At tonight’s Committee of the Whole (“COW”) meeting (City Hall, 7:00 p.m.), the City Council will be asked to approve the new collective bargaining agreement between the City and the Int’l Union of Operating Engineers covering the City’s public works department employees.

As any reader of this blog knows, we’ve been critical of the almost automatic way the City (and each of our local school districts, for that matter) has increased wages and benefits for City employees without requiring any commensurate increase in performance.  We’ve been even more critical of the secretive way all those negotiations have been conducted (e.g., Fire Chief Mike Zywanski’s “Ground Rules” which effectively imposed a gag order on the mayor and the Council preventing them from giving the taxpayers progress reports on the negotiations).

As best as we can tell, this new agreement continues that economically-irresponsible automatic wage increase practice.

But we can’t say for sure because the Cover Memorandum provided by H.R. Director Michael Suppan contains nothing in the way of an “executive summary” or other analysis that would assist us, or the Council, in fully understanding the deal that the City’s negotiating team (whose members also remain unidentified) appears to have cut with the union – other than that it’s a 3-year deal that’s been delayed almost a year.  Consequently, the City will effectively owe the covered employees a year of retroactive raises.

What will those raises total?  The memo doesn’t say, other than for a check in the box that states that Council action on the agreement “will Require an Expenditure of Funds” – without any of the additional required information about that expenditure, such as its “Total Cost,” whether it’s a “Budgeted Item” and, if so, what budget section it will affect.

And although the agreement itself refers, on Page 2, Section A of Article V, to a “Wage Schedule” attached as “Tab A,” guess what?  No “Tab A” is attached.  Instead, Suppan writes that “[t]he details of the changes in the agreement will be presented to the Council in closed session.”

Brilliant!

Should the Council go along with Suppan’s folly and the aldermen hightail themselves into closed session to discuss the results of these secret negotiations, the taxpayers who will be asked to pay for this deal over the next 3 years will remain in their current “mushroom” state (kept in the dark and covered with fertilizer) for at least another week.

What’s so darned secret about all this stuff, Mr. Suppan?  Or, voiced another way, what exactly are you trying to hide?  And why isn’t Acting City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton doing anything to enhance the transparency of this process?

Discussions of wages and benefits for City employees should be open to the public so that taxpayers can see and hear how their elected and appointed public officials are responding to the demands from City employees and their unions; and so the employees and their unions also get to hear the Council’s discussion and have a better understanding of the City’s position, free from suspicions of bluffing or bad faith.

That way, if the taxpayers think their representatives are being unfair to City employees, or are not treating them with enough “respect,” they can tell their officials in time to do something about it.  Or not.

Heck, maybe such an open process would even lure mayoral challenge Larry Ryles out of hiding to address the Council on his ideas for how the Council should deal with the ever-escalating demands of its employees, or with this contract in particular – although we’re not going to hold our collective breath waiting for that to happen.  Ryles hasn’t addressed the Council on any of the issues it has faced since he declared his candidacy last Fall, so there’s no reason to think he’ll risk publicly displaying his views (0r lack thereof) on these kinds of controversial matters.

But whether Ryles shows or not, the one-sided way labor negotiations have gone for as long as we can remember has demonstrated, time and again, that secrecy has ill-served the taxpayers – whether at the City, at the Park District, and especially at the school district levels.

Since secrecy hasn’t worked, it’s time it ended.  Starting tonight.

UPDATED 03.12.13.  By the time last night’s COW meeting was convened, “Tab A” had finally been posted on the City’s website.  Unfortunately, whoever prepared it must didn’t think to include the previous year’s “Wage Schedule” for comparison purposes.  Or else he/she was actually trying to conceal those numbers to prevent such a comparison.

Either way, the COW discussion that begins at approximately 01:20:55 of the meeting video demonstrates the problems this Council – and City staff – still have with being honest and forthright with City taxpayers about the details of unionized employee contract negotiations, even if they can’t seem to come up with good reasons for that particular malady.

Ald. Joe Sweeney (1st) and Acting City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton clearly don’t “get it,” as their arguments for closed-session secrecy about those negotiations and the Council’s discussion of the tentative contract indicated. 

If we understood Sweeney, contract terms should remain secret until the Council reaches a closed-session consensus to approve them.  Hamilton, on the other hand, worried about “releasing to the other side” the Council’s views and strategies about contract terms – as if there’s some big honkin’ secret about how much money the City can afford, and wants to spend, for raises and benefits for any particular group of employees.

Not surprisingly, Mayor Dave Schmidt was right on target in noting the public’s “right to know” all those details.  Whether he’ll be able to convince the “I’ve Got A Secret” contingent remains to be seen, because they sure don’t seem to want convincing.

As we’ve said many times before, there’s no reason to be coy or secretive about labor and employment negotiations.  The Council (and all other public governing bodies) should discuss and calculate – openly and publicly – what terms and amounts are fair and affordable by the City, so that such information is known and understood not only by the “other side” but also by the taxpayers and the rest of the civilized world.  That way, whether a raise is a meager 1% or a whopping 10%, its amount and the reasons for it will become public knowledge in real time, with no secrets and no opportunities for mistrust.  And the same goes for all demands made by those employees and their unions.

Both “sides” hold a public trust, and owe us taxpayers duties and obligations commensurate with that trust.  There’s no place for secrecy in that kind of relationship.

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