Within the past couple of weeks, the heretofore unthinkable happened.

The new mayor of that political cesspool known as Chicago, and the almost-new president of the Crook County board, both announced that their respective branches of government were going to get salaries under control or there would be more layoffs – in excess of 1,000 at the county level, along with furloughs and the loss of paid holidays; and more than 500 in Chicago, along with eliminating almost 800 vacant positions.

But here in Park Ridge, our public officials not only keep giving out raises without a care in the world, but they also sweeten the pot with additional benefits like the no-layoff provision contained in the new firefighters union contract – presumably to prevent themselves from correcting their mistake at a later date should their judgment ever return.

Monday night, by a 6-1 vote (Ald. Dan Knight dissenting), the Council over-rode Mayor Dave Schmidt’s veto of the contract between the City and the firefighters union – in an empty Council chambers as the clock worked its way toward midnight, after a closed-session discussion orchestrated by the City’s highly-paid “labor attorney” Dina Kapernekas, whose hiring and compensation arrangement we still haven’t been able to find memorialized in any of the Council meeting minutes.

Such 11th-hour maneuvering is a slap in the face of anybody who believes in transparent government.  That’s even more true when the maneuvering endorses a contract that was negotiated under a public-information blackout agreed to by Fire Chief Mike Zywanski without the good sense of consulting with the mayor or the Council prior to agreeing to it; and without the integrity of admitting to what he did when the mayor first asked about it at the May 2nd meeting – unless his initial silence was intended to buy time for him and certain other City employees to get their stories straight and persuade Chief Z to wear the jacket?

Not surprisingly, four of the six aldermen casting over-ride votes (Alds. Sweeney, DiPietro, Raspanti and Maloney) Monday night didn’t even feel any obligation to publicly explain the reason(s) for those votes, limiting themselves to a simple “no” when they were polled on the motion to sustain the veto.  Apparently they don’t care whether or how the firefighters are supposed to actually earn their 2% bump in 2012-13 and their 3% bump in 2013-14.  2-3% quicker response times on fire calls?  2-3% greater success rate on paramedic resuscitations?  2-3% reductions in fire damages?  2-3% more cats removed from trees?

Or is the real point of their sphinx-like silence that they truly believe City employees do not need to actually earn their raises in this madcap world of public-sector unionized employment?  Or in the equally madcap public-sector non-unionized employment, for that matter – as we saw from this same merry band’s approval of an amended 2011-12 budget back in May that included 3% across-the-board raises for the City’s non-union employees – with only Schmidt and Knight dissenting?

Only Alds. Tom Bernick (6th) and Jim Smith (3rd) gave any clue to their reasons for their veto over-ride votes, and Smith’s was little more than a call to “move on.”

Bernick, on the other hand, called it “a very good contract” despite being unable to articulate anything “good” about it other than that it would eliminate any chance of the union demanding costly arbitration.  In fact, Bernick sounds so terrified of arbitration that he may have crowned himself the Council’s new “Chicken Little,” title vacated by former Ald. Jim Allegretti – especially in light of Kapernekas’ admission that the City’s turning down the contract didn’t make arbitration a certainty because the City and the union still could agree to resume negotiations over those two points on which Schmidt based his veto: the 3% year-three raise and the no-layoff provision.

Bernick’s expressed arbitration-phobia and the “sphinx”-aldermen’s unexplained over-ride votes become far more problematic, however, is in how these bad contract terms affect future negotiations and contracts. 

As Schmidt correctly noted in his comments immediately prior to the over-ride vote, by agreeing to these terms the City is effectively setting a new baseline for subsequent negotiations…and any subsequent arbitration award.  In other words, by agreeing to the 3% year-three raise and the no-layoff provision, the City has now given the firefighters union (and every other City-employee union?) carte blanche to treat those terms as an entitlement in future negotiations…and has given any arbitrator carte blanche to award those terms in any future arbitration.

What this vote (and the prior vote to adopt this flawed contract) also does is effectively announce that these aldermen, save for one, are pushovers: six Neville Chamberlain wannabes going belly up for the union and then proudly waving this contract above their heads while proclaiming labor “peace in our time.”  

Can you say “entitlement,” Alds. Sweeney, DiPietro, Smith, Raspanti, Bernick and Maloney? 

We knew you could.

Now, how about “appeasement”?

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