As we move all too quickly into the second half of summer, the attention of many residents is shifting to vacations (now that most kids’ summer sports schedules are ending), and even to the resumption of school.

That means a lot less attention will be paid to what goes on with our local governmental bodies.  Which makes it a dangerous time for taxpayers…and their pocketbooks.

Fortunately, one potential costly problem has been eliminated now that the “Acting” adjective has been removed from City Manager Shawn Hamilton’s title.  And one longstanding bad precedent has been abandoned, at least temporarily, in the process.

The “bad precedent”?

The kind of multi-year, fixed-term contract that was foolishly given to former city manager Jim Hock.  Both he and his predecessor, Tim Schuenke, were handsomely rewarded by a collection of irresponsible and profligate mayors (Wietecha, Marous and Frimark) and aldermen (2000 through April 2011) who inexplicably acted as if mediocre-to-terrible performance somehow deserved escalating salaries and benefits.

By the time he retired from the City in 2008 – after helping engineer most of the Uptown TIF giveaways to the developer, but before the full extent of the damage done by those giveaways was well known – Schuenke was pulling down over $179,000 in salary, which our then-mayor and aldermen jacked up a whopping $12,000 (from $167,000) in his last two years on the job, also goosing up his pension.  Hock’s base salary, on the other hand, remained at $165,000 for his four year stint prior to being sacked last year.

So Hamilton’s new salary of $155,000 is almost a bargain when measured against his predecessors, especially since he is not getting the $350,000 interest-free loan, a City vehicle, or the six-figure severance Hock received.

Hamilton’s salary might even have been lower if Ald. Marc Mazzuca had his way.  Mazzuca wanted Hamilton’s compensation to be benchmarked against the federal government’s civil service pay scale, which would have put Hamilton’s salary $20-30,000 lower.

Mazzuca was a little vague on why City employees should be benchmarked in that fashion.  And as Mayor Dave Schmidt noted, that kind of salary would have made Hamilton the lowest-paid city manager among comparable north/northwest suburban communities, and put his salary only slightly above his subordinates despite the significantly greater responsibility and accountability.

That’s just another one of the consequences – it’s called “wage compression” – of continually raising union and non-union wages for reasons unrelated to either individual employee performance or a measurable economic benefit to the City.

But the real benefit to the City of Hamilton’s “deal” – negotiated by Schmidt and recently approved by the “new” Council – is that it’s an employment-at-will arrangement, which is the generally-accepted standard of employment for the vast majority of Illinois employees.  And there are none of those outrageous benefits lavished on Hock, like a $350,000 interest-free mortgage loan and the $110,000+ severance.

Hopefully this will establish a new precedent for future hires of city managers and senior staff.  Heck, maybe it will even catch on with mayors, presidents, councils and boards of surrounding communities, who seem to be as boneheaded and irresponsible with their taxpayers’ money as our former elected officials were with ours.

And the “at-will” nature of Hamilton’s employment is important in view of his uneven performance during his “Acting” year, including bedeviling lapses in judgment and dropped balls that are simply unacceptable for a city manager making this kind of money – some of which we have identified in our posts of 06.06.13 and 06.20.13.

We still are optimistic that Hamilton can raise his game and become a real asset to this community, rather than someone who can merely clear the exceedingly low performance bar set by his predecessors.  Most of that optimism, however, is derived from the more exacting demands that we expect to be placed on him by Schmidt and the new aldermen.

Whether Hamilton has the smarts and the spine to hold his own subordinates to more exacting performance standards remains an open question.  So far, we haven’t seen that or heard it.  We also haven’t seen or heard the kind of hard-nosed, tight-ship management ideas we expected from a guy who was hired in large part because of his private-sector business background.

But at least Schmidt and the Council have brought a welcome dose of reality to City Manager compensation.  Now its up to them – especially Mazzuca and those other aldermen who have over-ridden Schmidt’s vetoes of previous arbitrary, non-merit based raises for both union and non-union City staff – to keep the momentum going.

And it’s up to Hamilton to prove he’s worth what he just got.

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