,” “dignity and respect” – in what appears to be an attempt to portray the City’s salaried employees as quasi-serfs.  They also spout the ridiculous assertion that “[w]hether the pay increases are merit increases or Cost of Living (cola) increases doesn’t matter” – thereby demonstrating their inability to grasp the difference between compensation earned for meritorious performance, on the one hand, and what amounts to nothing less than the employer’s guarantee of the purchasing power of the wages being paid, on the other.

Yet when Ald. Knight questioned them about the exact meaning and relevance of those various buzzwords and terms, he basically got deer-in-the-headlights responses from the authors…until Public Works Director Wayne Zingsheim rode to their rescue with tales of salaried employees working extra hours without pay, and laments about “wage compression” – shrinking pay differentials between supervisors and subordinates. 

Zingsheim seemed oblivious to the fact that extra hours without extra pay is a hallmark of salaried employment.  And his only example of any lack of “dignity” or “respect” was the fact of subordinates making more than their supervisors, a/k/a “wage compression.”  

But proposing an actual solution for “wage compression” – other than just giving the salaried employees 1-2% raises – must be above both Zingsheim’s and the Council majority’s pay grade, as suggested by Ald. Maloney’s rationale that: “We say ‘no’ to this group [the salaried employees] because we can, but we can’t necessarily say ‘no’ to some of the unions.”

Why not, Alderman?

According to the final page of the arbitration award for the Fraternal Order of Police issued December 20, 2011, the City’s final offers – beyond which it chose to say “no” to the FOP’s demands – were upheld by the arbitrator in five of six instances.  Keep the champagne on ice for the time being, however, because while that might have been a technical “win” over more extreme union demands, the arbitrator’s findings on Page 35 of the award suggest more of a Pyrrhic victory, “won” by the City’s having given away “effectively 9% over four years, more when longevity is factored in.” 

If you want a little insight into how inter-dependent the various union negotiations and resulting contracts are, check out the first four pages of that award.

What becomes obvious from just this trickle of information is that the Doczekalski/Suppan phobia about the salaried employees possibly joining a union if they aren’t given raises, is that the City and its hard-nosed negotiators already gives the unions such good deals that even the pro-union arbitrators end up endorsing them!

Victory by surrender? 

We’re not opposed to City employees, including the salaried employees, receiving fair compensation.  And we’re certainly not opposed to City employees being represented by unions.  But we most certainly are opposed to aldermen and supervisory personnel who seem to care more about special interest groups – in this case, the salaried employees – than about the taxpayers who pay the wages of those employees, some of whom would gladly take those City jobs.  Without raises.

As was demonstrated Monday night, the City’s salaried supervisory personnel (with the notable exception of Finance Director Allison Stutts) and at least four of our seven elected aldermen are seemingly more concerned about pandering to this one special interest group than about undertaking the admittedly more difficult task of forging a long-term, comprehensive and economically realistic wage policy – especially when there’s already the specter of an 11% City property tax increase looming this coming November?

But when you can make a special interest temporarily happy simply by giving away $48,101, why do any heavy lifting?

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