Orland Park Mayor Pekau Update

The following is an update on the October 1st board meeting and the October 10thbudget meeting. The board meeting started with the Orland Park Police Department receiving a number of awards for traffic safety.  We were named the number one department for departments between 50 and 100 sworn officers as well as the number one overall police department for the entire state of Illinois.  This is a testament to the leadership of Chief McCarthy, the commanders and other members of the leadership team, and the officers who they lead.  Congratulations on a job well done! We also received an update from Tom Dubelbeis, the golf committee chair, on the results of the golf outing.  As you know the Mayor’s golf outing was renamed as the Veterans Golf Classic and was held last month on September 11th.  In total, the outing raised over $30,000 to be donated to veteran’s groups and used for veteran’s programs in the Village of Orland Park – the most successful Mayor’s golf event ever!  This was done with ALL volunteers on the day of the event.  Thank you to all of the volunteers and Tom for a job well done! Additionally, we discussed the village official’s budget which is handled out of my office.  Over the past several weeks, I repeatedly asked the Trustees to go directly to me with any requests or questions.  I received one question from Trustee Ruzich and addressed it.  Nobody else reached out to me.  However, there were anonymous requests and demands made from “The Trustees” through the Village Manager’s office and Trustee’s assistant.  One of these requests was for all of my expense reports.  At the board meeting, I had staff give copies of my expense reports to every board member, every member of the press and had additional copies for any citizen that wanted a copy. I reminded the Trustees that “anonymous” requests are unacceptable.  My requests are not anonymous, nor are the public’s.  I asked who requested this information.  For some time, it was completely quiet, but eventually Trustees Ruzich and Carrol spoke up and said they DID NOT ask for the information.  After more silence, Trustee Fenton finally admitted that she asked for the information.  I asked her “for what reason?”  The mayor’s office has always handled the official’s budget and apparently this has never happened in the past.  The closest thing I received for an answer was when Trustee Fenton offered that the board has never had to make cuts before.  Think about that, almost 26 years on the board and never, until I took office, has Trustee Fenton weighed in on the official’s budget.  I suggested that we discuss the Official’s budget and it was agreed to not discuss it at that time. I reiterated that these requests should never be anonymous and the Board should not put staff in the middle of any disagreements between board members or myself.  I also reminded Trustee Fenton that she has my phone number, I have always been willing to talk to her and all she had to do was ask as I prefer to deal with issues directly.  The information is public and I have nothing to hide.  Hopefully, going forward, this message has been received. There wasn’t much else for the board meeting, so I will shift to the budget meeting.  The summary is as follows:   In total we reduced expenditures by $1.8 million.  This included staff reductions from early retirements and re-organization savings of over $730K.  Some of the additional expenditure reductions included savings resulting from the LED lighting upgrades I pushed for earlier in the year and the board supported.  The only program that was cut was the PACE dial-a-ride program which I will discuss in more detail later. Total additional revenue is $0.5 million.  Of this $280K comes from gaming revenue, and $31K from raising the hotel tax from 4% to 5% to match all of our neighbors.  The remainder comes from sponsorships, booking fees and permitting that we expect to increase next year.  As you can see, no restaurant taxes, no amusement taxes and no property tax increases in these numbers! The staff reductions of $730K in 2019 will increase to over $1.6M in 2020.  This is due to the timing of retirements in 2019 as well as the accrued vacation, sick pay and other payments required to new retirees in 2019. The goal was to maintain a 20% operating budget reserve through 2023.  In the past, the Village only looked at the reserve for the upcoming budget year.  We are now looking forward five years.  The changes this year will maintain the reserve over 20% through 2022 and slightly below (18.5%) in 2023.  During the budget meeting we discussed several items: The first was a proposed cut to the theater program.  The direct savings of cutting the program is approximately $6K.  In the last three productions 30 residents and 40 non-residents participated.  Additionally, over 2,000 tickets were sold to the performances.  The program apparently has been declining the last several years.  After a lot of discussion, I commented that $6K is rounding error in this budget and suggested that we keep the program for another year, involve the Parks & Recreation Advisory Board and strive to improve the program in terms of participation and financially going forward.  The board agreed to keep the program with Trustees Ruzich, Calandriello and Dodge joining me to vote to keep it.  Trustees Carroll and Gira voted to eliminate it, while Trustee Fenton could not decide which way to vote.  We also discussed longevity pay.  This a significant cost, over $350K per year, to the village and has been in place since the 1990’s.  Currently, $314K of this is contractually obligated in union contracts.  However, we are taking steps to eliminate these payments to our non-union employees.  I agree with Trustee Fenton who said “in the real world, who gets this.” Additionally, we discussed cost of living (COLA) increases.  These also cost the village over $350K per year.  I pointed out that the COLA increases over the last 5 years are a total of 4.9% more than the Social Security COLAs given to our seniors by the federal government.  The COLAs have been too high and we need to correct this going forward.  Again, there are contractual obligations to our union employees but a COLA increase for our non-union employees was removed from next year’s budget to begin to close that 4.9% gap. Lastly, the Village Manager had been receiving more questions from Trustees about the Official’s budget and asked if we wanted to discuss this budget.  None of the Trustees were interested and since I submitted it, I am happy with it (by the way, it’s a small budget that we trimmed significantly last year with more cuts this year.  The only program that was cut in this year’s budget was the PACE dial-a-ride program.The rationale for this is as follows: The net direct cost of the program is a loss of $130,000 per year. The projected indirect costs are higher than the direct costs (including equipment maintenance, scheduling, phones, etc.) In the last year there are 24 different people who use the program. The subsidy per ride is over $12 for a total cost per ride of over $15 per ride. There are several other options for these riders including the Orland Township Senior dial-a-ride program, PACE bus disabled rider services, insurance reimbursements for medically related rides as well as private services such as Uber and Lift. Our Village Manager and I agreed to have either my assistant or the Trustee’s assistant directly help all 24 of these riders find alternatives.  This will include personally helping fill out any paperwork needed.  Ultimately the costs for providing this service are unacceptable when there are several other agencies that provide duplicative services.  We are doing everything we can to help all 24 people identify the appropriate alternatives. In summary, this budget is a HUGE VICTORY FOR THE RESIDENTS OF THE VILLAGE!  Prior to this year, only the next year’s budget was looked at.  This year we looked forward 5 years.  The 5-year projections prior to this budget were to have no cash reserves and needing to borrow in 2023.  The changes in this year’s budget will keep our target reserve balance through 2023, without borrowing.  This was accomplished through expenditure cuts, staffing cuts and without a restaurant tax, amusement tax or more property taxes.  Congratulations to Village Staff and the Village Board for a job well done! There are several important meetings coming up that I encourage you to attend or watch on Facebook live.  These include the October 15th board meeting at 7PM, the October 22nd board meeting at 6PM and the November 5th board meeting at 7PM.

Update from Orland Mayor Pekau

Our last Village Board meeting had only one major item on the agenda which was a consultant’s presentation about the evaluation of our existing fields and a potential new complex.   However, at the end of the meeting, Trustee Carroll elected to attack me during his board comments. As you recall, the Village Board agreed to have consultants look at our existing field complexes, when the Trustees decided to postpone the repairs of John Humphrey Complex.  The report examined the John Humphrey Complex, Centennial Park and Cachey Park.  The findings were as follows: Cachey Park is a good size for a soccer complex, but its location would make parking and high usage rates very difficult. Centennial Park’s layout is good for recreational use, but poor for tournament usage. John Humphrey has a good layout for tournaments, but has the lowest usage and is in the poorest condition of all of the fields. The Village’s fee structure is overly complex and we are charging less than market rates for the usage of our fields. The scheduling of our fields for just a few hours on Saturday are impeding other weekend uses. The consultant had the following recommendations for our existing fields: Use all of the money allocated for repairs on the John Humphrey Complex Expand field #4 for to a 90’ infield so it can host several different ages Eliminate field 5 so that field 6 can be made into a 70’ infield Make High Point field #11 a full-size field Regrade the fields and infields Install new back stops Recommend installing irrigation system Develop a new field allocation system that reduces the number of tiers to one resident and one non-resident rate (currently there are six) Re-allocate scheduling to keep the Humphrey Complex available for weekend tournament usage These recommendations make sense for a number of reasons.  First, it will make all of the fields at John Humphrey usable for all ages (which it currently is not).  Second, our in-house programs will have more fields available during the week with an improved John Humphrey complex and minor scheduling changes can free up the complex for weekend use for tournaments.  These tournaments bring 50 to 60 teams (and families) to Orland Park.  The families will stay in Orland Park (we have a couple of new hotels coming), eat in Orland Park and shop in Orland Park. The consultants also looked at the possibility of a new complex.  Their report recommends an eight-field baseball/softball complex with full size (330’) baseball fields configured as two 4-plexes with concessions in between.  The fields will be artificial turf so they can be used as full-size soccer, lacrosse and football fields as well. According to their analysis, the economics indicate that this complex pays for itself between the weekend tournaments, concessions and economic impact to Orland Park.  The study suggests that this is worth exploring further.  In spite of what you may hear, this study doesn’t mean that we are moving forward with building a complex but that we keeping this option on the table.  If it can be built in a fiscally responsible way (private/public partnership, sponsorships, donations, etc.) then the benefits are many – new fields for our kids, direct economic benefits to the Village to provide services for our residents and indirect economic benefits to our local businesses. The only other eventful item was Trustee Carroll’s rant, personally attacking me, which can be found here https://www.orland-park.il.us/CivicMedia?CID=Board-of-Trustees-Meetings-2#, at 45:35 seconds.  here are the excerpts (my editorial comments in italics, my board comments follow): “In the last 30 days it appears the campaign season must be starting up again.  The mayor’s blog posts, his supporters repeating those blog posts all over social media, fake news are up and running, and illegal robocalls have started all over again. Some of the things, I have to point out because they slander me” (I guess the Regional, Prairie and Daily Southtown are now fake news) “Post on September 10th, posted during regular business hours, a political post that was completely false.”  (News flash – posts can be scheduled at a date and time) That I wrote in the post that “we will have no reserves for 4 years, so this is great progress”.  (Trustee Carroll conveniently left out the rest of the wording.  The entire written word is as follows: The good news is if we adjust the budget by the $2.85 million presented, we will maintain a healthy operating reserve for 5 years.  If we do nothing, we will have no reserves for four years, so this great progress.) He says that staff has not been given clear direction. (I encourage anyone to go to the meeting audio and see if the direction was clear) Trustee Carroll states that every time someone on staff comes up with a cut, someone has a problem with it.  He wants me to “show some leadership and identify what cuts he’s comfortable with because every time the team comes up with a cut, there is as problem with it and it hasn’t gotten anything accomplished” (The was only one cut that the board disagreed with -- was cutting the Veterans Programs to save $7K. Trustee Carroll made it clear that he supports cutting the Veterans Program.) “You can’t do a budget unless you know how much money you make.”  (This is true, but you do your budget based on money you know is coming in, not on taxing our residents more to make up the shortfall as Trustee Carroll would like to do) “Time and time again we’ve asked staff to come up with more and more cuts… At the last meeting he was asked to come up with another half million in cuts.”  “I don’t know how we can discuss throwing $600,000 at a concert.” (Conveniently, Trustee Carroll fails to identify that those are the expenses for 3 concerts, but doesn’t mention the offsetting revenue which is over $600,000 and could be as high as $850,000.) My response at the meeting was as follows: Trustee Carroll should do a little more research before attacking me.  The robo-call, which was also sent to me, attacked Trustee Carroll for his gaming vote.  Last I checked I voted the same way.  I am also against an aldermanic form of government.  If he has a problem with it, we’ve been through this before, call the FCC. I repeat again, I have nothing to do with the robo-calls. As you all know by now, if I have a problem with an issue I address it directly, not anonymously. Regarding the reserve requirement, our reserves in 4 years will be below zero.  That chart was never shown to the public until my State of the Village, though it existed for 4 to 5 years before I was elected.  We have a good reserve policy but we need to make some changes to keep the reserves at those levels, which is exactly what we are trying to do. The budget direction was very clear.  $2M in revenue and $2M in cuts.  Trustee Carroll agreed to that.  At the last budget hearing we were given $1.27 Million in cuts, of which 350,000 was a funds transfer not an expense cut. The only cut that we did not agree to was a $7,000 cut to the Veterans Program which would have cut the person who does our Memorial Day Program, our Veterans Day Program, our steak fry, our fishing derby, our Liberty run and who just did our wildly successful golf outing.  This person, along with our Veterans Commission raised approximately $25,000. I thanked Trustee Gira and her husband for volunteering at a hole during the golf outing, Trustee Ruzich for coming to dinner, Trustee Calandriello for purchasing a dinner ticket and Trustee Dodge for playing.  I failed to acknowledge Trustee Fenton for sponsoring the drink cart – I apologize for missing this at the board meeting. At the end of the day, budget discussions are difficult, particularly when costs are rising faster than revenues.  This means that hard decisions have to be made.  Yes, services that are extremely costly and benefit only a few, will likely be cut.  However, I believe that the Village has a long way to go to become more efficient and many of our cuts will have little to no long-term impact on our core services.  We have a lot of excellent staff and they will find better, less expensive ways to provide our critical services.