When, early into Monday night’s (Dec. 1) City Council meeting, 1st Ward Ald. (and mayoral candidate) Dave Schmidt made his motion to seek the voters’ advice on whether the City should spend in excess of $16 million (not including land acquisition and bond interest) on a big new police station, the silence from his fellow aldermen was deafening.

Some stared down at their desks while others looked blankly into space, as if trying to avoid eye contact with Schmidt or the citizens in the audience whom they claim to represent.  Only their shameless leader, Mayor Howard “Let’s Make A Deal” Frimark, spoke…and that was only to ask the question to which he already knew the answer: “Is there a second?”

There wasn’t, and the motion died.  And with it died the Park Ridge voters’ best hope for getting an honest chance to tell City government whether or not they want their money spent on an expensive new cop shop that – under the most recent plan expressed by 7th Ward Ald. (and aspiring Frimark Alderpuppet) Frank Wsol – will likely cost the taxpayers over $1 million a year for 20+ years in debt service payments, of which approximately $200,000 a year would be just the interest on the bonds.

By our unscientific calculations, those annual interest charges alone could pay for two police officers, three-four blocks of new relief sewers, or our current city manager.  Any of those three options seems like the better deal for Park Ridge taxpayers, especially since Frimark and the current Council members have shown the inability to manage city finances – as evidenced by the $1.7 million deficit City Mgr. Jim Hock reported for last year, and an even bigger deficit being projected for this year.

But those kinds of calculations and budget deficits don’t seem to matter to our current City officials when the alternative is building a big new monument to themselves – and which also enables them to dish up a lot of sweet contracts to consultants, architects, engineers and contractors.

But with Schmidt’s motion having died without a second, the voters are unlikely to get a chance to express their opinions on the big new and expensive cop shop in the way it can best (and most honestly) be measured: at the polls on Tuesday, April 7.  That’s because the only vehicle for putting an advisory question on the ballot, other than by Council resolution, is by a citizen petition, which would have to be filed no later than January 20, 2009, and which we understand would require something in the neighborhood of 3,000 signatures (although the exact amount is a question for an election law attorney and/or City Clerk Betty Henneman).

Why would Frimark and the Alderpuppets want to put our voters to the onerous task of collecting all those signatures in the dead of winter to get such an important public policy issue on the April ballot when the Council, from the comfort of its warm and cozy chambers, could make that happen in minutes? 

Because if the referendum doesn’t go their way (which is what we believe would be the case), they would have to disregard the manifest will of the people if they still wanted to build their “Taj Mahal” cop shop.  Without a referendum, however, they can continue to talk about the “need” for such a structure and claim – without any way of being proved wrong – that the residents they’ve heard from really want another expensive pile of brick and mortar.  

Frimark and the Alderpuppets think that makes them “leaders.”  What it really does is expose them as cowards.

UPDATE 12/03/08 @ 4:20 p.m.

Today’s Park Ridge Journal contains an article (“At This Point, Can City Even Afford New Police Station”) about the new cop shop debate that should be a “must read” for anybody interested in this issue and the current City administration’s fiscal management, if only for the quotes from 3rd Ward Alderpuppet Don Bach in which he blames the current police station for everything but the heartbreak of psoriasis.

Bach, channeling fellow Alderpuppet Jim “Chicken Little” Allegretti, calls the current cop shop “a lawsuit waiting to happen” with “unsafe and dangerous prisoner facilities” that is such “a disgrace, a joke” that it is creating a “morale problem with our police officials.”  Big talk, Mr. Bach, but where are your facts – not opinions, but hard evidence – that any of your spiel is true, and that the City has suffered any adverse financial effects because of it?  And isn’t it true that any time a new officer vacancy opens up, the P.D. is flooded with applications?

Despite the current recession, hundreds of homes sitting stagnantly for sale (many of which are in foreclosure), and the City budget awash in red ink, Bach – the same Alderpuppet who earlier this year voted to give Mayor Frimark crony Bill Napleton as much as $2.4 million of our tax dollars because (Bach claimed) a whopping 30 of his constituents said it was okay – insists that the new cop shop presents no financial issue.  Watchdog to Bach: “It’s the economy, stupid!”

But, for us, the defining quote from Bach is his claim that: “The overwhelming majority of residents I talk to in my ward on a weekly basis tell me they favor building a new facility.” 

If you’re not smoking the funny stuff or outright lying through your teeth, sir, you’ve just given away your only excuse (lame as it is) for not having a referendum: That you’re afraid of an overwhelming “No” vote.  Otherwise, you’d be eager to be proved correct by the voters.

So either publicly recant your opposition to Schmidt’s cop shop referendum, or tell us where you get your Maui Wowie.  Or should we just check to see how much your nose has grown?