At tonight’s City Council meeting, Mayor Howard “The Coward” Frimark’s apprentice Alderpuppet, Frank Wsol (7th Ward), is scheduled to present two advisory referendum questions, one of which ostensibly involves the proposed new police station that Wsol desperately wants – and on which he himself placed the $16.5 million price tag (which becomes $28 million when the bond interest is added in) that was the basis for Ald. Dave Schmidt’s proposed Council referendum resolution and now Joe Egan’s citizens’ referendum petition, both of which Wsol opposes.  

Wsol’s referendum proposals reek of rank political gamesmanship.  He has been talking up the big new cop shop project since his re-election campaign two years ago without once expressing any interest in giving the voters a chance to vote on it via referendum.  And when Schmidt, on two occasions, proposed a referendum resolution by the Council, Wsol wouldn’t even offer a second so that the referendum’s merits could be discussed. 

But more offensive than Wsol’s obvious gamesmanship is the intellectual dishonesty of his referendum questions themselves, which – like both Schmidt’s and Egan’s questions – are advisory only, meaning that even if they are approved by the voters in April the City Council can nevertheless ignore them if it so chooses.  And from the way Wsol’s questions read, a bet on the Council’s ignoring them looks to be a sure thing.

One of Wsol’s questions – “Shall the City of Park Ridge adopt a policy that all non-emergency debt and all non-emergency budget increases above the CPI-U (CPI-U decreases will not apply) shall require voter approval by referendum vote?” – is so ridiculous and impractical that, if enacted and applied literally to the City’s operations, it could require a virtually incessant stream of referendum questions that might even require the City to hold special elections for even some minor spending or borrowing decisions that, while not technically “emergency” ones, might not be able to wait for the next regularly-scheduled election.

But while Wsol’s CPI-U question is just ridiculous, his other question may be the single most poorly-worded and intellectually dishonest referendum question we have ever seen – appearing to have been written first to confuse, then to confound, and finally to frustrate any voter who actually tries to make sense of it.  It actually causes us to wonder whether Wsol is proposing it in the hope that it gets a ballot position ahead of Egan’s question, so that many voters throw in the towel in disgust before even getting to Egan’s.

In the interest of political science and provoking thought among the electorate, however, we will try to deconstruct and analyze that referendum question, with our comments in bracketed bold for your convenience:

“In adopting a capital project to improve the administrative/public and police facilities at 505 Butler Place [Wait a minute! By adding “administrative/public” into the equation, it looks like Wsol is setting the table to go beyond the “police facilities” to include other parts of City Hall. Why is it, then, that the new cop shop project – which Wsol originally supported at more than four-times the size of the current 9,000 square foot facility and without any cost cap, before scaling back the cost to $16.5 million – is now morphing into an overall City Hall project?], shall the City of Park Ridge require as conditions of issuing any bonds for such improvements that: the annual bond payment will not cause an increase in City taxes/fees or service reductions as of 2008 levels (adjusted for inflation) [Who at City Hall can we trust to tell us the truth on that point? Didn’t Wsol vote for last year’s budget and (we believe) all of the costs and expenses that pushed it $1.7 million into the red, and didn’t he do the same for the current year’s budget that was already $1.2 million in the red a the half-way point?]; the total spent, absent interest [which, according to figures obtained by the City, will push the total cost of a $16.5 million project to $28 million] and operational costs [which can be expected to more than double, based on the additional size, while Wsol et al. are already presiding over consecutive years of budget deficits] will not exceed $16.5 million; the facility improvement will not require new land purchases [Did you clear this with Mayor Howard, Bill Napleton and all the other Friends of Frimark who are trying to sell their land to the City, Mr. Wsol? And if you’re thinking about using the Courtland property that the City bought a few years ago for around $650,000, you need to include that cost as well.] and the facility improvements will, where economically appropriate, include “green engineering” for the purpose of lowering on-going operational costs?” [Given the current mayor’s and Council’s fiscal buffoonery, “where economically appropriate” can be expected to mean “don’t count on it.”]

Now, compare that with the Egan version that Wsol and the other alderpuppets have criticized: “Shall the City of Park Ridge replace its current police facility with a new, larger structure at a cost of at least $16.5 million plus additional, but currently unknown, costs for the land on which it will be situated and bond interest?”  

We think that language is exponentially clearer than Wsol’s.  But, predictably, Alderpuppet and Frimark lapdog Jim “Chicken Little” Allegretti (4th Ward) was unhappy about it: “It’s biased, it’s prejudiced, it’s one-sided, and it doesn’t really tell us anything.” Funny, but that’s one of the ways we could describe Allegretti and his Council service over the past three-plus years.

As reported in last week’s Herald-Advocate (“Wsol suggests different ballot questions about police station,” Jan. 14), Wsol – in full dissembling politician mode – said he is proposing these questions “in an effort to resolve the issue of Park Ridge City Council spending and its right to incur long-term debt.”  

Gee, Mr. Wsol, instead of proposing one referendum question that looks to dump a steady stream of the City’s big and small financial decisions on the voters when you don’t want to give them the vote on this one big cop shop expenditure, and another question that is borderline-unintelligible, why don’t you start by doing one of the jobs you were elected to do…like balancing the City budget?  And if you really want to start getting a handle on the City’s debt problems, why not reinstate the City’s voluntary debt cap that was eliminated back in 2003-04?

Or aren’t those suggestions complicated and confusing enough for you?

Update 1/19/09
They did it!  This morning Joe Egan filed petitions containing over 2,800 signatures, or approximately 600 above the minimum required.  Mr. Egan reported a “huge number” of signatures turned in yesterday, which suggests a repudiation by the citizens of Park Ridge of both the Oberweis hi-jinks of Mayor Howard (“The Coward/The Bully”) Frimark and the political maneuvering of Frank Wsol and the rest of Frimark’s alderpuppets.

Way to go, Mr. Egan and all you petition circulators!  And way to go, Park Ridge voters!  On to April 7th!