Chicago City Budget Analysis: Estimating Real Cost of Budgeted Positions from Publicly Available Data

For purposes of the BGA budget snapshots, BGA Policy has applied the fringe formulae from the DoF fringe memo to each budgeted position's exact salary, rather than a citywide average.

Each budgeted position was first sorted into its relevant pension fund, using a combination of bargaining unit, title code, and pay schedule/grade codes. The budgeted salary for each position or positions was then multiplied by the DoF fringe memo from the relevant year. Tying each individual salary to its relevant fringe multiplier provides as accurate an estimate as possible of fringe costs for full-time, non-grant positions.

Part-time positions cannot be as accurately estimated, since budget data does not specify how many individual employees are represented by hours/months budgeted, nor which of those employees are eligible for pension and/or health benefits. The D0F fringe calculation for pensionable employees relies on a fixed per-employee pension amount, meaning it can only be used when a specific number of employees is known in addition to the budgeted hours/months.

Our estimate therefore uses the only available part-time fringe calculation that does not include a per-employee fixed value: the single multiplier for non-pensionable part-time employees. The resulting part-time fringe estimates will necessarily be an undercount, as at least some of the part-time hours and months included in the budget will be fulfilled by pensionable employees.

The impact is marginal - part-time hours and months typically make up less than 5% of the locally-funded position budget in a given year - but accounts for a slight undervaluing of the BGA estimate relative to the fringe-relevant appropriation totals in the Finance General section.