Daily Herald opinion: ‘Sour grapes’ aren’t the issue: Whatever the result of clerk’s pay-raise suit, DuPage board failed a transparency test

DuPage County Board member Jim Zay has a valid point when he questions the motives behind a county clerk’s complaint challenging pay raises the board voted itself and other county officers last April.

Clerk Jean Kaczmarek has been at odds with the board for years, mostly on the losing end, over her refusal to attend board meetings and abide by policies on contract bidding and budgeting. And, she lost her bid for reelection in April to a board-supported challenger.

So, it’s easy to understand Zay’s reaction to the complaint that writer Alicia Fabbre reported in the Daily Herald last week.

“You want to talk about hypocrisy. Now, all of a sudden, she can show up at a county board meeting and speak out,” he said. “Sounds like a lot of sour grapes to me.”

Maybe so. But sour grapes or not, Kaczmarek has a point of her own, and it’s one the County Board should take more to heart.

The crux of the clerk’s complaint is that the County Board fell two days shy of the six days’ notice Kaczmarek argues is required by state law when planning to consider compensation packages totaling more than $150,000 a year for employees participating in the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund. The board posted notice on April 24 of its plan to consider the proposed pay raises on April 28.

Furthermore, Kaczmarek complains that the County Board chair’s annual pay, which was posted to raise from $136,959 to $154,390, was abruptly pushed to $185,000 just before the final vote.

“If the Open Meetings Act’s requirement for agendas to set forth the general subject matter of any resolution or ordinance is so broad that the County Board can post one set of specific salary figures in advance and then dramatically amend those salaries on the board floor without notice, then the public derives no benefit whatsoever from the originally posted ordinance or text,” she wrote.

It’s important to remember that neither the raises nor the amount of them are at issue here. Allowing the public to see and consider them, though, is.

Is a dalliance of two days so egregious that officials ought not qualify for raises at all? It seems harsh to think so, but that would be the result if the court sides with Kaczmarek since the law also requires that raises must be approved 180 days before they take effect and barely 150 days remain until the new term begins on Dec. 1.

Yet, the public interest must remain the highest priority, and transparency has been a consistent objective of the DuPage County Board. It cannot exactly be said that the board has been secretive about the need for raises; members first started talking about them at least two years ago. But when the public learns just four days ahead of time that proposed salary hikes are actually on the table, and a substantial increase is made on the day of the vote, that suggests something other than transparency was on officials’ minds.

A representative of the DuPage County state’s attorney’s office questioned the legal merits of Kaczmarek’s complaint, saying the Open Meetings statute applies only to employees, not elected officials. The clerk countered that the Illinois Pension Code, in part, includes elected officials in its definition of “employee.” So, the ultimate outcome of the case may rise or fall on a variety of technicalities.

Kaczmarek has been no paragon of virtue in protecting the public’s interest where transparency is concerned. She has flouted rules designed to protect taxpayer costs of public projects and refused to abide by strict accounting procedures related to her office’s spending.

But in this case, whatever her motives, she has raised an issue that deserves public attention and that board members should have taken more seriously.