Dear Geneva,
The fact that a mere 12.98 percent of Kane County denizens managed to make it to the polls last week is beyond disheartening. While conservatives rant and rave about our “socialist” president, they didn’t even bother to vote despite the fact that local taxing bodies are responsible for 66 percent of their total tax bill.
All this immense apathy does is give elected officials the green light to do whatever the heck they want. And this very dynamic was particularly evident at the March 25th City Council COW meeting.
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Under the guise of what Assistant City Manager Stephanie Dawkins called “salary range compression” the city slyly attempted pass out 2.5 percent raises to staffers who’d already maxed out on their salary range.
Not only is it blatantly against city policy, but Alderman Chuck Brown wryly noted that if you’re increasing the minimum and maximum ranges, it really ain’t “compression,” it’s actually called a pay raise.
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It wouldn’t be nearly as bad if the Mayor and administrators hadn’t previously told us that, during the worst of the Great Recession, salaries had been either frozen or raises were relegated no more than 1 percent.
But the truth is, as I proved right here, some of the highest paid city employees did much better than that while the rest of us were taking pay cuts.
With the average Geneva non-police and fire staffer making $66,000 a year, an across-the-board 2.5 percent raise doesn’t seem to add up to too much — just $200,000 a year. But it’s when you annualize and amortize that process over the next 20 years, that realize it will cost taxpayers up to $30 million in pension liability.
Because Aldermen Brown and Rich Marks caught on to this fiscal sleight-of-hand, the Mayor dropped it from any before-the-election city council meeting. But trust me, it will come up again. Though it’s not currently listed on the April 15 agenda, that doesn’t mean it’s not hidden in some other item.
I go into this subject much more detail in my blog post titled, “You Pay for What you Get,” on thefirstward.net.
The bottom line is, sometimes the cost of not voting can be pretty steep.
