We want to offer a big Watchdog bark-out to the Park Ridge City Council, which took a major step – actually a leap – toward full transparency and accountability in its labor relations at its August 3 meeting when it voted 4 (Alds. Milissis, Knight, Mazzuca and Maloney) to 2 (Alds. Moran and Shubert) against going into closed session to discuss the terms of contracts with the police sergeants union (the Federation of Police) and the patrol officers union (the Teamsters).
The seven sergeants are represented by the Fraternal Order of Police, while forty patrol officers and support personnel are represented by the Teamsters.
We applaud the Council for taking this action, which is one part of a more comprehensive plan we advocated in our 06.08.15 post, “Time For A Better Way To Negotiate Public Sector Union Contracts.”
For decades, public sector unions in Illinois have manipulated closed-session negotiations to hide their sometimes/often outrageous demands, as well as their bargaining postures and tactics, from the very taxpayers from whom they are looking for more money without providing additional or better quality services. And for decades they generally got their way with clueless and spineless public officials who, truth be told, were just as happy to keep their cluelessness and spinelessness hidden from their constituents.
The result?
Multi-year contracts locking in annual raises unrelated to measurable improvement in performance or greater economic efficiencies. As reported in a Park Ridge Herald-Advocate story, “City Council skips closed session over for [sic] police contract negotiations” (08.11.15), the proposed four-year contract with the Teamsters provides for pay raises of 2% in years 1 and 2, and 1.5% in the final two years.
Although our local “mainstream” media didn’t report it, the Teamsters contract will have a “net impact” (i.e., increase) on the City’s budget of $153,239, or 1.16% of their annual payroll, while the net increase proposed for the seven sergeants is $116,387, or 6.06% of their annual payroll.
And because this is Illinois where the fleecing of the taxpayers has been institutionalized for at least the past 30 years, City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton pointed out that awards from “interest arbitration” – where an often union-friendly arbitrator decides contract terms when negotiations of police and fire contracts reach impasse, due to the police and firemen being legally prohibited from striking – are around 2.25%. Hamilton’s implication was clear: the City can save money by voluntarily grabbing its ankles rather than hanging tough and risking that a pro-union arbitrator will ram home a bigger increase, on top of whatever legal fees and other costs the City will have incurred in connection with such an arbitration.
As best as we can tell from the materials Hamilton presented to the Council on August 3, by the last year of the proposed sergeants contract (2017) a newly-minted sergeant will make $100K, and over $105K with 4 years’ experience – while by the last year of the Teamsters contract (FY 2018) newly-minted patrol officers will be making $61K-plus, with a top-end of $88,500.
Oh, yeah…one other thing: 37 0f the 41 patrol officers currently on the force are already at the maximum base salary under the existing contract, which is $82,164.
To put these salaries in perspective, a patrol officer currently makes over 87% of the median Park Ridge household income. Yes, that’s right: 37 of 41 patrol officers are already making over 87% of what half of entire households of Park Ridge taxpayers currently earn.
And if we understand the pension deal, both the sergeants and the patrolmen will be able to retire at 75% of their final salary, and 3% annual COLAs, by around age 50, assuming sufficient years of service. Under the proposed new salary schedules, that calculates out to over $75K/year for the sergeants, and more than $66K/year for the patrolmen.
Should they live to age 85, each of those pensions will likely be worth upwards of $2 million!
Can you say “Suh-weeet”?
And just in case the public employee unions haven’t beaten it into you sufficiently by now, remember that most public employees here in Illinois don’t get Social Security. That means they don’t get that whopping $45K/year of S.S. benefits those of us in the private sector will be raking in…assuming we can keep working until age 70 and max out our contributions and benefits before we start drawing on them.
Just because the Council is willing to conduct its discussions about what it can afford to offer the unions, and why, however, doesn’t mean the unions have to reciprocate.
Don’t expect them to try to justify their demands for higher pay for no additional, or better, work when they can simply chant “inflation” and throw around “comparables” from other communities that really aren’t all that comparable to Park Ridge when you actually look at each community’s unique facts and figures beyond what they pay their police and firemen.
But by taking the transparency high-ground, the City Council stands in stark contrast to the secretive unions. And as Ald. Milissis pointed out, there doesn’t appear to be any true benefit to the City’s contriving secret negotiating strategies when those strategies never seem to work – as demonstrated by the unions always walking away with some kind of non-merit based raise.
The bottom line is that secrecy has NEVER worked for the taxpayers of Park Ridge, just like it hasn’t worked for any other Illinois taxpayers. So there’s no need to keep doing it and expecting different results.
Unless, of course, you are the D-64 and D-207 school board members who act as if they are owned – lock, stock and barrel – by the teachers’ unions and the school administrators. Then you run into closed sessions and give away the store.
To be clear: these arguments are not intended to be anti-police or anti-firemen. Nor are they anti-teacher or administrator.
They are pro-taxpayer.
By being transparent and accountable to the taxpayers concerning these labor relations matters, the City Council will now be able to enlist those taxpayers’ support for what it offers the employees and how the City bargains with the unions representing those employees. And the taxpayers can judge for themselves whether their representatives are treating the City’s employees fairly.
As Thomas Jefferson wrote in September of 1820:
I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their controul with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is, not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.
Like with more open-session discussions and fewer closed ones.
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