The word came “over the transom” just a few minutes ago: Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District 64 and the Park Ridge Education Association (“PREA”) have a deal!

The official announcement reportedly is due out later today, although we wonder whether it will contain detailed terms or, instead, keep them under wraps for another week or so in order to reduce the time the taxpayers have to mobilize opposition before the contract is ratified by the PREA membership and then approved, along with the District’s new budget, at the next Board meeting on September 24th at Franklin School. 

Having observed the way D-64 and the PREA traditionally announce their contracts, we can expect the standard love fest between/among the respective negotiators, highlighted by rounds of mutual self-gratification masquerading as adulation. 

Expect D-64 School Board president John Heyde to praise the PREA negotiators for their hard-but-reasonable bargaining on behalf of all the Districts wonderful teachers, while the PREA leadership reciprocates with kudos to the D-64 negotiators for their hard-but-reasonable bargaining on behalf of the District’s taxpayers.  Both sides, naturally, will pay the necessary lip service to their boundless concern for the well-being of the D-64 students, presumably punctuated with at least one or two invocations of the “it’s for the kids” cliché.

Although we have neither seen nor heard the details of whatever agreement these merry co-conspirators have cooked up, there are a few easy ways to determine whether the taxpayers have been sold out by the seven School Board members who are supposed to be looking out for our interests: John Heyde, Scott Zimmerman, Sharon Lawson, Eric Uhlig, Pat Fioretto, Dan Collins and Tony Borrelli.

The first is the length of the contract. 

Anything over 2 years is a “teachers” contract because it is designed to lock in teacher-favorable terms no matter how bad the economy gets.  Judging by most polls, surveys, and the predictions of many of this country’s prominent economists, a big recovery is not even on the horizon.  And anybody who thinks that a Mike Madigan-controlled General Assembly is going to pull Illinois out of its glide path toward figurative, if not literal, bankruptcy is snorting bath salts.

The second clue to a Board sell-out is whether the new contract retains a “negotiations-are-secret” provision.

That’s the kind of provision in the just-expired contract that kept these negotiations under the public’s radar.  Public employee unions – especially those who claim to be doing the angels’ work, like police, fire and teachers – don’t want the gullible public finding out about any of their demands that might be viewed as unreasonable or greedy, much less watching and listening to those demands and counter-demands in real time.  If the new contract has that same secrecy provision in it, we’ll know we’ve been had. 

The third clue will be whether the Board will actually provide a detailed post-mortem account of the various “bid” and “ask” terms of the negotiations.

Keeping secret the information such as PREA’s initial wage demand and the District’s initial wage offer, followed by the counter-asks and counter-bids, is essential to D-64 and the PREA manipulating public opinion.  That kind of play-by-play account of the negotiations is frowned upon by both sides because that would reveal too much about the less-than-angelic bargaining strategies of the “angels,” and the windsock-like resoluteness of our tough-as-mashed-potatoes School Board negotiators.

But where the rubber always meets the road is how much the raises will be.  And, rest assured, there will be raises.

We’ll know the Board has sold us taxpayers down the river if they describe the raises in terms of: “X % in Year 1, Y% in Year 2, etc.”  That’s because those announced percentages almost always refer only to “base” salary increases, not to the additional components of teacher compensation known as “step” and “lane” increases that drive up the price of poker without public recognition.

For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, or who have been suckered by the D-64/PREA wind-talking all these years, “step-and-lane” are the pre-programmed, scheduled annual increases that have been built into recent contracts to ensure routine annual raises for employees simply for seniority (“step”) and/or for accumulating credits toward an advanced academic degree (“lane”). 

D-64 teachers, administrators and Board members don’t like to talk about those increases, which we understand have been averaging 2% over the past several years.  For example, if the new D-64/PREA contract provides for a Year 1 base salary increase of, say, 2%, after figuring in the step and lane increases the average teacher will actually be getting a 4%+ increase – to go along with the 8-9 month work year and those outstanding benefits such as tenure, health care, minimal-to-non-existent performance standards, and the still-guaranteed defined-benefit pensions with their cost-of-living adjustment that actually rewards retirees for the otherwise dubious condition called “inflation.”

Should just the base salary increase be reported, that will be a clear indication that Heyde and Company believe the teachers deserve to remain at least the 25th best-compensated elementary school teachers in the state, notwithstanding that the measurable educational performance of their students is not within hailing distance of a 25th-in-state ranking.

And it will be a clear indication we’ve been sold out by the School Board.  Again.

UPDATE:   Looks like we guessed right on the 2% raise.  Assuming we can trust whatever they are saying – and when it comes to D-64, we subscribe to the motto of the late and lamented Chicago City News Bureau: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” – the annual increase will average 3.6% guaranteed for the next four years. 

How many Park Ridge working folks (yeah, you folks with the jobs that require you to work a full 11 months or more, not 8 or 9) are guaranteed a 3.6% pay increase for the next four years?  Heck, how many of you are even guaranteed a job for the next four years?

We particularly like the quotes in the H-A article from PREA and D-64.

PREA President Erin Breen: “This agreement is a win for all stakeholders in the Park Ridge-Niles community.”

Any time a taxpayer hears the word “stakeholders,” he/she can be sure that somebody in government is grabbing for his/her wallet.

Board President John Heyde: “This longer agreement offers the Board and our teachers a stable foundation for planning while focusing on improvements in teaching and student learning.”

A “stable foundation” for planning what, John…how students can continue to underperform while the teachers remain the 25th highest paid in the state and the administrators remain the 4th highest paid? 

Not surprisingly, D-64 isn’t giving its taxpayers the courtesy of posting the draft contract because [insert explanation of your choice here], but they have posted a “Fact Sheet” containing what we can only assume are the minimum number of “safe” facts they think they can get away with posting in order to claim they are being “transparent.” 

To read or post comments, click on title.

The Chicago Public School teachers are out on strike for the first time in 25 years. 

Depending on whom you believe, only a couple of non-monetary terms remain to be resolved (Mayor Rahm Emanuel); or several non-monetary terms remain unresolved (Chicago Teachers Union).  Interestingly enough, however, both sides seem to agree that the strike is not primarily about money.

That’s most likely because the Chicago Public School Board already has offered a 16% increase over four years – which reportedly consists of 9% (3-2-2-2) over and above some “modified step increases,” according to a story in today’s Chicago Tribune.  The Tribune and several other sources are suggesting that those pay increases are intended to compensate teachers for the longer school day that Emanuel pushed through.

How many of the Chicago taxpayers who will be footing the bill for this largesse are guaranteed a 16% increase over the next 4 years, just for putting in the time and irrespective of performance?  Outside of other public employees, we’re guessing the answer is “none.”

But that didn’t stop the CPS Board from offering those kinds of salary increases even though rookie teachers right out of college start at more than $50,000 for what officially is a 9-month school year.  Not only does that annualize out to $67,000, but even at its face amount it exceeds the approximately $47,000 average City of Chicago family income.   

And the average annual Chicago teacher salary of approximately $76,000 annualizes out to over $100,000, not counting benefits.

Not bad, considering that (as we’ve noted many times before) it comes with little chance of being fired for poor performance; with no chance of having the job outsourced to Mexico, some other country, or even another state; and (still as of now) with a guaranteed defined benefit pension that dwarfs Social Security and many private workers’ 401(k) plans. 

That the CTU has elected to strike despite that kind of compensation for what amounts to an “office” job has caused even a bleeding heart like the Sun-Times’ Neil Steinberg to write (in his 09.08.12 column): “I’m one of the many wondering what planet teachers live on.  I live on Planet Glad to Have a Job.”  So do many/most of us taxpayers who guaranty those ever-increasing salaries of our public employees.

But why do we here at PublicWatchdog care about what’s going on over at CPS?

Because, like the CPS, the Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District 64 still doesn’t have a contract with the Park Ridge Education Association (the “PREA”), our local equivalent of the CTU.  Which makes D-64 susceptible to a teachers strike.  Or to an overly-generous multi-year pay increase in order to avoid a teachers strike.

What’s happening with the D-64/PREA contract negotiations?  We don’t know because nobody’s talking.  And nobody’s talking because the contract that recently expired but which the parties continue to operate under contains a provision requiring “secrecy” about the conduct of negotiations – a secrecy provision we understand the PREA demanded and was granted by a stereotypically complicit School Board one or more contracts ago.

Why is there no new contract between D-64 and the PREA?  We’re guessing it’s for the same basic reason there’s still no new contract between the CPS and the CTU: teachers unions gain a whole lot more leverage once school has started, because a strike then is so much more disruptive to parents who count on the schools almost as much for child care as for education.

Which is why Emanuel and the CPS administration is assuring parents that they are providing “safe” places for the school-less kids to hang out while the strike continues, including libraries, park district facilities and churches.  There will be extra costs incurred for those jerry-rigged baby-sitting services, but those will likely never be figured into the calculations of what this strike will end up costing the taxpayers.

Meanwhile, back here in Park Ridge, we sincerely hope the D-64 Board and its negotiators can persuade the PREA negotiators that the best contract is one that recognizes the current economic realities and the plight of the District’s taxpayers, especially in the light of the sweet deal teaching in this upper-middle class district has been and still remains.  If not, the CTU strike may also become instructive for us in another way. 

As Chicago Ald. Ricardo Munoz is quoted in today’s Tribune: “They need to reach a deal.”

Why? 

“The parents in my ward want their kids to be in school. They don’t care who’s to blame.”

Those of us who lived through the last PREA strike in November 2003 might still remember what happens when parents who already are enjoying the economic benefit of the “free” education for their kids don’t care enough to undertake the sometimes tough analysis required to actually figure out “who’s to blame.”

It’s a whole lot easier to simply tell the School Board to just write a bigger check.

To read or post comments, click on title.

A few random rim-shots and quick-hits for your mid-week edification, in no particular order of importance:

Unaccountable ComEd.  At Monday night’s City Council COW meeting, two ComEd reps showed up with a variety of non-explanations of recent power outages throughout the City.  Alibis ranged from a “big tree falling in the Forest Preserve” to smaller trees and/or limbs causing local “pocket reliability issues” within and without ComEd’s “tree zone.”  They also described one of ComEd’s key diagnostic techniques as “walking the line”; i.e., walking along the ground looking up at the power line for problems.  How 21st Century! 

A more detailed “report” from ComEd can be found here, and ComEd’s reps are scheduled to be back before the Council on September 17 at 7:00 p.m.

What we’ve concluded – although we hope we’re wrong – is that ComEd’s got so much juice (pun intended) in Springfield that they basically can do whatever they want.  So while the City should continue to be as squeaky a wheel as possible re these outages, about all it can do from a practical standpoint is: (a) try to keep our trees trimmed away from power lines; and (b) keep giving an earful to our state legislators (Sen. Dan Kotowski, Rep. Rosemary Mulligan) for letting ComEd continue to get away with being too big to give a rat’s derriere about dependable power for Park Ridge.

City Council Policy No. 6 On Way Out?  Council Policy No. 6 is the one that deals with “regulating the use of City funds for the support of private non-governmental organizations. It is the basis for years of arbitrary, unaccountable donations to private community groups – something we’ve been critical of for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it appears to violate Article VIII, Section 1 of the Illinois Constitution: “Public funds, property or credit shall be used only for public purposes.”

From what was said at Monday night’s COW meeting, it looks like Policy No. 6 will either be modified or perhaps eliminated.  As Ald. Marty Maloney (7th) correctly noted, for years the City has been “writing blank checks” to community groups without a strong sense of what the City is getting for its money.  Ald. Joe Sweeney suggested an advisory referendum on whether the taxpayers want to see $250,000 a year budgeted for handouts to these community groups.

As we’ve said before, if these private community groups want public funding of the services they provide, such funding should be under a contract with the City like every other vendor – with fixed prices for the various identifiable units of services and documentary proof that those services are going to Park Ridge residents.  Maybe, just maybe, our City officials finally are getting the message.

New D-64 “Changes” Frivolous?  An article in the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“District 64 welcomes new year with changes,” 08.23.12) announces three changes for the new D-64 school year, two of which are more students riding buses, and more students eating lunch at school.  Big whoop.

According to the H-A article, the bus-riding results from the borderline bankrupt State of Illinois deciding that D-64 deserves state funding so that Lincoln and Emerson 7th and 8th graders can get free busing through “so-called hazardous crossings that students encounter two [sic] and from school.”  No mention in the article of what those “hazardous crossings” are so that the rest of us can be extra careful when we cross there.  Also no mention of whether the free busing will be based on economic need, so we’ll assume need is not a criterion unless and until we hear otherwise.

And elementary students will be required to stay at school for lunch, with the elimination of the lunch supervision fee.  That begs the question of who pays for the lunch supervision that used to come out of the pockets of the parents whose kids lunched at school rather than went home to eat.

“Free” bus service should require a showing of need – otherwise it just shifts the costs (and the inconvenience) of getting one’s kid to school from the parent to the taxpayers.  The same goes for lunch supervision: making stay-at-school lunching mandatory doesn’t magically make the supervision costs disappear, does it?

A Sign.  Our post of 08.03.12, “’Management By Walking Around’ Should Start With Stroll Along Summit,” complained about how City government seems to have a hard time making sure that even the little things – like posting a sign on the paybox for Summit parking that actually tells parkers what the daily fee is – are getting done right.  Well, somebody finally got around to that: and a new sign is up announcing the $1.50 per diem.

In Neil Armstrong’s honor, we’ll call that “one small step for some bureaucrat, one small leap for City government.”

To read or post comments, click on title.

Today we’re going to depart from our usual complaining about local government screw ups and/or its robbing of the taxpayers and, instead, praise the brand-new athletic track at Roosevelt Elementary School. 

What’s so special about a new athletic track?  After all, it’s clearly an amenity rather than a necessity – so why all the fuss?

For us, it’s the fact that it cost Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 (a/k/a, its taxpayers) nothing.  Nada.  Zip. Nil.  According to the article in the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“New track at Park Ridge school fully funded by community donations,” 08.10.12), the construction of the $90,000 track was undertaken by the Roosevelt Parent-Teacher Organization (“PTO”) “fully funded through donations from Park Ridge families and area businesses.”

Outstanding!

The planning for the project reportedly started two years ago.  In addition to the two lane, one-fifth mile asphalt track, the project features two “rain gardens” comprised of plants suited to utilizing the rain water run-off from the track.

Given its location, we imagine that it will draw most of its users from the Roosevelt School neighborhood rather than from the rest of the City.  Currently, runners from the southwest end of town seeking a track to run on have the use of the one at Maine South, and those on the northwest end have the Maine East track.  

Although the article didn’t give the details of the fundraising other than to note that a “track-a-thon” held in September 2011 pushed project funding over the top, the bottom line is that the PTO folks running this project didn’t just talk the talk, they walked the walk.

So kudos to the Roosevelt PTO.  Raising $90,000 of net funds in two years for a 2-lane asphalt running track in a bad economy is a significant accomplishment. 

Maybe some of our local community groups who constantly put the arm on City government for handouts should consider holding a track-a-thon or two.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Back in the day when Westerns were all the rage on both the big screen and the small, it became almost a cliché to see a group of cowboys sitting around a campfire at night in the middle of nowhere when one of them would remark “It sure is quiet” – to which another would respond “Yeah, too quiet.” 

And then, almost immediately, that quiet would be shattered by a bunch of whooping “injuns” galloping in with arrows flying, or firing rifles purchased – often along with some “firewater” – from unscrupulous “white” traders. 

For some reason we find that old cliche a fitting metaphor for the dead silence surrounding the ongoing Park Ridge–Niles Elementary School District 64 teacher negotiations, with nary a whisper emerging about what kind of deal is being cut. 

From our observations of public sector union negotiations over the past couple of decades, any “too quiet” situation bodes ill for taxpayers.  That’s especially true with the scheduled commencement of the school year rapidly approaching and the prospects of a strike becoming more frightening by the day to those parents for whom the D-64 schools serve double duty as both education and day-care.  That invites manufactured “crises” giving rise to rushes to judgment that always involve throwing more money at the teachers. 

We’re not ready to cue the injuns just yet, but we also have no reason to believe that the Park Ridge Education Association (“PREA”), the teachers union, is asking for anything less than the moon – especially in view of the recent report from D-64 that it is anticipating 2.5% lower expenses this coming year, thereby arguably freeing up some additional cash for teacher raises and/or benefits.

We don’t know if that 2.5% in any way reflects a reduction in D-64’s Uptown TIF-related payment that we hear the City is going to try to negotiate because of continued dismal revenues from that financial white elephant, but that’s another variable that the D-64 negotiating team better be keeping in mind, along with the $14 million D-64 says it needs for immediate capital expenditures that are projected to eventually total $23 million, all-in.

We also hear that there was an acknowledgement at last night’s D-64 Board meeting that the rosy expense projection may already be history.  At any rate, that projection never factored in any of the increases in compensation for teachers, teachers aids, administrative staff or custodians that seem to be inevitable whenever the District and the PREA “negotiate” – as they are scheduled to do tonight.

And the Board is holding a closed-session “retreat” at Emerson School this Friday night – to engage in one of the many exceptions to the Illinois Open Meetings Act, 5 ILCS 120/2(c)(16): “Self evaluation, practices and procedures or professional ethics, when meeting with a representative of a statewide association of which the public body is a member.” 

The irony of their discussing surrender (to PREA) at a retreat – perhaps under the “practices and procedures” of submission – is almost too delicious…in a perverse way, of course.     

And let’s not forget skeevy Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan’s recent proposal to dump a good-sized chunk of the teachers’ pension funding into the laps of the local districts.  Frankly, that may be the most intelligent and fiscally responsible thing Madigan has proposed in his 30+ years as speaker – assuming it’s not just some cynical political ploy – because local school boards have been borderline criminally irresponsible in jacking-up, and then “spiking,” teacher and administrator salary to boost pensions, seemingly without regard for the consequences because those pensions are administered on a state-wide basis.

If the D-64 Board actually cared about the taxpayers and the long-term fiscal health of the District, the mere threat by Madigan of such a substantial expense being kicked back to local districts should be a major constraint on any raises.  But we’re talking about the same crew that has helped give this District the 4th highest-paid administrators and 25th highest-paid teachers in the state, so the only question about the current teacher negotiations would appear to be: “How much?”

We’ve previously expressed our strenuous opposition to any and all public-sector labor negotiations conducted in secret.  That opposition becomes even more strenuous when D-64’s lead negotiators are board president John Heyde and member Pat Fioretto.  Per our Western metaphor for the D-64/PREA negotiations, if the taxpayers need a John Wayne (think “Jake Cutter” in “The Comancheros”) standing tall and shooting it out, in Heyde and Fioretto they get the equivalent of chuckwagon cooks (think “Wishbone” and “Mushy” from “Rawhide”), slingin’ hash instead of flingin’ lead. 

Now we’re down to only 2 weeks until the first day of school, and the silence surrounding a new teachers contract is almost deafening. 

Okay, it’s time: Cue the injuns!

To read or post comment, click on title.

As regular readers of this blog know, we tend to devote a majority of our posts to the operation of City government.  In large part that’s because City government directly affects all Park Ridge residents in a variety of ways, while the other governmental bodies impact most residents more indirectly by their effect on our pocketbooks through their ever-increasing tax assessments.

But our postings also reflect the fact that the City Council appears to be the most transparent of all of our local governmental bodies – with its meetings broadcast live on WOW, the meeting videos posted on the City’s website, and the meetings regularly covered by on-site reporters from both local newspapers and the TribLocal.  City Council meetings also regularly feature the most vigorous public policy debates.

Nevertheless, we try not to ignore the other local governmental bodies.  And a report in last week’s edition of the Park Ridge Journal (“Dist. 64 Fine Tuning After School Costs,” 05.23.12) about the fees for D-64’s “after-school program” at Jefferson School caught our attention, especially the part about how D-64 is attempting to fine-tune that program to reflect parents’ complaints…about the cost of the program! 

Many/most taxpayers might expect parents who already are getting $10,000+ per year, per kid, of what amounts to “free” education not to beef about paying the fully-loaded costs of the after-school program (a/k/a babysitting) that enables them to work and afford the property taxes to obtain that almost-free education for their kids in the first place.  Unfortunately, such an expectation would be wrong, at least as to those shameless-but-vocal parents who seem able to make a relatively spineless administration and school board quake in their boots.

So, as reported by the Journal, a 6-1 vote of the D-64 Board ensured that those parents will continue to get dependable, well-supervised after-school babysitting for the low, low price of $5/hour – less than most of them pay the neighbor kid for less-dependable services when they go out to dinner and/or a movie on Saturday night.  And because of those low, low rates, the District projects a $5,866.93 loss for FY 2011-12, and a $17,540 loss for FY 2012-13.

That should be unacceptable to the taxpayers who already are subsidizing the vast majority of the cost of a D-64 education. 

If one believes in the value of public education – as we do – one also has to accept the fact that there are limits on what that “public education” covers, and at what cost.  The first phase of our research on the origins of public education in this country has led us to conclude that taxpayer-funded “public” education was intended to include nothing more than the basic classroom education: the old “readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic.”

Yet currently, in addition to the after-school babysitting program, D-64 offers a variety of “elective” extracurricular activities, such as athletics and music, for which it does not even attempt to recover the fully-loaded costs.  Instead, those activities are designed only to cover supply expenses, not the expenses for the personnel who teach/coach/administer them.

A report dated May 21, 2012, from the D-64 Community Finance Committee “Community Coordinators” Ares Dalianis and Genie Taddeo (both former D-64 Board members) shows that the CFC appears to be making some progress in getting a handle on the true costs of providing these activities.  More importantly, as noted on Page 4 of Attachment 1 to that report, the CFC is proposing “investigating the true costs of these electives, plus any other clubs or activities, and increasing elective fees to accurately cover all costs associated with the elective programs.”

All we can say is: “Bravo!”  And: “It’s about time!”

We are big fans of user fees, primarily because they are one of the most effective ways – if not the most effective way – of restricting discretionary, unnecessary and/or excessive use of public services whose costs are both significant and reasonably allocable.  Elementary school elective and extracurricular activities fit that bill to a “t,” which is why it is refreshing to see somebody associated with the D-64 administration actually talking about recovering those costs.    

Now we just need to see whether the CFC, and the D-64 Administration and Board, can walk that talk.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Once upon a time public sector employment in the State of Illinois was generally – with certain notable exceptions – less coveted than private sector employment. 

The private sector generally paid better.  It generally offered better pension and health benefits.  And it usually provided more stability than the public sector, where the political whims of certain elected or appointed officials could derail the careers of the competent-but-unconnected because “who you knew” usually meant more in the public sector than what you knew.

But public-sector employment has become the place to go if you want good pay, great benefits, plenty of time off, early retirement, minimal accountability, and job security.  One reason is because, while private-sector employment has become increasingly susceptible to the vagaries of competition and a world labor market, public employment is effectively insulated from those same vagaries. 

Just as significantly, many of our politicians – especially those who aspire to become career politicians – figured out that pandering to public employees and the unions that represent them could facilitate those aspirations. That has created a political-legal landscape which places the taxpayers at risk of being fleeced every time one of their governmental bodies enters into negotiations with a public employee union. 

As we’ve seen even in our sleepy little burg, public-sector unions seem to consistently outfox the City’s well-paid negotiators and their even better-paid outside labor lawyers who “specialize” in public-sector matters and have learned from years of experience what kind of wage and benefit increases they can give away while keeping the politicians sedated, the public somnolent, and the legal fees rolling in.

That’s one big reason why public employee wages have continued to increase by percentages that often exceed both the cost of living and what their private-sector peers get.  Public-sector pension and health benefits have become the envy of those very private-sector folks who are footing the bill for those benefits while trying to figure out how to keep their own 401(k)s from becoming 41(k)s.  And let’s not forget all those holidays and other days off (MLK’s Birthday, Casimir Pulaski Day…) that most private-sector employees haven’t enjoyed since grammar school.

As if that weren’t enough, the chances that our teachers and our police and fire personnel might get fired, or see their jobs moved to another state or outsourced to Mexico, are virtually non-existent.

All of which is an admittedly longish lead-in to our question: What’s going on with the teacher negotiations over at Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District 64?

D-64 gets a full one-third, and then some, of our property tax payments, but it may be the most adept of all our local governmental bodies in avoiding serious scrutiny and keeping meaningful information under wraps.  Heck, it didn’t even start videotaping its meetings until last summer, 3 years after the City started and more than a decade after the Park District initiated that practice.

As we understand it, the current contract between D-64 and the teachers union – benignly calling itself the “Park Ridge Education Association” (“PREA”) because, presumably, something with “education” in it is much more marketable than “teachers union” – expires this summer.  Yet from what we hear the negotiations haven’t even begun.

From the perspective of bargaining strategy and tactics, that already gives a 15-love advantage to the PREA – because the closer it can drag out the negotiations to the beginning of the next school year, the better the odds of its being able to stampede D-64 parents and the lightweight D-64 School Board majority into wage and benefit concessions so as to ensure that the schools open on time; or, in other words, to avoid any teacher strike that might play havoc with the work and social schedules of so many D-64 parents.

And that delay also earns PREA a 30-love advantage by eliminating lay-offs (or “RIF”s, in school district parlance) as a D-64 bargaining tool.  That’s because, as we understand it, staffing decisions for next school year effectively became locked in as of April 1 – meaning that every teacher staffing position provided for at that time is guaranteed for next school year.

Although lay-offs have more power in negotiations with police and fire employees whose statutory collective bargaining process includes mandatory binding arbitration if agreement can’t be reached, the threat of layoffs can still be a powerful reality check when employee demands become unreasonable or onerous.  The PREA’s ability to delay the negotiations beyond the lay-off deadline, however, took that tool out of D-64’s toolbox.

But where the PREA takes game, set and match is the provision it was able to finagle into the current contract (and possibly previous ones) that requires secrecy about the negotiations until the parties reach a tentative agreement or formal impasse – the same kind of bargaining arrangement that Park Ridge City Mgr. Jim Hock and both the City’s regular and labor attorneys tried to sucker the City Council into adopting as Hock’s ridiculous Council Policy No. 8. 

Being able to insist on “secret” collective bargaining not only enables but actually emboldens the unions to make outrageous demands, knowing that the public won’t hear about those demands until after the deal is done, if ever.  In closed sessions, union negotiators can be uncompromising, dismissive and even belligerent with impunity, and then put on their very best “Eddie Haskell” persona when they finally emerge into public view.

For teachers, that persona is the well-burnished “for the kids” trope; for police and fire personnel, it’s the heroic “first responders” image.  Either way, those personae have been crafted to appeal to, and to exploit, the ignorance, the naivete, and the goodwill of the average taxpaying citizen.  And it’s those personae that have greased the way for the growth in public-sector wages and benefits to where they have become unsustainable.

But don’t expect the public employees, their unions, or most of our politicians to do anything about it…other than to continue to hide what they’re doing from the taxpayers until the deals are done.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Tuesday’s post addressed a lack of candor by Park Ridge City Manager Jim Hock in connection with the City’s labor negotiations.  Hock’s efforts to keep “the public” in the dark about what our City officials are doing when it comes to employee compensation is, in or opinion, reprehensible.

But Hock is not alone in his apparent disdain for “the public” and it’s need – and right – to know how its government operates, and at what cost.

Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District 64 makes City government look like transparency central when it comes to much of its activities.  And when it comes to the District’s negotiations with the teachers union known as the Park Ridge Educational Association (“PREA”), transparency is so lacking that – as we understand it – not even all School Board members are welcome at those teacher contract meetings. 

That’s because the PREA, with the spineless acquiescence of the School Board, foolishly built into the current teacher contract (signed in 2009) a provision requiring non-disclosure of negotiations information.  Chalk that up to the handiwork of Board president John Heyde and member Eric Uhlig, rubber stamped by the remainder of the board at that time.  

We’d like to be able to report exactly how the PREA negotiators and D-64 negotiators Heyde and member Pat Fioretto are conspiring to shake even more shekels out of D-64 taxpayers, but we can’t.  And neither the Illnois Open Meetings Act (“IOMA”) nor the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) are any real help in getting that information.

So as D-64’s ISAT scores stagnate in mediocrity, as Carpenter School continues to play musical principals, and as taxpayers try to figure out what they are getting for the tax dollars they pour into the District’s coffers, Heyde and Company play footsie with the teachers union.

And “the public” remains none the wiser.

To read or post comments, click on title.

As we wrote in Monday’s post, the “Labor Negotiations Guidelines” proposed by City Manager Jim Hock are exactly the wrong way for the City to go about negotiating union contracts.  That’s because public sector collective bargaining bears little resemblance to its private sector counterpart. 

Private sector employers are profit-driven. They want to maximize their profits for the shareholders’ benefit.  One way to do that is to minimize costs – including labor costs.  Collective bargaining in the private sector, therefore, is the product of both management and labor keeping their cards close to their vest, bluffing when they can, and generally producing a level of creative tension that usually facilitates a reasonable balance between the employers’ and employees’ interests.

Public sector employers, on the other hand, are governmental bodies who tend to be viewed by their own bureaucratic managers as “non-profit” entities.  That view fosters a give-away mentality, because the bureaucrats generally have no real incentive to minimize labor costs or operate more efficiently.  To the contrary, increased raises and benefits given away to the unionized workers, and a larger workforce under management, can actually be used to justify higher raises and benefits for those “managers.”

That symbiotic coziness between public sector unions and the governmental managers is a key reason why bureaucrats like Hock would prefer to keep union negotiations hidden from public view – as we saw with the recent firefighters union contract, where lead City negotiator Chief Mike Zywanski (presumably with Hock’s approval) proposed “Ground Rules” that kept negotiations secret and effectively put a gag on the elected officials.  And, as we saw in the aftermath of those negotiations that guaranteed the union firefighters a non-merit, across-the-board raise of 6% over the next 3 years, the non-union salaried City employees were given non-merit, across-the-board raises shortly thereafter.

Another reason why negotiations are kept secret is that the public officials who are supposed to be negotiating on behalf of the taxpayers often have strong ties to the union side of the table.  In the case of Chief Z, he reportedly spent much of his career as a firefighters union member; and his non-Park Ridge taxpayer status (he resides in the Naperville area) doesn’t even provide any “taxpayer” self-interest as a counter-weight to that sense of firefighter fraternity.   

Even when we have elected officials involved in the collective bargaining, however, those officials often are proven go-along-to-get-along types (like D-64 Board president John Heyde), or outright union sympathizers (like D-64 Board member/union attorney Pat Fioretto).  No wonder Heyde and Fioretto don’t want even fellow D-64 Board members sitting in on the teachers union negotiations.

But perhaps the most significant reason why negotiations are conducted in “closed” sessions outside the public and media view is because the unions want it that way. 

Irrespective of whatever lofty mantle a particular union wraps itself in for marketing purposes – “first responders” for police and fire, “for the kids” for teachers – the last thing those unions want is for the taxpayers to see and hear, firsthand, the unions’ demands; or for those taxpayers to be exposed to a weeks/months-long stream of meeting video, news reports and press releases detailing the costs of whatever compensation and benefit packages are being negotiated. 

They’d prefer the taxpayers hear about that stuff only once, after the deal is tentatively struck and being rushed through the City Council or school board for final approval.

That’s why we’d like to see the City – and all our other local governmental bodies – adopt ordinances requiring that all union contracts be negotiated publicly, in meetings open to the public and videotaped for those who can’t attend in person.  Let the taxpayers see and hear the respective sides’ demands, offers, and negotiating “styles” so that they can judge for themselves who is being reasonable and who is not.

Prior to any such negotiation, however, each governmental body would have to make a determination – in open session, probably in the context of the budget process – how much it believes it can/should appropriate for union (and non-union) employee compensation and benefits for the coming year; and, if possible, projections for 2-3 years out.  That way, the public could weigh in on the fairness/reasonableness of those numbers even before negotiations commence.

But don’t expect this to happen anytime soon.

When Mayor Schmidt suggested the possibility of open-session bargaining at Monday night’s COW meeting, Hock called it an “unfair labor practice” (“ULP”) almost before Schmidt finished his sentence – although City Attorney “Buzz” Hill didn’t offer an opinion either way on Hock’s claim.

While we don’t claim to be experts in public employment law, we could find nothing in the Illinois statutes or in case decisions that support Hock’s position.  While labor negotiations are a permitted exception to the Illinois Open Meetings Act’s requirement of open proceedings, neither IOMA nor any other law we could find prohibits open-session negotiations.  And open session collective bargaining – under so-called “sunshine” laws – has been the rule in states such as Florida for years.

Schmidt asked Buzz to look into it and report back to the Council, so we look forward to what he will find.

We wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Hill reports that not only are open-session union negotiations permitted (and, therefore, not a ULP), but that the City’s adoption and enforcement of Hock’s misguided “guidelines” would violate IOMA while also actually providing the unions with a basis for claiming a ULP if, for example, any information about negotiations were to slip out of the “confidential” bargaining sessions Hock wants to impose!

But apparently that’s the kind of sharp thinking that gets Hock the big bucks.

To read or post comments, click on title.

There are a few matters of interest on tonight’s City Council COW agenda, including the “transparency” of the backgrounds and qualifications of all those appointed City officials sitting on boards, commissions and task forces.  That’s one that’s near and dear to our hearts, as our posts on 01.17.12 and 02.20.12 confirm. 

But a more immediate and, arguably, more consequential matter on the agenda is billed as “Labor Negotiation Guidelines.”  City Mgr. Jim Hock has prepared (with the help of temporary “HR Consultant” Mike Suppan) a document by that name filled with a lot of typical HR feel-good mumbo-jumbo that looks as if it was designed to bamboozle the simpler-minded folks around The Horseshoe while keeping the actual negotiations themselves away from the mayor and the aldermen.

If the Council approves these guidelines, it will be demonstrating that it learned nothing from the Hock/Fire Chief Zywanski/atty. Dina Kapernekas fiasco of the just-resolved firefighters union contract, which we addressed in several posts, including “The City’s Three Amnesiacs…Or Three Liars” (05.19.11), “One Bite At A Time” (05.23.11) and  “Firemen Renege, Hock Conceals, Council Hides, Taxpayers Pay” (1207.11).

Why?

Let’s start with Hock’s provision (in paragraph 3) that “[t]he Human Resources Manager and at times, any labor attorney approved by the City Council will represent the City at the negotiation table.”  That’s eerily similar to the model that gave us the Chief Z/Kapernekas tag team and the decidedly taxpayer-unfriendly firefighters contract. 

And if that paradigm isn’t enough, by itself, to justify nuking those guidelines, let’s try the fact that Hock just appointed a new Human Resources Manager, former Community Preservation & Development Manager Cathy Doczekalski, who appears to have no meaningful human resources education, training or background experience – much like her predecessor, who recently resigned her City position after a botched attempt to manipulate salary brackets to increase the compensation of the non-union City employees.

That means the City’s negotiating team will be headed by someone woefully inexperienced in such negotiations.  But it gets worse. 

Hock wants the negotiations to be “confidential” – meaning that the mayor and the aldermen cannot “publicly discuss any contract issues…unless a formal declaration of impasse has been made.”  And just to be sure that such information stays secret, Hock includes a provision that not only permits closed session discussions of the negotiations, but that also requires that such “closed session discussions must remain confidential” – which sure sounds like a violation of the Illinois Open Meetings Act to us!

But that’s indicative of the way Hock, and most bureaucrats, view “transparency”: if there’s a way to get around it so that the public remains in the dark, so much the better.   Just ask D-64 Board president John Heyde, who reportedly has the teacher union negotiations so locked down that no D-64 board members other than he and fellow “negotiating team” member Pat Fioretto are permitted even to attend the negotiations.

And when it comes to labor negotiations, the last thing the unions want is to have all their demands displayed before the taxpayers in real time.  That might put a smudge or two on the angelic personae they all try to cultivate in the public’s mind, whether they be “first responders” or “for the kids”-committed teachers.

That’s why we previously proposed (in “One Bite At A Time”) that all City labor negotiations be conducted in open meetings subject to full public scrutiny:

Let the City decide, as part of its very public budget process, what wage and benefit terms are affordable and in the best interest of the taxpayers for the coming year, and only for the coming year.  The City should then publicly offer those exact terms to the union representing the particular bargaining unit; and then let that union make its case, equally publicly, to those same taxpayers if it thinks its members deserve more than what the City offered. 

That way, it wouldn’t matter nearly as much which bureaucrat is chosen to “lead” the City’s negotiating team (except, of course, for the irredeemable Chief Z), although that team still should have at least one elected City official – either the mayor or a capable alderman – to represent and be accountable to the taxpayers in the ways most bureaucrats can’t or won’t. 

But for now, the City Council should tell Hock in no uncertain terms that his “Labor Negotiation guidelines” are non-starters so long as they contain anything that would prevent City officials from treating the details of all future negotiations like an open book.

Or, better yet, like an open City meeting video.

UPDATE:  Listening to Hock last night defend his “guidelines,” it was difficult to tell whether he is totally clueless or a shameless dissembler. 

Either he still doesn’t understand the workings of the Illinois Open Meetings Act, especially the “closed session” provisions, or he’s so concerned about secrecy that he doesn’t care about violating IOMA – which observing his “guidelines” would definitely do.  And, interestingly enough, whenever the discussion moved in the direction of opening up and shedding more light on the negotiations process, Hock would try to stop it by chirping “unfair labor practice” (“ULP”) – as if he were a trained parrot…perched on the shoulder of a union negotiator. 

Or like the little boy who cried “Wolf!”

Query for Mr. Hock: If conducting collective bargaining in an open forum in front of the public really is a ULP, then why do you need “guidelines” that expressly provide for all these confidentiality requirements?  Wouldn’t the “guidelines” actually give the unions the basis for a ULP claim where currently there is none?

Fortunately, Mayor Schmidt called Hock on his ULP invocations and requested the City Attorney to look into exactly how much open-ness could be applied to negotiations without the City’s committing a ULP.  We can’t wait to hear Buzz Hill’s answer(s).

To read or post comments, click on title.