Isiah Carey asks, “Is It Time to End the City’s Bonus Program?” It’s a question I answer in the limited affirmative.

As I pointed out before, and it was confirmed in the media, the city has more than one way to pay bonuses. In fact, it has three. The Performance Pay Bonus authorizes a one-time payment to the employee. Then there’s a “bonus” program that is actually a permanent raise (usually in the range of 1% or so) that has to be authorized by the mayor and funded by department director’s squeezing savings out of the budget. The last bonus method involves temporarily changing the employee’s base pay, then changing it back.

The first and third methods need to be eliminated. In particular, the first method has been used by past mayors and current city council members (and possibly the current mayor, see Isiah’s article linked above) to essentially loot the city for the benefit of their friends and cronies. Excuse me, “aides and key staff.” The stated excuse is that these people have to be paid commensurate with their skills, or they’ll leave for the private sector. However, this begs the question: What is unique about these people, that they must receive bonuses of up to $8,000 over and above their pay, whereas the rank and file employees do not? (Disclosure: Lanier authorized a $300 bonus for all city employees in one of his early terms. Whoop-te-do. It was $180 after taxes. . .)

Are these people more civic minded? (Evidently not.)
Are they working harder? (Four people to order supplies and push paper?)
Are they really underpaid compared to the private sector (And if so, aren’t all the employees?)
Do these bonuses help or harm morale? (Silly question; they help the recipients, harm everyone else’s.)

As I allude in the last question, the bonuses, widely known among employees, have been a sore point for some time now. In fact, how did this whole thing blow up? Two employees kvetching to each other about the bonuses were overheard by a supervisor. The fact that they weren’t taking such outrageous bonuses up the chain as suspicious says a great deal about just how much this is going on; it is expected behavior from the elected officials running our fair city, so only the exceptional amount in these four cases raised any interest.

That speaks volumes about these bonuses. Needless to say, Houblog fully supports ending two of the three bonus methods, and further, altering the third. The Performance Pay system needs to be scrapped, and the fiddling of the pay scale needs to be eliminated. The third method (permanent increase/bonus) needs to be placed under ordinance and authorized only as a part of the overall budget plan. Further, the current system of allowing the directors to determine how the bonus increase is awarded needs to be scrapped in favor of a single standard among all the departments. If variants are allowed, they need to be at the mayor’s discretion only.

So far, Mayor White and Controller Parker have been reticent with details of their suggested changes. If they plan only to add a few signatures to the current system, then the changes are essentially cosmetic and useless; as this affair proves, signatures can be forged. Only a fundamentally structural solution will work, and it needs to be one that levels the playing (and paying) field between “friends of the boss” and the rank and file employees. With two unions battling to represent the employees in future negotiations, the mayor and council do not need to give them any more ammunition in the form of employee resentment due to preferential treatment.