Only in IL: Where 4 + 2= a Six-Figure Severance Package

Opinion by Madeleine Doubek

When I hear about some of the salary, severance, and bonus payments granted to public officials in Illinois, I can’t help but think we’ve all lost our minds.

I mean, really. Consider the latest:

Sept. 8: University of Illinois trustees give President Timothy Killeen a $100,000 performance bonus. That would be in addition to his $600,000 base salary.

Sept. 8: University of Illinois at Chicago Chancellor Michael Amiridis a $75,000 performance bonus. That would be on top of his $400,000 annual base salary.

Sept. 16: Chicago State University trustees give Thomas J. Calhoun Jr., the president they hired nine months ago after being unhappy with their previous top administrator $600,000 to go away. Calhoun’s annual salary was $300,000. Trustees cut a deal with him to pay him two years’ salary to go away after nine months on the job, despite howls from students whose questions about what was going on went unanswered.

Have we lost our minds? Or, is it just the majorities of those who are appointed to boards to oversee public institutions who have?

This is not a new phenomenon, you might recall.

January, 2015: College of DuPage trustees give President Bob Breuder a nearly $763,000 severance package that remains the subject of litigation to this day.

July 2013: Metra’s board grants CEO Alex Clifford a $718,000 severance package. Clifford ultimately was paid $652,000 under the agreement, but once lawyers and public relations firms were paid, the whole go-away deal cost taxpayers $1.3 million after Clifford said he was being pressured to make political hires.

And while all those deals with our money were being cut, let's not forget the state had the worst pension debt nationwide and several billion in other unpaid bills.

Even now, as the U of I and Chicago State bonuses and severance deals were granted, our public university system is in crisis and chaos because our elected officials refuse to do their jobs and pass a budget before they brawl it out to see whether Democrats or Republicans win a few more seats in the Nov. 8 general election.

Students, teachers, professors and support staff are being starved, living off about half what they normally would have gotten over the past 18 months. Chicago State still hasn’t released enrollment numbers, but it barely made it through to May last year. At U of I’s Urbana-Champaign campus, freshman enrollment is up not quite a half of a percent. It’s down more than five percent at UIC. And those were the brighter spots in the enrollment figures recently released.

Still, U of I trustees sang Killeen’s praises as they gave him the performance bonus. After all, he was in charge when the university snagged former Chicago Bears Head Coach Lovie Smith for the bargain price of as much as $29 million over six years.

Now, granted, those are some awfully big numbers. Let’s make this easier to comprehend. Smith gets just a $2 million salary this year. And on Saturday, his team racked up three rushing yards against Western Michigan.

So, let’s turn this into a word problem. If Illinois football only gained three yards on the ground for this entire year, how much would Coach Smith be paid for each yard his team gained? Answer? Anyone?

That’s right, Jimmy! Smith would be paid $666,666 for each measly rushing yard his team achieves. But wait, you think that’s ridiculous, Olivia? All right. Maybe that wasn’t a true-to-life word problem. It’s true that wasn’t the first game of the season, so the Illini do already have more than three yards on the ground. But hey, Smith could be “let go” any day now and he’d likely collect far more than his $2 million base salary for this year.

This is Illinois, where so many people are so beaten down by the politicians and public trustees that anyone can get away with just about anything.

After all, if you’re in a public sector job, isn’t severance just another word for jackpot?

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