Kane County 2011 budget hopes may rest with union negotiations

Kane County must engage its employee unions in a tough discussion about raises if it hopes to pull off the 2011 budget plan officials envisioned Thursday.

County Finance Director Cheryl Pattelli told members of the county board's Finance Committee the hole for 2011 is about $3.2 million deep if every department gets the amount of money it's seeking.

Much of the additional financial burden stems from planned salary and wage increases in nearly every county department. That includes offices like the sheriff's department, which is asking for nearly $1.5 million in new money for salary and wages, to the county board budget, which has nearly $30,000 of new money for employee compensation.

All told, 14 different offices and budget categories have line items reflecting increases salary and wage hikes.

That flies in the face of repeated calls from the county board for no raises in 2011. That call was solidified with a finance committee resolution Thursday that would hold all departments to budgets not a penny more than last year, with few exceptions.

Those exceptions include additional dollars for increased health insurance costs, new staffing to accommodate additional judges the county will receive at the end of the year and changes to debt payments.

Other than that, committee members said, departments shouldn't spend more than in 2010.

"My general feeling is we've spent a lot of time the last couple of years going over these budgets, trying to get them where they belong," said board member Cathy Hurlbut. "They all knew coming into 2011 that it was going to be a flat line, and we should give them a flat line."

The ability to make that happen won't be known until the county sits down with its various unions at the negotiating table. Just about all the county's union contracts are up for renegotiation, which means no salary increases are promised for 2011 - yet.

But even in the recent lean years, most employee unions have managed to squeeze raises of at least 1 percent out of the county.

Even without raises, Sheriff Pat Perez said he's betting his budget will fall out of whack again because the county board won't fund known costs in his budget, such as housing prisoners outside the county because the jail is too small.

Perez also said he doesn't have other departments' luxury of cutting back on the quality of customer service to save money.

"I can understand where in one department it might be OK for someone to wait 20 minutes instead of 10 minutes to get a document," Perez said. "But when you call 911, are you going to accept a 20-minute response time?"

The full county board is set to take a final vote on the 2011 budget in October.