It was the big money grab Monday night. Oak Park village trustees voted themselves a whopping 100 percent pay raise. Or is it 1,000 percent? I’m bad with decimals. Anyhow, they increased their haul from $7,500 to $15,000 per meeting, err, per year.
And the mayor/village president, who started all this foolish talk about getting a pay raise, well he got boosted from $10,8000 to $25,000. Now remember, when Mayor Anan Abu-Taleb first suggested several months back that he was undercompensated, he was initially looking for money in the village manager league. He fairly quickly pared that back to, oh, say, $75,000. So anyway you slice it, getting to $25,000 is only a moral victory.
Now the trustees point out that they hadn’t had an increase in their pay — ahem, they like to call it a stipend, but it still spends — since 1996. Hell, Bill Clinton was still screwing around in the White House back in 1996. That’s a long time to go without. A raise, I mean.
Fine print time: The raises voted on Monday go into effect after next April’s election and only apply to trustees (and the village president) who are on the April ballot. In other words, trustees Bob Tucker, Adam Salzman and Andrea Button-Ott, who were re-elected without opposition two years ago, get no pay raise for at least another two years. Poor kittens.
Imagine the tension this will cause at the board table when rookie trustees ask innocent questions about why the hell actuaries can’t agree on when retirees will actually kick off or how to create a new TIF without telling the school districts. I can just hear Tucker now. “Been there. Done that. And you whippersnapper, don’t think I don’t know that you’re pocketing two bucks for every one of mine!”
My suggestion is that we start a GoFundMe page for the soon-to-be underpaid trustees. Sort of a beer, babysitting and baseball slush fund so the trustees can still run a tab at the post-meeting watering hole, pay for the sitter in the case of young parents Salzman and Button-Ott, and, heck, who doesn’t like the White Sox?
Now that the word is out about 100 percent pay hikes on the table, we will indubitably see many more candidates surface for the April election. So far we have four announced. But I’m betting we’ll get to a dozen at $15K. Not a bad part-time job. Evening hours. Clean work. And everyone calls you “Your honor.” Beats watching the Bulls.
Reminds me of the slate of Republican candidates for the Oak Park Township board who came to Wednesday Journal many, many years ago for an endorsement interview. Why are you running, was the softball question opener. “To do good for God and man. Because township government is the essential entity of government. Can’t imagine life without it. Can you? And I could really use that paycheck.”
We let them down gently. There is no paycheck. Focus on doing good for God and man. It will all be all right.
These pay raises amount to a rounding error in the village budget. And once we agreed to start paying them something for their troubles, it was inevitable that someone would ask for their every-two-decade raise.
