No time cards for DuPage board members

DuPage County Board members who want to qualify for pensions are supposed to work at least 1,000 hours a year on county-related business.

But nobody is making sure that requirement is met. Instead, the county and its pension plan — the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund — rely on what’s effectively an honor system.

“There are no time cards,” said Dirk Enger, one of three DuPage board members who opted not to participate in the IMRF. “Who’s to say what everyone does during the week? We should turn in a log book and justify it.”

In the private sector, attorneys, consultants and other professionals must document how they spend their time. County board Chairman Dan Cronin says he would be in favor of requiring board members to do the same.

“I think it’s important to find some sort of system of accountability,” he said.

In a resolution, the board states the part-time job takes at least 1,000 hours a year, but officials aren’t required to record or verify the number of hours they work, board spokeswoman Johnna Kelly confirmed.

An IMRF auditor “reviews participation for ... elected officials, to determine if they meet the (1,000 hour) standard,” IMRF spokeswoman Linda Horrell said in an email.

But “meeting the hourly standard refers to the number of hours a position is expected to require,” she adds. “For an elected position, that is the number of hours the office requires to do the job correctly.”

Because the county doesn’t track the officials’ hours, the IMRF has no way of accurately verifying how much a board member works. Theoretically, an elected county official could still qualify for a pension if he or she didn’t reveal any shortfall.

Kelly said all but three of the 18 county board members participate in IMRF. Beside Enger, Tony Michelassi and Robert Larsen also opted out of the program.

“I felt the pension plan was overly generous for elected officials working a part-time position,” Larsen said.

DuPage board members participate in what’s commonly known as ECO, or the “elected county official” pension program, part of IMRF.

They become vested after eight years, and after 20 years they’re eligible to receive 80 percent of their final year’s salary. By comparison, other IMRF participants have to work twice as long for a smaller benefit — 40 years to receive 75 percent of their highest consecutive 48 months of salary in the last decade of work.

In August, Gov. Pat Quinn signed a bill that closed the ECO program to new officials but the changes don’t affect current board members.

DuPage board member John Curran said he didn’t participate in IMRF in his first two years in office. But he reconsidered because of the challenging workload, saying he spends more than 1,500 hours a year on the job.

“I would have no problem documenting my time spent on DuPage County matters for IMRF, but they do not require nor request such documentation,” Curran said.

Even so, Curran says he’d be in favor of stripping away pensions for board members.

Curran says he had second thoughts about participating in the pension program and approached the IMRF this year to ask if he could opt out. But he was told he couldn’t leave, he says.

Elected officials like Curran don’t have to participate in IMRF, but once they do, they can’t opt out until they leave office, an IMRF official confirmed.