Who in this election year will appear to be the most generous Cook County commissioner?
Maria Pappas made her pitch for the title Monday, saying the county is about to see a record surplus of $168 million and called for a $97 million reduction in property taxes to be paid next year.
Pappas made a similar claim of a large surplus a year ago, then laid credit to the $63 million property tax abatement pushed through the County Board in February by board President Richard Phelan and Finance Committee Chairman John Stroger.
Not to be caught flat-footed again this year, Stroger, the Democratic candidate to succeed Phelan as County Board president, made some less specific financial observations Monday.
The county, he said, will indeed finish the year with more money than it needs. Therefore, said Stroger, there will be some sort of tax abatement.
“I have told the Phelan administration that we should be making plans for an abatement, but as for the exact amount, we won’t be able to make a determination about that until the books are closed,” Stroger said.
The reasons for the recent spare cash in a government body that only a few years ago was crying poverty, according to Stroger, are the vast number of open positions in the budget. Of the 27,000 county jobs on the books, Stroger said, 2,100 are vacant.
One reason, he said, is that some of the jobs were intended to meet the demands of new county facilities. For instance, he said 300 jobs at Provident Hospital, which opened a year ago, haven’t been filled because the startup of the hospital has been slower than anticipated.
A spokeswoman for Phelan said the administration was evaluating the unfilled jobs to determine how many can be eliminated from the 1995 budget.
While the commissioners were trying to appear generous to the taxpayers, they were also trying to decide how generous they should be to themselves.
Stroger said he favored a raise in the $51,250 salary paid to the commissioners. But he wouldn’t commit to a specific amount, other than to say the raise should at least equal cost of living increases.
Stroger’s Republican opponent Joseph Morris, meanwhile, said he opposes pay hikes, maintaining board members already make too much.
Morris also predicted the board would avoid taking a vote on the pay raise issue until after the Nov. 8 election.
That is what happened in 1990, when two weeks after the election, the board approved a 28 percent pay raise over four years.