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FOP Ignores Retirees in Contract

IPSN Newspaper, April 16, 1997

THE CURRENT POLICE contract between the City of Chicago and Lodge 7 of the Fraternal Order of Police runs to 159 pages of text, with another nine pages thrown in for a table of contents and an index. This document covers all the big stuff like salary levels, arbitration and discipline procedures. It also covers lots of little stuff, like use of the masculine pronoun in the text of the contract itself. But nowhere in this ponderous document is there a single reference to the real needs of the several thousand retired Chicago Police Officers.

It’s as if the thousands of men and women who spent 20 or 25 years chasing the bad guys are, immediately upon retirement, turned into non-persons. It’s as if Bill Nolan and the other Daley pawns who run the FOP are overwhelmed by the needs of active-duty cops, and are just simply spread too thin to even consider providing union services to those men and women who have already attended their own retirement parties.

ART CHOLLY KNOWS. He’s a guy who spent years covering the beat, chasing the offenders and supporting the FOP. These days, Cholly chases down errant political figures and tries to get them to support his efforts to set aside a $190-per-month charge that retired Chicago cops must pay to keep their health insurance in force. That figure had recently topped out at $275-per-month but, thanks to Cholly and his fellow retirees who make up the Oak Lawn-based CAREPAC organization, the City saw fit to cut it back to the still-abusive $190.

In an interesting bit of credit-grabbing that borders on theft-by-deception, Bill Nolan and his FOP chums tried to claim that they were the white knights who forced the City to lop $85 off the monthly retiree health insurance fees. But Cholly dug into his group’s archives and came up with a letter written on Mayor Richard M. Daley’s official letterhead which quite clearly states that the City intends to keep the top limit that retirees would pay for their health insurance at $190-per-month. So, no matter what Nolan and the FOP gang might have been claiming last year and into the first part of l997, the Cholly letter is dated December 3, 1990. That’s about seven years before Nolan got into the act on this particular problem.

CHOLLY’S CAREPAC group—the Coalition of Active & Retired Employees Political Action Committee—has been on the leading edge of the effort to keep the City from charging retired cops for their health insurance. Cholly’s recollections go back to the days of the “handshake agreement” between police unions and the original Mayor Daley. It was in that era that police were “promised” that they would never be required to pay for health insurance after they went on the retired rolls.

The promises, Cholly recalls, were made not only by Big Daddy Daley, but also by the subsequent Mayors who occupied City Hall’s fifth floor.

But eventually, the City came up with a plan to begin charging those retirees who were not yet eligible for Medicare a flat $55-per-month health insurance fee.

A suit was filed that would languish in the Circuit Court of Cook County for more years than even a patient guy like Art Cholly could take. Then, in 1992, Cholly and his group staged a City Hall demonstration that drew some 4,000 retirees who quite visibly and vocally protested the insurance charge.

It was at that public outcry that the FOP tried to take control of the issue.

Initially, Cholly thought that forming an alliance with the FOP would result in at least a cutback on the insurance charges, if not the complete elimination of what was to become a form of taxation without representation directed specifically at retired cops.

IT WAS ONLY after the FOP got into the act—or “into bed with the City,” as Cholly maintains—that the original $55-per-month rate climbed all the way up to $275.

Then, after Mayor Daley’s people had a unilateral change of heart and decided to make the cutback to $190, the FOP’s Nolan thought nobody would remember the whole story and tried to take credit for this so-called insurance rate “reduction.”

But Art Cholly is not only a guy who remembers all the gory details of how the City has been squeezing its retired cops on their insurance for years, he’s also a guy who won’t let Nolan and the FOP forget. And Cholly is good with numbers.

Although $190-per-month may not seem to be all that financially crippling, if a retired cop pays it for ten years or so until Medicare kicks in, he or she is losing something in the neighborhood of $25,000.

THAT’S BECAUSE THE FOP didn’t have the desire or the inclination or maybe the guts to include retired members in their contract with the City. At 159 pages-plus, there apparently just isn’t room in the FOP contract for the rights of retired cops.ises.