9%, 10%, 11% Raises!

What? Oh, not for the front line police or firefighters. You peons be happy with your 2% and 1% raises:

• Even with 517 layoffs, $417 million in budget cuts and $220 million in higher taxes, fines and fees, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s first city budget rewards a handful of top mayoral aides.

  Fire Commissioner Robert Hoff is in line for a nine percent pay raise — from $185,652 a year to $202,728.

  There’s also a nine percent pay hike — to $178,740 — for the newly-appointed deputy commissioner in charge of the scandal-scarred Fire Prevention Bureau.

• While the Chicago Police Department is closing three district stations and eliminating 1,252 police vacancies, Supt. Garry McCarthy’s chief of staff will get a nearly ten percent bump — to $185,004.

  The Police Department’s new director of news affairs will be paid $112,008 a year, nearly 9.5 percent more.

  Transportation Commissioner Gabe Klein gets a nearly eight percent pay raise — to $169,500. A former transportation chief in Washington D.C., Klein is a champion of bike lanes and bike sharing, two of Emanuel’s pet projects.

  General Services Commissioner David Reynolds gets a nearly 12 percent bump from his predecessor — from $140,364 to $157,092.

  [...] Although the budget for the mayor’s office is down slightly — to just under $6 million — a staff restructuring has resulted in pay cuts for some and eye-popping pay raises for others.

  Matt Hynes, director of the Mayor’s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, is in line for a nearly seven percent raise — from $158,364 to $168,996.

  An administrative secretary in the mayor’s office gets a 22 percent pay raise — to $90,000. Four assistants to the mayor would be in line for increases ranging from 14 percent to 41 percent — one earning as much as $162,492.

  There are also pay hikes for two deputy chiefs of staff. The budget director and chief financial officer also get a boost, both receiving $169,992-a-year.

But hey, that's not urine on your head. It's raining! Honest!

• Communications Director Chris Mather — whose $162,492 a year salary is eight percent less than her predecessor’s — insisted that most of the increases built into the mayor’s first budget are not really pay raises.

  “People aren’t getting raises from now to 2012. This is what they got hired at. And there are a number of younger, entry-level people who came in at a lower amount, so we bumped some of them up to 2012,” Mather said in an e-mail response to the Chicago Sun-Times.

If the check amount went up, it's a raise. We certainly expect the FOP negotiating committee is taking copious notes on these raises, seeing as how after Rahm raises health and pension contributions next contract while claiming the City is still broke, we're looking at pay cuts in terms of take home pay.