We have often written about the seductiveness and delusional effects of “OPM” – Other People’s Money – on our public officials.

At the federal and state levels, the budgets and expenditures are so mind-numbingly large that we suspect it all seems like Monopoly money to the folks in Washington.  The late U.S. Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen (R. Ill.) was reported (although perhaps apocryphally) to have observed, in response to a discussion about federal spending: “A billion here and a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.”

Today, however, a billion dollars barely qualifies as a rounding error at the federal level.  Even at the state level, it’s about 3% of the budget – which might explain why it took the state’s unfunded pension liability to reach $100 billion before our Springfield spendthrifts actually began talking in earnest about – although not acting on – that problem.

Only at the local government level do we still talk about money in understandable amounts that don’t instantly make the eyes glaze over.  Which is why it always pains us to hear and/or read about our local officials apparently succumbing to the Sirens’ spending song and throwing around OPM like confetti, seemingly just because they legally can.

The most common and most consequential example of such profligacy is the way our local officials throw money at our local public employees, almost always without any objectively measurable relationship of the amounts of that money to individual or collective performance, or to a measurable benefit to the taxpayers.

No local governmental bodies do profligacy better than our school districts, perhaps because they have become so adept at talking and acting as if teaching upper-middle class Park Ridge children for roughly 8 months a year is the work of the angels – even if the measurable results of that teaching are less than angelic; e.g.,  according to admittedly two year-old reports, Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District 64 had the 4th highest paid administrators and the 25th highest paid teachers in all of Illinois, but with student performance on standardized ISAT scores coming nowhere near those lofty compensation rankings.

Yet just last month the D-64 Board gave out the latest round of arbitrary, non-merit based pay increases that, over the past decade or so, have made employment there one of the sweetest deals around.

Secretaries and custodial staff got arbitrary, non-merit based 3.5% increases, while an assortment of “exempt” staff members got arbitrary, non-merit based 2.0% raises – for no apparent reason other than Supt. Philip Bender thought it was a good idea and such raises were “within a modest range of 0-4%.”   Actually, had Bender been left to his own devices, he would have saddled the taxpayers with a 2.75% increase for exempt employees, so the School Board did save the taxpayers 0.75%.

But before anybody suggests that those Board members deserve a parade for their frugality, a closer look at how they did what they did suggests they are guilty of the same basic fiscal irresponsibility as their drunken sailor predecessors who gave both our teachers and administrators their lofty compensation rankings.

Why?

Obviously, 2.0% is better than 2.75%.  But that 2.0% appears to be no more objectively justified than the 2.75%, which itself appears to have no more justification than 1.25%, or 5.75%.  And we could find nothing in the public record that indicates even one of the 7 Board members had the insight or the cojones to ask Bender or finance director Rebecca Allard the $64,000 (or more) question: “Why exactly should we be giving out any raises at all to these employees?”  Or the other $64,000 (or more) question: “What specific objective criteria justify these raises?”

That’s because this D-64 compensation process, perhaps even more than the compensation processes of our other local governmental units, is little more than a fun-with-numbers exercise – with raises having become an institutionalized entitlement that require no demonstrable increase in productivity by the employees, no demonstrable increase in performance by the students, and no demonstrable increase in economic benefit to the taxpayers.  And the process of giving them out illustrates one of the most pernicious evils of what the political class and the political media love to extoll as “compromise.”

To see the evils of unprincipled compromise writ large, one need look no further than Springfield – where for 26 of the past 36 years “Let’s make a deal!” horse-trading between a Democratic General Assembly and 3 different Republican governors (“Big Jim” Thompson, “Slim Jim” Edgar and George “No. 16627-424” Ryan) has left our state perilously close to bankruptcy and with a bleak future, despite increasingly higher taxes.  That’s because feckless compromise, unlike principled, policy-driven up-down voting, encourages factions to stake out positions based not on their inherent merit but merely on their bargaining value.

In the case of these recent D-64 raises, Bender and Allard were effectively able to manipulate the Board into approving an arbitrary and boneheaded 2.0% raise for exempt employees by recommending an arbitrary and ridiculous 2.75% raise.  Worse yet, Bender and Allard could also use that compromise process to bamboozle the more simple-minded townsfolk into thinking that their elected School Board members, by driving the proposed 2.75% down to 2.0%, were being tight-fisted defenders of the public purse rather than mere pawns in a Bender/Allard-orchestrated chess game that benefits themselves and their fellow administrators.

Not only did nobody on the Board ask Bender or Allard any $64,000 questions about those raises, but it appears that nobody on the Board cared enough about transparency and accountability to even make public the actual dollar cost of those raises – preferring instead to stick with just the sterile percentages that serve to conceal from taxpayers the actual cost, in hard dollars and cents, of those raises.

Don’t “2% raises” sound so much more innocuous than “$125,000 (or whatever the actual amount turns out to be) of raises”?

Despite this latest spendthrift performance, we still have high hopes that new Board president Tony Borrelli can somehow bring sorely-needed transparency and fiscal responsibility to D-64, notwithstanding that he’s surrounded by a majority of Board members whose carelessness about fiscal matters seems exceeded only by their cluelessness.  Not surprisingly, it was Borrelli who led the push for cutting the exempt staff raises from 2.75% to 2.0%.

And even the 3.5% increase for secretaries and maintenance staff may have a silver lining, thanks to Borrelli: at what we understand was his insistence, it was accompanied by the elimination of arbitrary “step and lane” increases for those employees that guaranty annual raises based on seniority (“step”) and additional training/education (“lane”), mimicking the way teachers are guaranteed their annual raises.

Hopefully the elimination of those step-and-lane increases for secretaries and maintenance workers will begin a serious discussion about eliminating such increases for teachers before it’s time to negotiate the next PREA contract a couple of years from now.

But counting on Borrelli as the only Board member out of seven to be the taxpayers’ champion means that he has to bring his “A game” every single day – and avoid becoming the seventh dwarf on significant issues like these most recent arbitrary, non-merit based employee raises.  Even if he does bring his “A game” every day, however, for the time being he’s likely to be outvoted by those D-64 Board members who, like so many of their predecessors, have happily jumped into bed with the PREA-led teachers and the PREA-sympathetic administrators in a kind of mini-“Combine” to fleece the taxpayers while producing relatively unexceptional results, as objectively measured by things like the ISATs.

All of which causes us to wonder, yet again, whether anybody (other than Borrelli) with autority over the roughly 40% of our property tax dollars that D-64 grabs every year truly comprehends one of the most important facts of government: that the money they so cavalierly toss around isn’t really theirs.

It’s ours.

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