This week’s edition of the Park Ridge Journal brings a trifecta of holiday cheer.  

You can deck your halls with the City of Park Ridge’s 5% tax levy increase (“Aldermen Approve 5% Increase In Property Tax”).  You can jingle your bells with the Park District’s more modest 2.95% increase (“Park District Eyes $5.2 Million Property Tax Levy”).  Or you can let Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 really roast your chestnuts with its 11% tax increase (“Dist. 64 Agrees On $54.4 Million Tax Levy, 11% Increase”).

But before you start spiking the egg nog over the fact that the recent triennial re-assessment sent your home’s assessed value soaring by 25-40% while your market value actually may have declined by 10-15%, you might want to hoist your mug of glogg in a toast of good cheer to those lucky folks who own Napleton Cadillac. 

That’s because it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas for Napleton – and for PRC Partners, which is likely to purchase the old Napleton Cadillac property for more condos and/or townhouses.  City Manager “Tiny Tim” Schuenke and the City’s Finance and Budget Chairman “Richie D” DiPietro are eagerly cutting a deal that will give Napleton $400,000 of the City’s TIF revenues to pay for the environmental cleanup of the old Napleton Cadillac site – which Napleton contaminated during all those years it was running a profitable dealership there. 

Apart from the financial concerns, it sure seems like wrongheaded policy to effectively reward environmental polluters by bailing them out from the consequences of their conduct, especially when the polluter clearly has the ability to pay its own way.  Is that the kind of message we, as a community, should be sending? 

And as if that weren’t enough, the City is ready to cut a tax revenue sharing arrangement with Napleton whereby the City will share any sales tax revenues generated by the new Napleton (formerly Tom Noe) dealership on a 50-50 basis once Napleton crosses a certain tax threshold – which is looking to be around the $225,000 the City says it has collected in sales tax revenue from Napleton during the past 12 months.

Why the giveaway?

One reason being floated by the City is that the Napleton deal is a lot like the giveaway to Bredemann when the City bought the Toyota and Buick properties for TA2.  You know how it goes: We let the first guy fleece us, so it wouldn’t be fair not to let the second guy do the same.  And the standard party line on these kinds of deals is that if you don’t give businesses such “incentives” they will leave for other communities. 

That kind of rationalization reminds us a lot of the scene in Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles,” where the black sheriff holds a gun to his own head and stops the onrushing white citizens in their tracks with the warning: “Next man makes a move, the [N-word] gets it!”  Sure, an auto dealership that’s been located in our town for the past X number of years might pick up and leave.  But let’s face a simple fact: If a multi-million dollar business will pack it in over the kind of dollars we’re talking about here, it’s commitment to the community isn’t worth “a pitcher of warm spit” (borrowing a term John Nance Garner once used to describe the vice presidency of the United States).

What we’re really talking about here is something that’s becoming more and more prevalent in Park Ridge: Greed, pure and simple.  And also the increasingly well-known ability of savvy and well-connected businessmen like Bill Napleton and Joe Bredemann to pretty much have their way with a lifelong bureaucrat like “Tiny Tim” Schuenke, and a rubber-stamp official like Richie D.

But let’s not forget about our mayor at this festive time of year:  Howard “Old Fezziwig” Frimark, who amazingly saw nothing wrong with leading the City’s “Napleton” negotiating team even though Napleton Cadillac gave Frimark’s mayoral campaign $1,000 [pdf].  When somebody on the Council raised a question about the apparent conflict of interest, Frimark’s response was to disclose – at the January 22, 2007 Council meeting [pdf] – simply that he had “an economic interest with Napleton Cadillac,” without explaining the nature of that interest (or if it was, indeed, limited to that $1,000 campaign contribution), the extent or dollar value of that interest, or how long it had existed.

So sing a chorus or two of “Silent Night,” Park Ridgians, and worry not for Napleton and PRC.  Visions of sugarplums – and our tax dollars – are already dancing in their heads.