As we’ve repeatedly pointed out in past posts, our various branches of local government always seem to be overmatched when collectively bargaining with the unions that represent most of our public employees.

Tonight the Park Ridge City Council Committee of the Whole (“COW”) is scheduled to discuss City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton’s Agenda Cover Memorandum on the current state of the City’s labor negotiations and unfair labor practice charges.  A review of that report suggests that the City is not even close to getting its labor costs and bargaining practices under control – or establishing a workable, pro-active plan for getting the taxpayers fair value for those ever-rising labor costs.

The report starts with the Local 150 Operating Engineers (“OEs”) contract, which passed the Council by a 4-3 vote but was then vetoed by Mayor Dave Schmidt because he wasn’t convinced that the promised health insurance savings promised by the OEs would actually be realized.  While we await the vote to sustain or overturn Schmidt’s veto, the City’s labor attorneys – Robert Smith and his Rosemont firm of Clark Baird Smith, LLP – continue to battle the OEs on two related unfair labor practice charges before an Illinois Labor Relations Board administrative law judge.

Unfortunately, these ULPs tend to be decided in favor of the unions because the vast majority of the ALJs who decide them are pro-union lawyers placed on the state payroll by the clout of the ruling Democrats who need to keep the public-sector unions happy.  Chalk that up as yet another cost of one-party rule in Illinois for the past 30+ years.

But that doesn’t mean the City should just roll over any time the unions beef about something – even in a situation such as this one, where it looks and sounds like either the City’s crack negotiating team was asleep at the wheel when it came time for properly documenting the “deal” it claims it obtained from the OEs, or it simply got suckered and slickered by its union counterpart.

The report also talks about the upcoming firefighters contract negotiations.  The City’s negotiating team will once again be headed by Fire Chief Mike Zywanski, which is like giving the firefighters union an extra negotiator and a blank check.  Chief Z is the guy who proposed those secretive negotiating “Ground Rules” a few years ago, then didn’t have the basic integrity even to raise his hand and admit he did it when Schmidt asked who was responsible for agreeing to something so stupid.

All of this, however, is just re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

So long as the City continues to go along with a process where it budgets arbitrary amounts of tax dollars with the expectation of raises and benefit increases, then sits back and waits for the unions’ arbitrary and excessive demands, it will continue to commit increasingly more funding for services that are neither more numerous nor better than what is currently being provided.

That’s because the unions and the employees they represent don’t care about greater productivity, greater efficiency, or better service.  The last thing they want is raises and benefit increases tied to such measures.  So each negotiation starts off with a set of union demands that have no basis in anything but the unions’ wish list.

Their goal, at a minimum, is to lock in what amounts to cost-of-living allowances (“COLAs”) which are intended to do nothing more but make taxpayers the guarantors of the purchasing power of these employees’ wages.  If the price of gasoline, or milk, or housing, or anything else included in the Consumer Price Index goes up, these unions want to make sure their members get enough additional money to cover those increases.

How many private-sector Park Ridge taxpayers get such COLAs?  We’re betting not many.

But when it comes to being lost in the funhouse regarding labor costs, the City isn’t just clueless with unionized employees.  It may also be an equal-opportunity bungler when it comes to non-union staffing, as has been the case with the various raises it has given those employees with no thought to greater productivity, efficiency or value.

And yet another example of that is on tonight’s COW agenda under “Economic Development Coordinator proposal,” which gets its own City Mgr. Memorandum to explain why the City needs to create a new position of highly-questionable worth.

Hamilton spends six paragraphs positively gushing over all the miracles – “grow our business tax base,” “reduce the property tax dependency of our residents,” and create “the competitive advantage the City can realize” – an $80,000/year ED coordinator will perform.  Not surprisingly, he offers no business plan or any metrics for evaluating the success or failure of this new incarnation of a position that was eliminated back in 2010 because it produced little beyond a $120,000/year expense.

Sadly, that’s the kind of lightweight work product we’ve come to expect from Hamilton, for whom we and other Park Ridge residents had so much hope when he was hired back in the summer of 2012.  The only redeeming quality of his latest brainchild is that it will cost the taxpayers $40,000 less than its predecessor.

Hamilton actually may have been out-gushed, however, by the president of the Park Ridge Chamber of Commerce, whose letter predicts even more miracles from the new ED coordinator, including “more long-awaited shopping, dining, and service options for Park Ridge residents” that will “improve the attractiveness of Park Ridge as a place to buy a home.”  And it that’s not enough, the Chamber pres suggests that when the new coordinator isn’t busy shilling for the business community he/she can also help people “find the [social] services they need.”

Brilliant!  The position hasn’t even been created yet, but the Chamber is already advocating a kind of mission-creep which can be used to justify the employee’s retention if/when he/she fumbles the primary economic development task.

We suspect neither Hamilton nor the Chamber want the taxpayers to think about how, despite not having any such ED employee on the City’s payroll for the past four years, Park Ridge was able to land a Whole Foods, a Mariano’s, a Chipotle, a Jersey Mike’s, and other businesses, the cumulative total of which absolutely dwarfs anything any City ED employee or department have generated in more than a decade.  Nor do they want the taxpayers to realize what a joke the Chamber has become at actually promoting Park Ridge as a viable business community.

At least not until after the new ED coordinator position is approved.

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