City of Joliet Fills Budget Hole with Water

July 23, 2009

The City of Joliet is trying to dig its way out of a $15 million budget shortfall. And they just hit a water pipe in the form of the city’s public-sector unions.

Among their first attempts to solve their budget problem was to ask public-service union members to begin paying $100 per month toward their health insurance.

According to the Herald News,

The average pay for a full-time city employee is $83,500 a year, according to a city financial analysis. They [Joliet city employees] make no contribution to health insurance premiums -- a rarity even in government health plans and almost unheard of in the private sector. And, at a time when people are losing jobs or taking pay cuts to stay employed, city workers in Joliet have 4 percent pay hikes scheduled next year.

Add in the costs of pensions -- another benefit unavailable to many taxpayers who were switched to 401(k)s or lost retirement plans altogether years ago -- and the city calculates the average cost of full-time employees at nearly $127,000 a year.

Let me repeat those numbers.

The average city employee’s salary is $83,500/yr. The average taxpayer cost per city employee once you calculate in the pension is $127,000/yr. And they make no contribution to their health care coverage and are not particularly interested in changing that. For comparison, the average household income in Joliet is $47,700.

This type of arrangement doesn’t exist in the private sector – for a reason. Businesses would be out of business if they had to shoulder such overhead costs while their employees were entirely disconnected from the costs of their employment benefits.

Since no one in Joliet wants to cut spending to cover the budget gap, the solution city officials have focused on is to double Joliet residents’ water bills. The families and businesses, many without secure health care of their own or certainly a guaranteed pension, will now foot the bill through a stealth tax to finance the permanent political class.

This isn’t just happening in Joliet. It is happening at the municipal, township, county and state level throughout Illinois, where public sector entities at every level of government are cannibalizing the private sector. And remember, despite being the 5th most populous state, Illinois has more units of government (read: taxing bodies) than any other state in the nation.

Democratic politicians across the state continue to extract money from people who play by the rules through taxes, fees, utilities, tolls, and a million other stealth “revenue enhancements” in order to sustain their patronage armies which, in turn, sustain their public careers.

We are extracting more and more from fewer and fewer as families and businesses in Illinois are crushed under the weight of the combined local and state tax burdens imposed on them.

This is not an attack on rank-and-file public sector employees. I have worked in the public sector both in state and local government. Public sector employees are no different than private sector folks: most of them are decent, honest, and hard-working. They want to maximize their earnings and benefits like anyone would.

But, c’mon, the economics of personnel costs like those being financed by Joliet taxpayers simply do not work.

What we have in state government and local units of government like Joliet are system problems, not strictly personnel problems.

And it is the public-sector unions that are the protectors of these unsustainable systems that must come to the table for an adult conversation about what rational, sustainable government looks like. This is precisely what a Proft Administration would do. The residents of Joliet should demand the same of their mayor and city council.

In the meantime, stay on the alert for a backdoor tax increase in the guise of higher water bills, and join our fight to stop the Chicago 9 from raising your taxes.

Let’s cut spending first, and if you have friends in Joliet, buy them a cold drink.

They’re gonna need it.