We recently had an inquiry from a Park Ridge taxpayer concerning the current “streetscaping” project on Summit Avenue, just South of the Library.  The general tenor of the question was: “With a horrible economy and the City’s million dollar budget deficit, why is the City spending all that money on something so unnecessary?”Good question.

But first things first.  The budget deficit for 2007-08 is reported to be $1.7 million, not merely $1 million.  And City Mgr. Jim Hock is predicting a similar deficit for the current 2008-09 budget year.  That’s a total of $3.4 million of red ink that our City Council let former City Mgr. Tim Schuenke bamboozle it into when it accepted his inflated revenue projections, and which it has to find a way to cover.  Let’s see now: will City Hall raise our taxes some more, add to our municipal debt, simply cut corners on essential but already-neglected infrastructure repairs…or all three?

So why is the City spending a bundle of our hard-earned money on streetscaping? 

In the first instance, because it was recommended by our own collection of bureaucrats known as City “Staff,” as can be seen from the August 18, 2008, Agenda Cover Memo [pdf] to the City Council by Acting Director of Community Preservation and Development, Carrie Davis. 

Ms. Davis has mastered the bureaucratic art of making grand pronouncements without any facts to support them.  In this case, she concludes that this streetscaping project “will improve sight lines and safety” – “safety” being the magic word because it’s a sure-fire way of provoking an unthinking, knee-jerkingly favorable reaction – without one shred of explanation about how this project will improve “safety.”  Not only that, but in her very next paragraph she makes the seemingly contradictory statement that “[t]he goal of this project is to continue the design of the City Commons streetscape improvements”  [Emphasis added], which suggests that the project is really more about appearance than about safety.

But if you really want to see the bureaucratic mind at work, check out the second page of her memo, where Davis attempts to explain away the over-budget cost of this project with four “reasons” (using that term loosely, as very little actual reasoning is at work here), including a repetition of her conclusory “safety” argument (this time, the more specific but no better explained “pedestrian safety”) and the recitation of one of the most loathsome of all bureaucratic excuses:

“Construction costs are expected to continue rising, making it more expensive to do the work each year the project is delayed.”

In other words, buy everything you want today because it’s going to cost more tomorrow!

Unfortunately, the members of our City Council must have been mesmerized by the total inanity of this explanation and whatever additional “pertinent details” Public Works Director Wayne Zingsheim came up with, because without even one question or comment they approved spending $1,553,341 on this project by a 7-0 vote at the Council’s August 18, 2008, meeting, as evidenced by the relevant excerpts of that meeting’s Minutes [pdf].

If the term “fiscal responsibility” is to be more than a tired cliché when applied to local government, we’ve got to get rid of this buy-it-now mentality which treats our tax dollars like Monopoly money, and treats non-essential amenities as if they are necessities. 

And if our bureaucrats and elected officials can’t embrace the concept of a “wise and frugal government” that Thomas Jefferson advocated in his first inaugural address over 200 years ago, then it’s time to get rid of them, too.