They can’t keep our streets paved or fill the potholes.  They can’t stop the flooding of our basements.  They can’t get us dependable electric power.  They can’t stop hiring consultants to tell them only what they want to hear.  They can’t stop raising our taxes.  They can’t even stop giving away our money and special favors to political contributors. 

But one thing Mayor Howard Frimark and his Alderpuppets Jim Allegretti, Don Bach, Tom Carey, Rich DiPietro and Robert Ryan can do is run a witch hunt…or a snipe hunt, depending on your point of view.

At the City Council meeting this past Monday night (March 3), Frimark used his regular “Mayor’s Report” to read a prepared statement in which he, City Clerk Betty Henneman and the Alderpuppets publicly “condemned” the release of closed session information and materials by 1st Ward Warlock…er, Alderman…Dave Schmidt, apparently for Schmidt’s having the temerity to actually tell Park Ridge taxpayers how the City was going to spend more than a million dollars of their money on a police department “audit” and on the acquisition of yet another parcel of private property for a new police station.

As reported in today’s Park Ridge Journal (“Mayor Condemns Alderman’s Release Of Documents,” March 5), Frimark and Friends once again displayed their terminal ignorance of the Illinois Open Meetings Act (IOMA), with Frimark wrongly insisting that the Illinois legislature recognized that “certain matters…should not be discussed in open session.”  He then blamed Schmidt’s release of the previously-concealed information for having “laid waste to the confidence and trust that are necessary for deliberative bodies to carry out their duties.”

Bunk.

As we’ve said before, and as is clear from the discussion of IOMA on the Illinois Attorney General’s website, IOMA merely permits – but does not require – certain limited subjects to be discussed in closed session.  Moreover, nowhere in IOMA does the state legislature require that any of the information discussed or disseminated in, or in connection with, such closed sessions be treated as “confidential” or entitled to secrecy. 

Of course, given the wheeling and dealing that Frimark and the Alderpuppets have been concealing from their constituents in all those closed sessions, they need to trust each other to keep secrets – not unlike the Mafia with its “omerta” (code of silence). So a guy like Schmidt is their worst nightmare – an informant.  That’s bad for those conspirators, but great for us taxpayers.

Which would explain why Frimark snuck the “Council Decorum” item into the existing agenda over the weekend and then apparently circulated his condemnation statement among the Alderpuppets in classic “hub-and-spoke” conspiracy style, ostensibly to avoid violating IOMA.  And in classic Frimark style, he didn’t even have the decency to offer Schmidt the courtesy of a preview.  

From the account in The Journal and from reports of citizens in attendance Monday night, it almost sounds as if Frimark was flirting with McCarthyism in his attack on Schmidt.  The only question is whether Frimark’s McCarthyism is of the paranoid Sen. Joe McCarthy variety, or of the petulant Charlie McCarthy type. 

And the answer to that question might very well depend on whether Frimark is coming up with this nonsense on his own, or whether he’s just a dummy spouting the views of some behind-the-scenes Edgar Bergen.