Orland Park voters shouldn't be looking for any shoulders to cry on if they don't oust their current mayor over an ongoing pension spiking scandal, the hosts of a Chicago-based radio talk show said recently.
"If you live in Orland Park and you allow this to persist -- and this guy was kind of popular, at least as of a few weeks ago -- if you allow this to persist, you don't have anyone to blame but yourself," Pat Hughes said on Illinois Rising. "When you're looking at your property tax bill, when you're looking at your wages, when you're looking at yourself struggling every day trying to keep a roof over your kids' heads and get them to school and everything else you've got to accomplish, and you don't get this guy out, you have no one to blame but yourself."
Orland Park Mayor Dan McLaughlin
Orland Park's longtime Mayor Dan McLaughlin received a 375 percent pay raise from village trustees in October. He is running for re-election against village businessman Keith Pekau. Pekau opposes McLaughlin's pay raise, which would take effect in May.
"The people can send a message to Dan McLaughlin and, frankly, the Orland Park Village Board about this kind of the gaming of the system for personal enrichment in perpetuity that they've done," Hughes' co-host Dan Proft said.
Proft and Hughes are co-founders of the Illinois Opportunity Project. Proft is also a principal of LGIS (Local Government Information Services), which owns this publication.
Earlier this month, Hughes gave a "two-minute warning" about pension spiking in Illinois during his web series Upstream Ideas, in which he also was critical of the McLaughlin pay raise.
Trustees in Orland Park have said their October 17 decision -- reached despite the standing-room-only crowd there to protest -- to give McLaughlin a $110,000-a-year boost is not an example of pension spiking, though McLaughlin is expected to retire in a few years. McLaughlin has been Orland Park's part-time mayor for 23 years.
The raise makes McLaughlin among the highest paid mayors in the world, ranking him just behind the mayors of international capital cities such as Madrid, Moscow, Rome and Paris. Orland Park's population is a little more than 56,000, according to the most recent census records.
"Pension spiking" or "pension padding" is a common way that Illinois public employees increase their pension amounts. One common method is for an employee to receive a pay hike the last few years before retirement, though his own contributions were made earlier at a lower pay rate.
"So you work for a long time and then you're just getting ready to retire," Hughes said. "Your pension is based on your last salary."
The trustees say McLaughlin, former executive director of the Plumbing Council of Chicagoland and the Builders Association’s current executive director, has the experience needed for the expanded role, adding that the pay raise ordinance will have to be renewed ever four years or revert back to $40,000.
However, Proft pointed out that McLaughlin has only a high school diploma, and some of the positions he is expected to take over in an expanded role as mayor officially require more advanced degrees.
"When you game the system, not only do you have to wire the salary, then you also have to exempt yourself from the qualifications for the positions you're supposedly going to be doing to justify the salary that you've wired," Proft said. "The layers of this are positively Illinoisan."
Editor's note: An earlier version of this story included an incorrect population figure for Orland Park. This has been corrected.
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