Politics
Quiet Use of Bonuses for City Council Aides on the Rise
Chicago City Hall. (Michael Izquierdo / WTTW News)
by Alex Nitkin, Illinois Answers Project
Amid City Council budget negotiations late last year, Ald. David Moore (17th) asked city officials to send him a list of Chicago’s highest-paid employees.
He was floored when he saw that his own aide, Cordarryl Jackson, was listed — erroneously — as having the third-highest salary out of the city’s 30,000-plus employees, at $247,000.
“Oh my goodness,” Moore said, laughing as he reviewed the list. “Not even close … somebody screwed up big time.”
Jackson was not paid $247,000 last year for his job as assistant to the South Side alderperson. His salary was $63,216, plus a $30,600 bonus at the end of the year.
But the snapshot of Jackson’s annual salary reflects a quirk of city budgeting that lets members of the City Council temporarily increase their staffers’ salaries to pay them year-end bonuses. In a few cases, the payouts are in the tens of thousands of dollars, with little documentation and no formal process, troubling some good government advocates.
A review by Illinois Answers Project of publicly available payroll data for 259 ward and committee staffers found that 65 council staffers received increases in their salaries between October and December 2024, representing more than $260,000 in taxpayer funds for bonuses. At least 20 staffers saw temporary bumps of at least $5,000 in one-time payouts.
The practice has expanded in recent years. In 2022, 16 aldermanic staffers got temporary pay hikes at the end of the year, records show. In 2023, 33 did.
Alderpeople defended the practice, arguing they are providing the pay hikes out of their budgets and that the maneuvers are allowed under city rules. They say the pay increases are well-deserved gestures of appreciation for their staffers, many of whom they say are severely overworked and spurn higher-paying jobs in the private sector.
Moore asked city budget officials to hike Jackson’s salary during the last two months of the year, so that Jackson would be paid a bonus of about $30,000 above his base salary. Moore spent most of the year with a vacancy in his chief of staff position, and Jackson worked overtime to fill in, Moore said.
“He was sometimes doing 80 hours a week,” Moore said. “He was doing two people’s jobs.”
Because city rules provide no way for aldermanic staffers to receive bonuses or overtime pay, temporary salary hikes can be the only way for council members to reward above-and-beyond work.
Still, critics call it an arbitrary and poorly justified use of public money.
“There’s no regularity” to the pay hikes, said Joe Ferguson, president of the Civic Federation, a nonprofit government watchdog. “It’s not tied to any standards. What are the criteria for [city budget officials] saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to that, and do they apply across the board?”
If alderpeople believe their staffers are underpaid, they can raise their salaries in the budget, Ferguson said. If aldermanic aides work extra hours or pay out of pocket to cover city-related business, their bosses can set up systems to reimburse them.
“Those are the things that aldermen themselves, and the City Council as a body, should elevate to a professional level,” Ferguson said. “Determine what the actual fiscal resources are … needed in order to operate within that professional framework and then insist upon that in the budget process.”
Alderpeople are exempt from court prohibitions against politically connected hiring practices, giving them flexibility in how they hire and manage staff. Instead of being provided a specific number of staffers with set salaries, each council member receives a budget of $309,000 each year to spend on personnel as they see fit. Committee chairs get additional staff.
Ald. Chris Taliaferro (29th), who arranged for temporary year-end pay hikes for three ward staffers and three committee staffers last year, said he and his colleagues pay employees differently than most city workers so that they can manage the mix of full- and part-time employees that best suit their office.
“They’re our employees,” Taliaferro said. “We have an ability to pay them as we choose based off of the work they do for the ward and the work they do in our office.”
‘Inefficient and Wasteful’
At the end of each fiscal year, unspent money from alderpeople’s staffing accounts typically goes into the city’s general fund.
Some council members, including Taliaferro, used temporary salary increases to spend down the money in their accounts instead of returning the surplus.
At the end of the year, if his actual expenses come in under their budgeted amount, “I give that money to where it’s deserved, and those are the personnel,” Taliaferro said.
Intentionally spending down surplus funds is “inefficient and wasteful,” said Ralph Martire, executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability.
In budgets like Chicago’s, where costs are budgeted on an annual line-item basis instead of tweaked year-to-year based on performance and need, managers can be incentivized to use up their allotted budgets instead of saving money so that their budgets aren’t reduced the next year.
“Is it good policy or practice? No,” Martire said. “Does it happen in traditional public sector settings with line item budgets? … Yes.”
Alderpeople provided various explanations for the control they wield over their staffing budgets.
Ald. Pat Dowell (3rd), who oversaw temporary pay increases for seven staffers across her ward office and committee staff, wrote in a statement that the “temporary salary augmentations” represent a way to “reward employees who go above and beyond.”
“Given the nature of government work my staff is often asked to take up projects outside of normal work hours and while I communicate my appreciation for them daily, I felt it appropriate to acknowledge their hard work and performance,” Dowell wrote.
Ald. Gilbert Villegas (36th), who paid bonuses to six staffers, said alderpeople’s flexibility over salaries widens their ability for training and professional development.
“This is an opportunity to allow [employees] an entry level position, and as they progress, then their compensation would progress along with it,” Villegas said. “I would hate for it to be a line item that says, you know, this position made $67,000 when, in fact, they may not have the qualifications, but there's an opportunity to get someone at $40,000 to build them up to that position.”
The temporary salary hikes have also caused some public confusion about how much aldermanic staffers are paid.
Because employees’ salaries are publicly listed on an annualized basis, the city’s data portal last December showed 10 aldermanic staffers, including Jackson, as earning more than $221,000 a year, which is how much Mayor Brandon Johnson earns.
Four staffers, all of whom work for Ald. Nick Sposato (38th), were shown in late December as earning more than a $300,000 annual salary because of a one-time pay hike that gave each staffer a $10,000 year-end bonus.
Those inflated salaries did not go unnoticed.
On Dec. 28, the blog Second City Cop posted screenshots of the salaries appearing to show that aldermanic aides made up 10 of the city’s 13 highest-paid employees.
“[The mayor] wants to jack up property taxes, fees, fines and everything related to the cost of living in or doing business in Chicago and there are ASSISTANTS to aldercreatures making twice what aldercreatures make?” the anonymous blogger wrote.
The next week, the X account Chicago Contrarian posted screenshots of records showing Sposato’s staffers earning monthly salaries of at least $25,000 with the caption “it pays to work in Ald. Nick Sposato’s office.”
Sposato declined to comment.
“The look is terrible,” Ferguson said of the pay hikes. “There is no standard or process with which to judge what is going on, and against the backdrop of the history of Chicago, people will assume the worst.”
Not everyone in the City Council dismissed calls to improve the process.
Ald. Andre Vasquez (40th) provided year-end pay hikes to two ward staffers and one staffer for the City Council committee he chairs, each amounting to about a $1,400 bonus.
He defended the payouts as an attempt to prevent turnover and reward staffers for their hard work.
But the ad hoc pay raises wouldn’t be necessary if annual, automatic pay increases for City Council staffers were baked into the budget, the way unionized city employees are, he said.
“If all these staffers were unionized, they’d be negotiating for that [pay increase],” Vasquez said. “Because I would bet every buck I’ve got that all those staff members work more than overtime.”
This article first appeared on Illinois Answers Project and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The Illinois Answers Project is Illinois’ nonpartisan investigations and solutions journalism news organization and is published by the Better Government Association, Illinois’ nonprofit full-service watchdog organization.
