County Candidate Puts County Salaries on Net
By vouchey in News on Apr 27, 2005 2:00AM
Tony Peraica is running for Cook County Board President, the first one to announce for office, he's got a lot of work to do to get attention. Worse yet, Peraica is running as a Republican in a county that voted an average of 61% Democrat since 1988. The odds are against him, but that doesn't mean he can't make some noise and mix it up a bit.
Yesterday Peraica launched a new component to his campaign website that allows regular joes to look up salaries of county employees. Searchable by name, ZIP, employee home town, department or keyword, the site tells employee name, position, hire date and salary. No address information or indication of how they were hired, or what deals were done to obtain the position.
It's a site that Chicagoist would have completely missed, had it not been for a note from someone working in county government. Apparently lots of County government folks are upset that "ordinary folks doing their jobs" have had such personal information revealed. Frankly, we're half of one mind, half of another.
Public employee salary information is public information -- although sometimes pains are taken to not make that information obvious -- and anyone can and should be allowed to find that out. Back when Chicagoist worked in DC, lots of folks would read the Plum Book to see how their friends (and enemies) were making out (just look a bit and maybe you'll find Chicagoist in the 2000 book). Usually the new salary information resulted in lots of jealousies and angry people the day after its release, making the workplace a bit more difficult to navigate.
On the other hand, Peraica suggests that his new site will expose the waste of county government, such as "$80,000 a year janitors; and $70,000 a year picnic table refurbishers." The thing is, the site doesn't really do that. The way it's built, it's hard to find any real patterns, and unless you know something about how the deals are done, and where the bodies are buried, it's hard to tell the difference between an $80k janitor and a $55k "Vehicle Right of Way Agent II".
So in the end, all Peraica seems to have done is just tell everyone in Cook County government what their co-workers are making. Boy, it's gotta be a fun week for them.
Thanks, Anthony!
Image via votetony06.com