PA Pundit

You don’t have to be a member of a union to enjoy exceptional compensation as a government employee.  Last month Main Line Suburben Life published details of the top Main Line town and school administrators.  Highlights:

• Tredyffrin/Easttown School District superintendent Daniel Waters had gross compensation in 2008 of $293,192, as well as a car for personal use and reimbursement for all car expenses — including gasoline and insurance!
• Lower Merion School District superintendent Christopher McGinley just signed a five-year contract with a base salary of $195,000 and 3.5% annual raises.
• Radnor School District superintendent Linda Grobman just signed a three year contract for a $194,000 annual salary.
• Radnor Township manager Dave Bashore earned $176,956 in gross pay during 2008, and enjoyed such additional perks as a car for personal use and home loan forgiveness.

Not covered in the article were defined-benefit pensions, which are bound to be equally lavish….

[Update: The Great Valley School District has an excellent watchdog site which reports that their Superintendent Rita Jones had a 2008 salary of $229,851, not counting extreme health benefits, all-expenses-paid car, and some bizarre provisions for "sabbaticals."]

Union negotiators represent a very vocal constituency with very strong interests in maximizing the union’s wins in contract negotiations.  Union workers enjoy a homefield advantage when it comes time to trot out human interest stories for the press and pundits to exploit.  Public boards and administrators, in contrast, represent the relatively poorly organized and unattentive constituency of “taxpayers.”

The prevailing custom is for public union negotiations to proceed in secret.  Fred at School Board Transparency explains how this “gives an immense and entirely unnecessary bargaining advantage to the union.”

The law allows (but does not require) school boards to conceal both how the union is proposing that they spend public money and how the board itself proposes to spend that money. Agreeing not to tell the public anything about this permits a union to prolong negotiations for as long as it wishes and then launch a PR blitz combining tributes to the dedication of teachers with threats of a strike. Unions can open negotiations with outrageous demands — not in the least “cognizant” of anything other than maxing out pay raises — stick with those demands for many months (or else lower them in tiny increments) and then complain that boards “aren’t negotiating.” Transparency is a dagger to the heart of this strategy.

He also offers a striking analogue:

Suppose that a school board in the newspaper’s area announces that it plans to put artificial turf on its athletic fields. The district negotiates with a sole-source contractor about materials and costs and promises to announce the results on the night of a board vote on the contract. (Meanwhile spokespeople for both the board and the contractor assure reporters that talks are “going well.”) It’s hard to believe that any self-respecting editor would shrug and say, “Well, I guess that’s how things are done.” Why apply a different standard to decisions that affect every family in a district, decide in advance the feasibility of plans to improve educational quality and cost many, many times more than laying down Astroturf?