IDOT hiring 16 supervisors during budget crisis

SPRINGFIELD — The Illinois Department of Transportation is hiring 16 new employees, at salaries of up to $100,000, as a new layer of management after the previous supervisors were allowed to unionize.

The new “operations supervisors” will supervise field technicians and road workers, their job description says. Until now, the field technicians did that job across most of Illinois.

The state Labor Relations Board recently gave those technicians permission to join Operating Engineers Local 150. Within weeks, IDOT posted job announcements for the new position.

“Our guys already do all this work,” union attorney Ken Edwards told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “You’re going to create 16 new positions that are identical to what we already do.”

The new jobs will pay from $67,000 to $100,400 annually. The current field engineers generally earn from about $50,000 to about $75,000.

IDOT spokesman Josh Kauffman denied the new nonunion jobs are being created because the field technicians were allowed to unionize.

“It’s been in the works for a while. It’s a supervisory role over the field technicians,” Kauffman said. He characterized the new jobs as “crucial to state operations,” but he couldn’t cite any specific problems in the current road maintenance system.

Kauffman said more than 300 applicants had applied for the 16 new jobs. The state plans to fill them by mid-November, so they’re in place before winter. Clearing roads during winter is among the chief tasks of the workers who are under the field technicians and will be under the new supervisors.

Sen. John Jones, a Mount Vernon Republican, criticized the Quinn administration for creating these new jobs while a state budget crunch is forcing state government to cut back elsewhere.

“Here we are laying people off and closing facilities, and they’re duplicating jobs,” Jones said, adding, “We are setting a poor example.”