Former Dist. 39 Official: Wilmette voters have permission to vote NO on the D39 Referendum on April 5th

Since 1998, student enrollment in Wilmette District 39 (D39) has increased by 9 percent; meanwhile, total D39 operating expenditures have increased by an astonishing 87 percent during that same period – both according to state report cards. Spending has therefore risen more than ten times faster than enrollment. Teachers have a contract that gives them average salary increases of 5.6 percent for each of the five school years spanning 2009 to 2013. (This does not include D39’s contribution, now between 70 and 95 percent, towards teachers’ healthcare insurance costs.) With this situation as backdrop, amidst an ongoing recession depressing home prices and private sector employment in the community, the D39 Board of Education is asking taxpayers to address a $5.5 million (and growing) budget deficit by passing a $6.4 million property tax increase referendum on April 5th. Should the referendum pass, the average Wilmette property tax bill ($12,000) will increase by $706.

At the county and state levels, a tsunami of other tax increases is already arriving, led by a 67 percent increase in the state income tax. Politicians have been promising, but not funding, extravagant pensions for public-sector employees for decades, and the resulting deficit spending has finally, if predictably, caused a financial crisis. The contracts for huge salary increases—including a 6 percent additional bonus during each of the final five years before a teacher’s retirement—demanded and received by the Wilmette Education Association (WEA) over the same decades have helped boost pension payments from the state (but eventually paid for by us) to almost obscene levels, making the succession of local school boards complicit in a scheme that currently leaves both District 39 and the state of Illinois in dire financial straits. But is a taxpayer bailout really the only solution?

Since the WEA has been asked, but refuses, to revise its contract, it is imperative that the D39 Board of Education, which was elected to represent not just some, but all of the taxpayers in the district, find the political will to insist that the WEA accept a salary freeze for the next three years – entirely consistent with the belt-tightening and property value reductions Wilmette residents have had to endure during the current recession.

A WEA salary freeze for the next three years would net D39 $1.7 million in annual savings, about one third of the total deficit. Further “minimal impact” cuts—of which the District has already found $4.3 million—can and must be found. (On the other hand, one has to ask why we were spending $4.3 million for things that had “minimal impact” in the first place!) Finally, the deficit includes $1 million of state funding supposedly eliminated. But, by most accounts, the state income tax increase will provide for reinstatement of that aid to the district. The combination of these three changes could easily wipe out most of the deficit.

Passing the massive $6.4 million referendum would, I fear, allow D39 and the WEA to return to business as usual, with the inevitable temptation of slipping back into deficit spending as they have done since 2005, while pinning their hopes on yet another future referendum to rescue the district once again.

I urge voters to reject the tax increase referendum on April 5. Let the D39 board, administration and WEA work together over the next months, so that the deficit can be reduced to a much more manageable amount. Before any new referendum, let’s address the root cause of the deficit, which has been too much spending, not too little taxation.

Eva Sorock, member of Wilmette's District 39 Board of Education, 1995-2003

2403 Iroquois Road, Wilmette, IL

Tel: 847-251-8955