This past Tuesday, a resident stood up during public comment at the Piqua City Commission meeting and read a memo out loud. The memo came from the city itself, through a public records request. It showed that several city department leaders had been given cash bonuses, ranging from $3,000 to $10,000, for their work helping bring a “project” (most likely a large data center) to Piqua. The resident had questions. The commission did not have any answers. But this story is not really about the data center, and it is not about any one person. It is about whether public employees should get bonus checks at all.
Most people who work for the government make a trade. They usually earn less money than they might in the private sector. In return, they get things many private jobs don’t offer anymore: lots of paid holidays, extra paid days off, the ability to trade unused days off for cash, and health, dental, and life insurance. They also get a pension that pays them money for the rest of their life after they retire, some after only 25 years of work. For a lot of workers, that whole package is worth more than the paycheck itself. Nowhere in that deal is a promise of a bonus.
That trade-off is exactly why bonuses deserve a closer look, not less of one. Article II, Section 29 of Ohio’s Constitution actually has a rule about this. Genreally, it says no extra pay can be given to a public officer after the work is already done. But a 1981 opinion from the Ohio Attorney General said this rule does not apply to cities, counties, townships, or school districts. So the bonuses were probably legal.
But notice what had to happen to get there: someone had to go looking through the state constitution, and then broadly interpret Piqua’s own city ordinances, just to find a way around the general rule. The closest thing to permission in Piqua’s own code is a Section 33.14 of the Code of Ordinances letting the city manager set personnel policies using “sound discretion.”
More than likely, that rule was written to handle things like holiday schedules and probation periods, not to hand out five-figure bonuses tied to the biggest development deal in city history. When you have to search that hard for an exception instead of a rule, it’s a good sign that something is being done poorly, even if it isn’t being done illegally.
Ultimately, there is a policy problem with bonuses in government jobs, and it goes far beyond any one community. Once you start paying people extra for hitting certain numbers in government service, it’s only natural people start chasing the numbers instead of doing the job the right way. A police department that pays bonuses for more arrests might get more arrests, but that doesn’t mean the community actually gets safer.
This is not an attack on the people who received these payments. City employees do important work every day, and the city should pay fair wages and provide competitive benefits. The question is whether one person local government should be able to create special bonus payments connected to a major development deal without a clear policy, independent review, and a public vote by the elected commission.
The December memo raises an even more serious concern. It recommended bonus payments for the city’s Finance Director and Law Director, along with other department leaders. Those positions exist in part to serve as safeguards. The Finance Director should be able to ask whether a payment is properly budgeted and authorized. The Law Director should be able to ask whether it is legally sound. When both officials are also receiving the payment under review, the city loses the independent check residents should expect.
That does not mean anyone acted dishonestly. It does mean the process was poorly designed. Good government is not built on trusting people to do the right thing after the fact. It is built on clear rules that protect the public, the employees, and the elected officials before a decision is made.
If communities are going to consider the extraordiary step of performance bonuses, at a bare minimum, they should adopt a written policy for such payments. The policy should require a stated purpose, a stated funding source, independent legal and financial review, and a public vote by the governing board before money is paid. If the city believes a bonus is justified, it should be able to make that case in public before the check is written. Residents deserve to know how public money is spent, who approved it, and what safeguards were in place to protect the public interest.
In the end, if any community is going to award extraordinary compensation tied to extraordinary projects, it needs an extraordinary level of public oversight: a written policy, a stated funding source, independent legal and fiscal review, and a public vote by the elected officials before payment.
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