Kane Co. jail guards to get long-awaited raises
Kane County corrections officers will get raises averaging nearly 9 percent when county board members approve a new union contract next week. That's far more than the average Kane County employee, but the jail guards have also waited nearly a decade for a new agreement.
The raises reflect retroactive pay and money going forward. The deal stems from more than two years of negotiations and is expected to resolve dozens of labor grievances filed by the jail employees.
Members of the county board's executive committee debated the contract behind closed doors Wednesday morning. They emerged fatigued by the process but satisfied the negotiations are over.
"I'm not happy that this took so long," said board member Theresa Barreiro. "That's the reason it's the amount that it is."
The amount she referred to is the $921,632 price tag. That covers costs dating from 2014 through 2017 and includes retroactive pay raises. As such, more than $221,000 of the total dates back to 2014. That money, for what is now old debt, will come from the county's contingency fund.
The labor disagreement between the county and the correctional officers actually dates back to about 2006, according to Sheriff Don Kramer. From then until now, the officers have received agreed-upon raises without coming to terms on an overall agreement. That's resulted in more than 40 outstanding labor grievances, many of them related to forced overtime and what Kramer has described as the lowest guard-to-prisoner ratio of any nearby comparable county.
At one point there were more than 200 incidents of guards working mandatory back-to-back 8-hour shifts at the prison. An unfair labor practice judgment barred the county from forcing anything longer than 4 hours of overtime following a full shift.
Getting rid of the federal inmates formerly housed at the jail was part of getting the staff-to-inmate ratio under control, even though it resulted in the loss of more than $2 million of revenue for the county.
On Wednesday, Kramer said the new union contract addresses all the remaining issues. He said a recent fight involving 33 inmates wasn't because there aren't enough guards.
"I think we're at where we need to be as far as staffing," Kramer said. "We're at, basically, what I was looking for. From time-to-time, you are going to have some problems. When you have 500 inmates, it's not easy to group 64 together who can all co-exist peacefully."
Kramer said the new contract will also help slow down the turnover rate of correctional officers. At one point, guards were leaving much faster than the county could hire replacements because of "burnout."
"You have a lot of disgruntled employees when you go this long without a contract," Kramer said. "It's a much more stable environment now that they know what the pay scale is and what the standards of the work environment are.
The new contract covers 114 correctional officers and 12 sergeants. Tim O'Neil, the attorney for the corrections officers' union, could not be immediately reached for comment.