The Perks Keep On Flowing
Charge It To My Card: Search the Water District’s Expenses
For more than a decade, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago has been paying a number of employees more than the market rate, documents obtained by the Chicago News Cooperative show.
Leaders of Cook County’s waste-water treatment agency have defended high employee salaries as necessary to retain well-educated employees who they say could find even better-paying jobs in the private sector. The practice continues even as many taxpayer-based agencies have had to freeze or cut salaries to make up for revenue shortfalls.
A 1999 salary study conducted for the district by outside consultants identified employees “being paid over the market rate,” records show. Rather than reducing the pay of those employees, to put their wages in line with the market rate, district officials instead have continued to pay those employees above-market salaries for the past 11 years. The employees have continued to receive cost-of-living and merit-pay increases during that timeframe.
“A change … was made so that the incumbents of these positions would not receive a reduction in pay,” the district’s executive director, Richard Lanyon, wrote in an Aug. 12 memo to his elected Board of Commissioners.
Now strapped for cash due to a revenue shortfall estimated at $24 million, Lanyon has suggested that the board consider bringing those salaries down to the market rate to save money.
There are 71 employees who are listed as “overpaid,” district documents show. Nine of these workers each are paid at least $5,000 a year more than the market rate. One official enjoys a salary that is $10,657 above market rate, according to Lanyon’s memo, which did not name specific employees who benefit from the policy.
Pegging back their salaries would save the district $204,000 over the next two years, Lanyon said. He recommended phasing out the rule over two years “to reduce impact to affected employees.”
As employees with above-market salaries have retired, the district has hired their replacement for lower, at-market wages, Lanyon said.
Costing the district another $103,000 every year is a policy requiring that all supervisors have salaries at least 5 percent greater than their highest-paid subordinate.
Lanyon recently recommended eliminating this “supervisory differential” policy.
He also suggested that the district save money by either cutting pay by 2 percent or instituting unpaid furlough days. The district historically has given employees both cost-of-living raises and merit pay increases.
In his budget memo to the board, Lanyon wrote that the district could conduct a new salary study. That would cost between $80,000 and $200,000 and take as long as two years, Lanyon said.
Besides high salaries, district employees enjoy benefits that are far greater than the packages offered to public workers in other local governments. Many agency employees get 15 days of sick leave every year, compared to 12 days for most state, county and Chicago workers.
The budget crunch could force the district to cut annual sick leave days to 10, Lanyon said.