In August 2023, the Village of Westchester, Illinois, retained Pontifex Consulting Group to conduct a pay study. Pontifex conducted market survey of wage rates in comparable municipalities to provide recommendations for compensation adjustments. The Metropolitan Alliance of Police, Westchester Patrol, Chapter #651, first requested a copy of the study in February 2024. The Village’s assistant manager, John Schwarz, responded by providing only materials that had been shared with a different union representing sergeants. This included a document on the study’s methodology and a competitive compensation analysis for sergeants, but it deliberately excluded the parallel analysis for the patrol officers’ bargaining unit. Schwarz justified this by stating that the full report had been presented to the Village Board in a closed session and had not been authorized for public release.
The Union repeatedly renewed its request for the complete report, emphasizing its necessity for bargaining. During mediation sessions, the Village claimed the withheld information constituted its “bargaining strategy.” The Village used the numbers from the report to strategize its wage proposals but continued to deny the Union access to the underlying data. The Union’s president testified that without the full report, the Union was negotiating in the dark; it could not verify the basis for the Village’s wage offers, understand how its proposals were calculated, or formulate effective counterproposals. Even as the parties moved to interest arbitration, the Village persisted in its refusal. In a telling move, the Village’s attorney stated in May 2024 that the Village Board had still not authorized the study’s release. Crucially, testimony revealed that after the Board of Trustees did later approve the disclosure in the latter part of the summer, the Village still withheld the information, offering to provide it only if the Union dropped the unfair labor practice charge it had filed over the refusal. The Village finally turned over the patrol officer compensation data the day before the hearing on the charge, but other parts of the report concerning different employee groups remained undisclosed.
An Administrative Law Judge for the Illinois Labor Relations Board found that the Village violated Sections 10(a)(4) and (1) of the Illinois Public Labor Relations Act. The ALJ held that the Pontifex report was presumptively relevant because it directly concerned wages, a mandatory subject of bargaining, and because the Village itself had relied on the report during negotiations. The information was “necessary for the Union to develop its wage proposals and its final wage offer for submission to interest arbitration.” The ALJ systematically rejected the Village’s defenses. The claim that disclosure was prohibited by the Open Meetings Act and Freedom of Information Act failed because those laws govern public disclosure, not a union’s right to information necessary for bargaining.
The Village’s primary argument — that the report contained confidential “bargaining strategy” — was also dismissed. The ALJ found the report was merely “a compilation of statistical, market information about wages paid to employees in comparable municipalities,” which is “raw data that assists the bargaining process when freely exchanged and is not ordinarily deemed confidential.” The report contained no actual guidance on negotiation tactics or proposals. The Village’s “shifting explanations” for withholding the report were noted as further evidence of bad faith.
Village of Westchester, 42 PERI ¶ 37 (ILRB 2025).