If you’re a top-ranked bureaucrat employed by one of our local governmental units, you are pulling down a six-figure salary and benefits such as a taxpayer-guaranteed pension that’s more than double – and sometimes even triple – what their private-sector courterparts will get from Social Security.

But when it comes time for our elected officials to evaluate the performance of these bureaucrats and dole out raises, the folks we elect to keep a keen eye on our local governmental units for us usually run into closed session and hide their deliberations from taxpayer view.  Often those elected officials rationalize the secrecy by claiming that’s the only way they can have “candid” discussions – which causes us to wonder how much less than “candid” are all the discussions they actually have in open session?

Make no mistake about it, however: those closed-session evaluations are far less about candor than about avoiding transparency and accountability to the taxpayers who foot the bills.

So a Watchdog bark-out goes out today to the Park Ridge Park District Board for its current evaluation process of executive director Gayle Mountcastle.

For the first time in Park District history as we know it, the Park Board is conducting what appears to be the closest thing to an “open” evaluation process conducted by any local governing body – with the possible exception of the time the Park Ridge City Council openly discussed then-city manager Jim Hock’s failure to meet a number of performance criteria the Council had set for him near the end of his tenure.

At its March 6th meeting, the Park Board held the majority of Mountcastle’s review in open session (running from approx. 1:50:20 through 2:12:43, and then from approx. 2:19:20 through 3:15:49 of the Board’s meeting video.  Since then, it has produced for public viewing a Performance Review of that evaluation and salary recommendation that will be discussed and voted on at tonight’s Board meeting; and Mountcastle prepared her own evaluation of her goals and achievements that is also part of the packet for tonight’s meeting (7:30 p.m., 2701 W. Sibley Street) available for public inspection.

We put little-to-no stock in consultants’ studies like the one the Board commissioned from McGladrey to design a “market-based” compensation program for the District’s full-time staff.  Such studies are inherently flawed because: (a) they are not based on the specific value of a specific employee to this specific district but, instead, are based on what other districts pay their employees – for whatever reasons, based on whatever resources those other districts may have that our Park District doesn’t, etc.; and (b) they seem to assume an unrealistic level of mobility of these employees.

When it comes to government in Illinois, what “somebody else” is doing usually is no better, and often worse, than what your own governmental unit is doing.  And it’s usually irrelevant, given the substantial dissimilarities between and among allegedly “comparable” communities, park districts and school districts that consultants conveniently tend to ignore.

So adding a 3.0 % raise to Mountcastle’s current $143,225 salary in response to what appears to be a C+/B- evaluation (3.75 out of 5.0) seems both arbitrary and overly-generous, especially because the Performance Review clearly doesn’t capture the kind of specifics the taxpayers deserve about how their elected representatives actually came up with that 3.75 rating and a corresponding 3.0% raise – specifics we assume were hidden away in the closed-session portion of the March 6 meeting, or a prior one, in the interest of “candid” discussions.

But we’re not going to let a desire for “great” become the enemy of the “good” that this Park Board has achieved – under the leadership of president Rick Biagi – when it comes to shifting the paradigm from secrecy to transparency in the evaluation of the District’s equivalent of a corporation’s CEO.

And this evaluation process should serve notice on the City Council and the Boards of D-64 and D-207 that this level of transparency and accountability – and even more of it – can be achieved if our elected representatives on those bodies start showing a bit more concern for the taxpayers who pay these salaries than for the employees who pocket them.

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