Former Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis walked out with a $76,308 check for accrued vacation days when he resigned his $310,000-a-year job on March 1 — a lump-sum payment for 64 unused days that’s raising eyebrows at City Hall.
His former $168,438-a-year chief-of-staff Mike Masters left police headquarters with a check for $30,448. That’s the equivalent of 54 unused vacation days
Weis’ lump-sum payment — for the equivalent of 56.2 percent of his allotted total — raises eyebrows for several reasons.
For one, he started work on Feb. 1, 2008, but still claimed 25 vacation days that year when he was eligible for none. The former superintendent also got 25 vacation days in both 2009 and 2010, even though civilian employees are only eligible for 13 vacation days.
In June, 2010, after entering the final year of his three-year contract, Weis made a policy decision that increased his vacation payment even more.
He changed the policy governing vacation carryover to allow “command staff members” including himself and Masters to carry up to 39 unused vacation days from one year to the next “when circumstances prohibited the use of current and prior year’s allotments.”
[...] Copies of Weis’ so-called “command staff vacation carryover requests” obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show that Weis and Masters took full advantage of the policy change—by carrying over 39 unused vacation days from 2010 to 2011.
Both men used identical wording to justify the request: “Unable to use due to operational needs.”
That must have been a helluva contract Shortshanks signed with J-Fled. Someone must have had Daley dead-bang on some dirty paper or a wiretap.