An article in last week’s Herald-Advocate lamented the fact that an advisory referendum question – proposed by Ald. Don “Air Marshall” Bach (3rd Ward) – about whether Park Ridge should spend up to $150,000 a year to address O’Hare expansion problems, was kept off the April ballot because three referendum questions were already on it.

We can’t tell for sure whether Illinois election law permits only three total referendum questions on any ballot, or no more than three from any one governmental body.  But it looks like that’s a moot point because the time for putting any more referendum questions on the April ballot has now passed.

Frankly, we would have preferred the voters getting a crack at the O’Hare issue rather than seeing a ballot slot wasted on Ald. Frank Wsol’s 11th-hour mutation of the more direct police station referendum question that the signatures of over 2,800 Park Ridge voters already had put on the ballot, or the purely political Maine Township referendum asking about the Cook County sales tax.

Just because Bach’s referendum question didn’t make the April ballot, however, does not mean that the question cannot still be publicly debated – especially because the Advocate article reports that Bach “believes Park Ridge needs to resume its fight against O’Hare Airport expansion” that the City abandoned five years ago by resigning its membership in the Suburban O’Hare Commission (“SOC”).  And when Bach talks you usually can see Mayor Howard Frimark’s lips moving, which suggests that Frimark has some political interest in this topic after having slept through the construction of the new runway.

We previously wrote about the Air Marshall’s flip-flopping on whether Park Ridge should resurrect its SOC membership ( “Bach On SOC,” Dec. 12, 2008), but we don’t see how that idea has grown any more attractive in the intervening two months.  Quite to the contrary, SOC could serve as an object lesson in why litigating with Chicago, the FAA and/or the airlines would appear to be a losing proposition.

We weren’t able to find the total cost of SOC’s legal battles with O’Hare since they commenced in 1985, but we did stumble across a Chicago Sun-Times article (“Is Airport Fight Worth Cost?” July 16, 2001) that reported SOC attorney Joe Karaganis and his firm were paid more than $240,000 in legal fees for representing SOC during the period between December 1, 1999, and April 30, 2001.  Based on that information, we have to think that SOC has spent millions on its anti-O’Hare crusade over the years, with darn little to show for it.

So before Air Marshall Bach and his newest best friends in the O’Hare Residents for Environmental Safety and Trust (“ORD-REST”) talk about re-joining SOC or about spending bundles of our scarce tax dollars on lawsuits related to noise and pollution from the new runway, we think Park Ridge taxpayers deserve to know: (1) what legal claims, if any, does Park Ridge have that are different and better than those SOC has been litigating up until now; and/or (2) if Park Ridge’s claims are basically the same as the claims SOC has been litigating, how can Park Ridge be expected to fare any better than SOC?

Such questions need to be answered because, having paid $65,000 in annual SOC membership “dues” for a number of years and having made one very bad $650,000 SOC-related “investment,” Park Ridge needs to be reminded of Einstein’s definition of insanity: “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”