End of gravy train causes DuPage County employees to retire

Last year, 25 DuPage County employees retired — a number that was dwarfed this year when 104 colleagues who decided to join them in retirement.

DuPage County Board Chairman Dan Cronin says it's no coincidence that the number of retirements increased as county board members were making significant changes to employee time-off benefits.

“There's a reason why more than 100 employees have left,” Cronin told the Daily Herald Editorial Board last week. “I think it's because of the policies. We were talking about reforming and changing the employee benefit packages and scaling them back.”

Board members last month agreed to trim time-off benefits in an effort to save DuPage as much as $28 million over the next two decades.

The changes, which take effect Dec. 1, will prevent future employees from receiving large cash payouts for unused sick days they stockpile through the years.

And with the possibility of pension reform in Springfield, Cronin said longtime county employees had added motivation to take their accumulated benefits and leave.

“And that's fine,” he added.

The departures gave officials the opportunity to review vacant positions and decide if each post was needed or if existing staff should absorb those duties. As for the jobs that were filled, the work is being done by employees making a lower salary.

Then there's the revised time-off benefits policy that will reduce the number of sick and vacation days county employees can accrue.

Board member Jeff Redick said the changes are needed to create a more stable and manageable long-term financial picture for the county. Before the policy was revised, financial projections showed the county's budget wouldn't be able to keep up with the rising cost of benefits, he said.

Redick served as chairman of an ad hoc committee on human resources that recommended DuPage reduce the number of vacation days employees receive annually. For example, employees with more than 23 years of service with the county will get 25 days of vacation annually — five fewer days than now.

In addition, sick time is being standardized to provide each employee with eight sick days a year. Previously, the number of sick days increased with an employee's longevity.

Departing county employees long have been able to receive cash payouts for up to 250 days of their unused sick time.

Redick said that created a situation where those employees were getting paid in current dollar values for sick days that were earned years — or even decades — ago.

“People who were employed by the county in 1997 aren't making that same amount now,” he said.

And when retiring employees cash out unused sick days, it helps boost their pension because the payment increases their final annual salary, according to Tom Cuculich, the county board's chief of staff.

“We had gone to the state's attorney's office to see if we could go back in time for current employees and take away the cash value of the sick time and vacation time that they had accrued,” Cuculich said. “We were told ‘no' because of the state constitution. That's an accrued benefit.”

But the county board did agree that any sick time accumulated after Dec. 1 won't carry a cash value.

While current employees will be able to cash out the sick time they've earned so far, any more sick days they bank won't have a monetary value. And new employees won't receive any payouts for unused sick time.

“It (sick time) is intended to be security when there's an illness,” Redick said. “It's not some lottery ticket.”

County finance officials have estimated the changes to sick day accrual will net $8 million to $12 million in savings during the next 20 years. The vacation day changes could save DuPage as much as $800,000 a year.

In order to ensure those savings are achieved, county board members have enacted a new budget policy to encourage every county department, including the sheriff's office, to adopt the time-off changes.

Cronin said he believes every department will follow the revised personnel policy, which will be “far less costly to the taxpayers.”

“If we had kept the old policy, it easily would have cost this county $20 million over 20 years,” Cronin said. “There's no doubt about it.”

In the meantime, he said, DuPage County will support efforts to revise the state's pension system.

Earlier this year, state lawmakers talked behind closed doors about ideas to cut pension benefits for current government employees. But without a deal in place, pension reform supporters in May decided put off the effort and try again later.

“The weight of the pension benefits is sinking government at every level,” Cronin said. “So that issue is not over. There's going to be an ongoing dialogue, and we'll be sitting at the table.”