$154K schools job for ex-Daley aide
CPS | Lumpkin gets outreach post despite tax hikes, job cuts
Despite a burgeoning financial crisis that has forced a $43 million property tax increase and hundreds of job cuts, the Chicago Board of Education has found a $154,000-a-year job for an all-purpose mayoral troubleshooter.
Barbara Lumpkin, 59, will serve as deputy CEO for external affairs for the Chicago Public Schools forging partnerships with the business community to support school programs. The job has been vacant for nine months -- ever since Lumpkin's predecessor retired.
(Scott Stewart/Sun-Times)
"We need to continue to do outreach to major corporations. We cannot function without fulfilling those responsibilities. We have high-level jobs like this that we always intended to fill," said CPS spokeswoman Monique Bond.
Schools CEO Ron Huberman found the job for his former City Hall colleague two years after Lumpkin resigned as Mayor Daley's $169,452-a-year chief procurement officer, leaving behind a department that has struggled to boost black contracting and weed out minority fronts.
Lumpkin is the City Hall equivalent of a utility infielder. She has also served as Daley's city comptroller, budget director and city treasurer following the conviction of Miriam Santos.
In 2005, her name turned up on city documents as one of four officials who signed off on some of the 14 pay raises over eight years -- three within two months -- granted to former gang member-turned convicted Hired Truck czar Angelo Torres.
At the time, Lumpkin called those sign-offs "routine for the role that I served in." She said she did not recall having discussions about Torres with Victor Reyes, the Hispanic Democratic Organization chieftain who ran the Mayor's Office of Intergovernmental Affairs at the time.
That wasn't the only controversy to cloud Lumpkin's City Hall tenure.
During a brief stint as city treasurer -- before Santos was released from prison and re-claimed the office only to turn around and plead guilty -- Lumpkin downplayed as "routine" $445.6 million in transaction errors that cost a top employee his job and deprived taxpayers of $102,428 in interest and penalties.
To plug a $475 million budget gap -- the largest since Daley's 1995 school takeover -- CPS is raising property taxes by $43 million and cutting 450 more jobs. Some of them may be teachers.
Swamped with pension costs, Huberman has warned that next year's budget gap could approach $900 million. That means "everything is on the table," including increased class size, teacher layoffs and pay cuts and a reduction in pension contributions, he said.