EDITORIAL: Reining in Chicago’s six-figure salary club

In Chicago, more than 4 of every 10 city employees are paid $100,000 or more.

We think that’s ridiculous.

Especially when the average household income in Chicago — not individual income, but household — is a modest $84,000.

And especially given that many of those high earners are police officers working absurd amounts of overtime, sometimes doubling their salaries.

Nobody can work that much OT and be fresh and fully effective on the job.

In 2017, a sergeant who apparently never sleeps made $279,612, which included $158,917 in overtime pay. A detective made $285,070, including $144,926 in OT. In all, according to a Sun-Times report on Sunday, rank-and-file police officers in 2017 pulled in about 60 percent of the city’s overall overtime pay.

If a private business burned through OT like that, it would go bust.

We have argued for years that the best proof of mismanagement of the Chicago Police Department is its unhealthy reliance on overtime pay. OT is expensive, wears out officers and is open to abuses. It would make more sense, even given the extra costs of pensions and benefits, to hire more cops.

Let’s be clear: we strongly favor good compensation for public sector employees. Fairly paid government employees are a bulwark against the shrinking of the American middle class. We also know that government pay is often too low — not too high — making it difficult for the public sector to hire the best.

Consider the bizarre — but understandable — decision by Gov. J.B. Pritzker to double the salaries of 20 of his key staffers out of his own pocket. His chief of staff, for example, will be paid $148,000 by the state and another $150,000 by the governor himself, and his press secretary will be paid $75,000 by the state and $75,000 by the governor.

Those are very good salaries, but not out of line when compared to the pay for similar positions in the private sector.

Chicago’s salary inflation is harder to justify. The six-figure salary club is out of control, in large part due to lax management and a give-away police contract.

In 2016, according to the Sun-Times story by Mitchell Armentrout and Tanveer Ali, 13,767 city workers made six-figure incomes. Then in 2017 — the most recent year for which full data is available — the number rose to 14,823. The six-figure club hauled in nearly $1.9 billion, almost 59 percent of the city’s entire $3.2 billion payroll.

Nobody — or at least not us — would quibble with police Supt. Eddie Johnson being paid $260,004, or with the commissioner of aviation at the time, Ginger Evans, being paid $400,000. Those are huge jobs that command nationally competitive salaries.

Our beef is with the enormous sums that go out the back door in ordinary overtime pay, especially within the Chicago Police Department.

Two years ago, city Inspector General Joe Ferguson revealed that CPD’s overtime pay practices were an expensive joke, and we see no indication they are any less of a joke today.

In some cases, Ferguson found, officers approved their own overtime, and in other cases officers approved each other’s overtime. The department almost never recorded specifically why the overtime was needed.

Ferguson also found instances of “trolling” — officers jumping in for overtime even when other officers were available — and “paper jumping,” in which officers unnecessarily added their names to a report so they could get OT going to court.

The police contract also gave — and continues to give — a minimum of three hours of OT for as little as 15 minutes of actual work, a guarantee not limited to court time.

Ferguson’s study was based on data from the six years prior to 2017, but Sunday’s Sun-Times report suggests the OT abuse has continued.

We’re all for paying the police well — and they are paid well.

But when a police dispatcher is paid more than the mayor of Chicago, as happened in 2017, something is out of whack.

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