Public Watchdog.org

At D-64, Secrecy And Lies Once Again Trump Transparency

10.31.16

In last Monday’s post we compared the D-64 Board’s contempt for the District’s taxpayers to that of political carcinomas, Mike Madigan, Rahm Emanuel and Richie Daley, for their taxpayers.

We also contrasted the Board’s contempt for its taxpayers with its overt favoritism for three special interests: the PREA-represented teachers; the teacher-turned-bureaucrat administrators; and parents of D-64 students who pay $5,000, more or less, of RE taxes to D-64 each year in exchange for $15,000, $30,000, or even $45,000 of D-64 education per year – which is such a bargain that many of them don’t particularly care if the education isn’t what it used to be, or doesn’t compare favorably to many of Park Ridge’s upper-tier “peer” communities.

The Board’s contempt-and-favoritism dichotomy has encouraged a form of “freeloader” mentality, the goal of which is to take far more out of the system in benefits than they pay in RE taxes, even if it means sticking their neighbors with the lion’s share of the resulting shortfall. And if they can run up their benefits high enough that there is virtually no chance of them ever getting back to even by years of paying RE taxes once their kids are out of school, so much the better.

Call it the D-64 variation on the quote attributed to Malcolm Forbes about winning by dying with the most toys. “He who moves out of Park Ridge with the largest debt to local government wins.”

But today we want to focus on a few of the lies told by D-64 representatives as political CYA for the new, secretly-negotiated PREA contract.

And what better way to start than with a few bon mots from Board president Tony “Who’s The Boss” Borrelli (SPOILER ALERT: The “Boss” is actually Supt. Laurie Heinz, which is why you don’t hear Borrelli speaking whenever Heinz is sipping a beverage).

Whenever Borrelli speaks at any length, however, you can bet he’s reading off a script written for him by Heinz and/or the District’s propaganda minister, Bernadette Tramm. If you doubt it, watch the 09.26.16 Board meeting video, starting at the 51:20 mark and continuing to the 1:02:10 mark, and you’ll see and hear Borrelli look and sound like an actor doing his first run-through of a new script at an initial table-reading.

Which is pretty much what it was.

One of our favorite lies is Borrelli’s (actually Heinz’s/Tramm’s) characterizing the new contract as having been “laboriously negotiated” since December 2015. This bit of propaganda must have so excited Heinz and Tramm that they had Borrelli reiterate it by noting, moments later, that the negotiations were “indeed laborious.”

That’s one of the most basic lessons of Sleazy Politics 101: drag a process out as long as you can (preferably until people stop paying attention) and then point to the length of time as proof of how daunting the task was. In this case, Borrelli and Heinz/Tramm must have been confident that their rube constituents and a disinterested local press wouldn’t figure out by looking at the contract – when it finally was published – that what took them 9 months to negotiate could and should have been accomplished in 9 weeks.

Take a look at the blue-lined comparison of the 2012 contract’s “secrecy” provision with the new one. Even the Israelis and the Palestinians could have hammered that out in an hour, tops. And the same could be said for many more of those differences between the 2012 and the new contract.

We also perversely enjoyed Borrelli’s (Heinz’s/Tramm’s) proclamation of how “unique to the District” is the new concept of tying teacher raises to the CPI-U index – which includes the cost of food, gasoline, electricity, apparel, new and used cars, rent, televisions, all school and college tuition, booze, tobacco products, water/sewer services, public transportation, medical care, Internet access, etc.

Not surprisingly, Borrelli (and Heinz/Tramm) didn’t mention how many of the taxpayers paying for the teachers’ raises will themselves be getting raises just because the price of sirloin and arugula, Shell regular, ComEd power, Dockers slacks, a Ford Focus, rent, a Sony 60-inch plasma, Miami of Ohio tuition, Hennessy VSOP cognac, Macanudo cigars, their sewer bill, their METRA ticket, their Illinois Bone & Joint bill,  their Xfinity bill, etc. goes up?

That doesn’t matter to them. But they did make sure that Borrelli went on the record to tell the PREA just how “grateful” the Board is “that this concept was accepted by the PREA.”

Huzzah!

Another of our favorites is Borrelli’s (Heinz’s/Tramm’s) lie about how the taxpayers would not be able to understand the details of the new contract with the “proper background” – while ignoring the fact that it was the Board and the PREA who deprived the taxpayers of any “proper background” by agreeing to hold their negotiations in secret.

But perhaps the most dishonest and unforgiveable lie is Borrelli’s (Heinz’s/Tramm’s) insistence that, if the Board had published the contract for public comment before it was approved, the District would be opening itself up to unfair labor practice (“ULP”) charges, fines and penalties. To quote Borrelli (from the 1:00:15 to 1:00:58 mark of the video):

“The District would most definitely be on the wrong side of any adjudication to [sic] either a ULP or grievance of these issues and would result in fines, fees and penalties incurred.”

Who says so? The District’s lawyers, according to Borrelli.

How do we know? Because Borrelli says so.

Is there any written attorneys’ opinion corroborating Borrelli? Not that we can find.

Why not? We’re betting because this Board didn’t want such an opinion and, therefore, didn’t ask for one.

Why? Because the PREA doesn’t want open negotiations sessions where the taxpayers could hear the PREA’s outrageous demands – not just its financial demands but its insistence on no accountability of the teachers for their own performance and that of their students. And because Borrelli et al. are terrified that real transparency would reveal just how readily and thoroughly they rolled over for the teachers and the administrators.

Which is why they made no attempt to challenge the current contract’s alleged secrecy language and, worse yet, they adopted the same basic secrecy provisions in the new contract – which we predicted back in our 06.21.16 post and again in our 07.26.16 post. So four years from now those negotiations will also be Star Chamber proceedings, compliments of Heinz via Borrelli and his lemmings

We’ll discuss the legality of all this in our next post.

To read and/or post comments, click on title.

8 comments so far

It’s bad enough what they do. Why do they have to lie about it?

Disgusting.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Because the more the taxpayers know about how poorly the District is managed, the less likely they are to continue to trust the Board members, who do little more than provide CYA for the administration.

Yes it is…and it’s been that way for awhile.

Thank you again, PW, for doing the heavy lifting on subjects like this that nobody else wants to do.

Even though I can understand how people might disagree on certain terms of the new contract, I fail to see how any reasonable and sentient person could believe that conducting secret negotiations is beneficial and instills trust in the taxpayers who end up paying the freight for these contracts.

And can anybody sound and act more arrogant than Borrelli?

EDITOR’S NOTE: If they got nothing else but transparent, open negotiations of the next contract it would be at least some notable achievement. But this Board has always been more intent on protecting the administration and shilling for the PREA than looking out for the taxpayers.

Given how little he has to be arrogant about, no.

I recall you once quoting some dead political thinker about how secrecy is the antithesis of good government. That lesson obviously has been lost on some of our local politicians, no more so than at d64. How can they keep on getting away with it?

EDITOR’S NOTE: “Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.” Jeremy Bentham (from our 01.10.12 post).

D-64 keeps getting away with it because almost all the people who run for school board prove Mark Twain’s observation: “In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.” And because the vast majority of school administrators – who make the decisions that school board members merely rubber stamp – are former teachers with no business degree, no business experience and no business sense with which to manage the $70+ million enterprise that is D-64.

You are a hopeless curmudgeon who can’t resist slamming all the good things in this community, including our outstanding schools.

Our teachers and administrators deserve far more than they are being paid, and more than the CPI raises this new contract gives them.

You suck!

EDITOR’S NOTE: “Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools.” Good to Great by James C. Collins.

Opinions vary.

8:16 AM:

My kids went through D64 schools and my observation is that we have some great teachers here. Unfortunately, we had some first-hand experience of horrible teachers as well. And if the good and bad teachers have the same degree and experience level, they get paid the same amount. For a job that is incredibly important, in my opinion the pay and tenure model is downright immoral.

Food for thought: a quick look at the D64 salaries showed at least one teacher being paid $116,238 and many making $105,469 for an eight month year. When combined with a defined benefit pension and no risk of losing their jobs, that’s a way better deal than the one that the rest of the taxpayers have. Average household income in PR is $87,626 (with many two income families and most people working an 11 month year). I would guess that most of these people don’t have a defined benefit pension. When is the school board going to wake up and see that they have to end this nonsense? The rest of us have no ability to pay for this over the long term.

Here are the sites with the salary info:

https://www.d64.org/business/documents/AdminTeacherSalaryBenefitsReport2015_FINAL.pdf

http://www.illinois-demographics.com/park-ridge-demographics

EDITOR’S NOTE: Why do you think we called teaching at D-64 the best job in Park Ridge (in our 08.02.16 post)? Do the math using the compensation, the hours, the pension, the lack of accountability, and all the direct and indirect benefits, etc., and it’s pretty darned unbeatable.

Considering that Board president Borrelli is Supt. Heinz’s sock puppet, and the rest of the board members are mere lemmings, awake or asleep they don’t have the attitude or the ability to do anything more than be the arrogant, mindless, sontemptuous secretive rubber stamps they’ve consistently shown themselves to be.

As a lawyer do you agree with the advice Borrelli says the school board received from its attorneys that it couldn’t publish the contract before they approved it, and would have cost the taxpayers money if they had done so?

EDITOR’S NOTE: No…and we’ll explain why in an upcoming post.

I feel like you’ve answered this in a previous post but if a school board member with a spine disclosed the contents of a closed session are there any legal ramifications? I realize this is a pipe dream given the current board but if there are board openings coming up I’d vote for whomever promised to do that.

EDITOR’S NOTE: These Board members DO have spines…to tell the taxpayers to go F themselves.

And the taxpayers just keep sitting there and taking it.

I watched the video of that Sept. 26 meeting and you are so right. Borrelli is reading from somebody else’s script. Since there’s nobody on that board capable of writing that script, I have to agree that it most likely was Heinz or Tramm.

If you want to read a cautionary tale about Illinois school district mismanagement, an how board members are out to lunch on their oversight, read:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/daily-southtown/news/ct-sta-lincoln-way-state-oversight-st-1106-20161104-story.html



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