One of the reasons this blog was started was because the reporting of local government activity left a lot to be desired. Key facts were often omitted, and some “facts” that were reported ended up being just plain wrong.
Although the local papers have raised their games in the past year or so, they are still not consistently accurate and comprehensive; and every so often they lapse back into their bad old ways, leaving the public dangerously uninformed, under-informed, or misinformed – as was the case with last week’s Park Ridge Journal account of the PADS homeless shelter discussion at last Monday night’s City Council meeting.
Not surprisingly, the Journal reporter wasn’t Craig Adams who, despite being relatively new to the City Hall beat, has shown an increasing grasp of how City government “works” (or doesn’t), and the ability to write about it in an accurate and understandable way. Instead, the Journal reporter last week was old reliable Dwight Esau – whose reporting on local government often seem to wobble precariously between fact and fiction.
Esau has always been a cheerleader for those public officials whose guiding principles are secrecy and the desire to tax, borrow and spend away the taxpayers’ money. So it comes as no surprise to find out that Esau heartily recommended/endorsed Schuenke for the $93,000/year position of City Administrator for Delafield, Wisconsin, after Schuenke took a lucrative early retirement from his highly-paid position as Park Ridge City Manager – shortly before the discovery of a $1.7 million deficit in the City’s 2007-2008 operations which apparently resulted, in large part, from Schuenke’s making up revenue numbers just to get the budget to balance.
Esau called Schuenke “one of the best” administrators Esau has dealt with in 25-30 years of covering municipal government in Cook County, www.livinglakecountry.com/LakeCountryReporter/Story.aspx?id=766110, which not only calls Esau’s judgment and reporting skills into question but also makes us wonder about how many other neighboring municipalities are also mismanaged.
Maybe that’s why it’s perversely entertaining to hear that Schuenke has already gotten sideways with the president of Delafield’s Common Council because of Schuenke’s attempt to tack an additional half-million dollars of debt onto a $12.4 bond issue. www.livinglakecountry.com/story/index.aspx?id=806880.
And guess what? Schuenke, Delafield’s mayor and other city officials “have been meeting behind closed doors with contractors and architects for the past several weeks” even though the mayor refuses to post public notice of the meetings or allow the media to attend, claiming that those meetings aren’t subject to Wisconsin’s open-meetings law. Sound familiar, folks?
Set against that backdrop, therefore, we thought it might be instructive to “mark up” Esau’s account of Monday night’s proceedings to identify his errors and reveal how insidious such errors can be to a trusting reader’s understanding of what exactly his/her local government is doing.
THE JOURNAL & TOPICS NEWSPAPERS | WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2008
PADS In Public Works?
By DWIGHT ESAU
Journal & Topics Reporter
After months of debate about putting a homeless shelter in a Park Ridge church, plans now call for locating it in the city’s public works center. [What “plans”? Frimark proposed the Public Works Service Center, but the Council did not vote on it or even really discuss the specifics of its use as a homeless shelter.]
The informal and tentative decision [What “decision” is Esau talking about? And what kind of a governmental “decision” is “informal” and “tentative”?] came after midnight Monday, Oct. 20, after nearly five hours of contentious and confusing debate at a city council meeting held in the auditorium of Washington School.
More than 60 residents [From our experience, anything that exceeds fingers and toes is beyond Esau’s mathematical prowess. We counted 97 people in the audience at 8:00 p.m., and we think we probably missed several more that had adjourned to the hallway or outside for a smoke] attended the meeting which took the form of the latest of a series of public hearings on whether a homeless shelter should be allowed in the city, and, if so, where it could be located, and under what conditions.
Weary aldermen informally expressed support for the idea of a shelter in the public works service center at 400 Busse Highway. They also authorized Mayor Howard Frimark to negotiate a contractual agreement for a shelter with the Park Ridge Ministerial Association and the PADS (Public Action t o Deliver Shelter), a social service agency serving homeless persons. The contract would have to be approved by aldermen. [The Council didn’t “authorize” Frimark to negotiate because, according to the City Attorney, Frimark doesn’t need Council authorization to negotiate anything on which the Council has a final say.]
Frimark told the council that the PRMA and PADS have both expressed a general willingness to enter into a contractual arrangement with the city for a shelter on city property.
“PADS told me they didn’t want to be a co-applicant for a shelter on private property, but they are willing to contract with the city for one,” Frimark said.
The mayor surprised aldermen and others involved in this project by proposing the center as a location instead of St. Paul of the Cross Church, a site the PRMA suggested earlier. [No, Dwight, Frimark surprised nobody about the Public Works Service Center as the shelter location because he had issued a press release on it last Thursday! He did “surprise” people (including the aldermen), however, when he announced that he had been talking to PADS Inc. and the PRMA about a contract arrangement rather than PADS being a co-applicant for the special use permit that will likely be needed for the shelter.]
“This public works site is accessible by public transportation, has equipment needed to operate such a facility, and could be open from October to April, as proposed by Ministerial Association,” Frimark said. “The association unanimously agrees with this recommendation,” he added.
A parade of residents almost unanimously supported the public works center location idea, and continued to criticize the council for considering the church site, where it would be close to a school, which is located very close to the church site. [At least half of the residents who spoke Monday night did not even mention the Public Works center but were discussing other specifics of the zoning ordinance text amendment, including the 500-foot restriction around schools.]
As they did in several previous hearings, residents expressed concerns about crime, health issues, and the potential danger of a shelter to children.
The council also approved, on first reading, two measures designed to set up a framework of regulation and supervision of shelters, wherever they are located and whoever operates them. Aldermen did so only after taking several hours to amend them extensively. [By our count, no more than 20% of either measure was amended, so Esau’s use of the term “amend them extensively” appears just plain wrong.]
One is a text amendment to the city’s zoning code that would permit shelters as special uses in several zoning districts in the city, and describes restrictions governing how and when they would be operated. This was approved by a 6-1 vote, with Ald. David Schmidt (1st) voting no.
Also approved, unanimously, on first reading was a licensing measure.
The measures are expected to be approved at the council’s next meeting on Oct. 29. [“Expected” by whom?] A key and controversial provision in the ordinance [Why no mention that the “ordinance” was recommended by a 7-2 vote of the City’s Planning & Zoning Commission?] says that a shelter shall not be located within 500 feet of a child daycare, nursery school, or grammar school, but also cannot be open within 60 minutes of the operation of any other activities at the facility where the shelter is located. [Why no mention that this 60-minutes provision was a City Council-proposed amendment to the P&Z’s recommended language?]
Officials said that all of the provisions of the ordinance and the licensing requirements would be included in any contract for a shelter.