Joliet Spends $10 Million On Overtime Pay Per Year: 'It Sounds Like The Definition Of Insanity': Mayor D'Arcy

JOLIET, IL — On Tuesday night, in a split 6-3 vote, the Joliet City Council followed the advice of Mayor Terry D'Arcy and Joliet City Manager Beth Beatty, agreeing to spend another $156,500 in taxpayer funds for a consultant study examining citywide staffing and service.

According to the agenda, the proposal for awarding the professional services agreement to the consultant company, Raftelis, was presented by Greg Ruddy, director of public works.

"This study will determine the desired type, level, and quality of city services and the appropriate number of employees and contractual support necessary to provide services at the desired level," Ruddy's memo noted. "The proposed fee submitted by Raftelis has been reviewed and found to be acceptable. A fixed fee professional services contract will be awarded in the amount of $156,500."

During Tuesday's meeting, Councilman Larry Hug expressed strong reservations with the proposed $156,500 expense. He also did not like the company that city officials recommended. Hug along with Juan Moreno and Jan Quillman voted against the $156,500 expenditure.

Hug reminded everyone that Joliet had a consultant study between six and eight years ago that examined efficiencies in police, fire and public utilities.

"We didn't get around to public service, and the scope that was established by the Council was to find efficiencies at current employment levels," Hug recalled. "Get the most out of what you currently have. This one, to make it short, I won't belabor this, I won't support it, because we need to go look at those old consultant reports, and see that if we accomplished what they said they'd do. We've already increased the staff in the last three or four years, since 2022 by over 11 percent.

"And this is a consultant with a bunch of retired public sector white collars in it. It's going to tell us we need to hire more. For me to support this would make me a hypocrite when I vote no and they come back and tell us we need to hire another 11 percent ... way too many new jobs are being added."

Hug made a motion to delay Tuesday night's vote, but his proposal did not receive Council majority. In the end, the $156,500 consultant contract for Raftelis was approved with yes votes from Joe Clement, Pat Mudron, Sherri Reardon, Cesar Cardenas, Suzanna Ibarra and Mayor D'Arcy.

Beatty Reveals Her Department Heads Are Not Getting Paid Time And A Half

Next month will mark two years on the job for Beatty, who came to Joliet from the city of Chicago where she worked under four different mayors, serving as a deputy mayor at the time of her departure shortly after Brandon Johnson became the new mayor. Joliet is paying Beatty a $230,000 a year base salary.

On Tuesday night, Beatty informed the City Council that Joliet had 895 authorized staff positions in 2015, and the city had a little over 1,000 positions in 2024.

"Our work force is growing and with that we need to study it," Beatty suggested. "This is like a data-based study. I know it was brought up, like, could we have one of us do it? But none of us are experts in that, that's why we need to hire the experts that can analyze the data and tell us how to best serve our community.

"I think you'll all agree with me that city services are our number one priority for our residents. And we need to make sure that we are serving the public to the best of our ability. And we can argue about specific positions, but I will tell you all these directors that are sitting here, they are not getting time and a half to sit here. They work their rears, they work their tails off with like less staff than they probably should have.

"So, who knows, maybe this will come back and say maybe we need more plow drivers or something and we get public utilities involved in that ... these are things that we just need to identify what the issues are and then we can all get together and say what are the city's priorities?"

Beatty maintained that Joliet has not done a staffing study such as this — citywide.

"And my goal is to make sure that all of our departments are operating at the way that they should be and we're not doing something in one department we're not doing in another. Like, we need to make sure that we have the efficiencies. And this is really the way to do it."

On Monday, Joliet Patch published another exclusive story, revealing how six AFSCME Local 440 city of Joliet employees made more than $200,000 last year and two of them, Terry Juricic and Wayne Lopez, both made nearly $65,000 each in overtime pay alone. A water department maintenance foreman, Juricic has found a way to average more than $50,000 in overtime pay during the past five years.

Before taking the vote, Mayor Terry D'Arcy denounced the city of Joliet's overtime expenses.

"I just want to throw a few numbers out there since I'm sort of a math guy," D'Arcy remarked. "So, our payroll, not including IMRF (pension system) FICA, insurance of $37 million, is $97 million dollars a year. In payroll. Flat payroll. Our overtime is $12 million a year. Now $2 million of the $12 million is paid by someone else. It's when a police officer's on a union job, or fire or something else.

"So, in hard numbers, this city invests $27,397 per day in overtime ... maybe we're going to burn some people out. We're working them too hard. And that's just the union employees. That's not the exempts because they don't get overtime. So at $27,397 a day, do we need more help? Maybe we do," D'Arcy declared. "Maybe we don't. But for $156,000 maybe we can figure out if we need more people to trim the overtime to take some of the burden off those employees that will absorb some of the overtime. They don't all want to do it. There's a lot of employees that won't take overtime. There's people that have four hours of overtime and there's people with 300 hours of overtime. So how do we balance this $10 million, $27,397 a day? Do we just keep doing it?

"It sounds like the definition of, insanity? Keep doing the same thing everyday and think something's going to change. Myself, as a businessperson and as a taxpayer, and the mayor, think that we do need to take a look at this and decide. Is that the best investment everyday for the city of Joliet to pay overtime?"