On April 7th Park Ridge will have its first municipal election that doesn’t involve aldermanic races, courtesy of Mayor Howard “Let’s Make A Deal” Frimark’s cut-the-council referendum that reduced our City Council to one-half its historical 14-member strength and failed to provide staggered terms for the seven aldermen.

That means we have only one contested City race, although it’s for the big chair at City Hall.  But we also have two City advisory referendum issues related to the Park Ridge Police station: a straightforward one put on the ballot by Park Ridge citizens when the City Council refused, and a vague and ambiguous eleventh-hour throw-away one by Ald. Frank Wsol, who in the past few months seems to be trying to come up with ways to salvage whatever might be left of his tattered reputation as a “fiscal conservative.”

Who deserves to be elected mayor in April depends in large part on how each of the candidates proposes to address the many issues that are crucial to the survival, the character and the prosperity of our community – issues that the citizens of Park Ridge have substantial control over if they pay attention and hold their elected officials accountable for addressing them in the most productive and cost-effective ways.  Those are the issues on which the focus of the mayoral campaign needs to be.

There are two other issues, however, that we appear to have little or no control over, making them nothing more than distractions to the candidates and the voters: The new O’Hare runway and the Des Plaines casino.

For those of you living in the Belle Plaine corridor, the new runway has been an extremely rude awakening.  We are not trying to minimize or ignore its harsh effects on the residents in that area. 

But it’s a $500 million-plus reality that is not going away, no matter how many letters we send to Jan Schakowsky, Dick Durbin, Pres. Obama, or the International Olympic Committee.  And for the time being, reducing flights on the new runway presents pretty much a zero-sum game for Park Ridge, because many of the flights diverted from 9L/27R will be shifted to the other two runways whose flight paths extend over our community: 22L and 22R. 

Neither Mayor Frimark nor his challenger, Ald. Dave Schmidt, tried to do anything about the new runway prior to its opening in November, and there’s no reason to think that whichever one of them gets elected in April will be able to do anything to make that problem go away – not with the FAA, the airlines, the City of Chicago, and the Chicagoland business community arrayed against us.  If you don’t believe us, check to see how well what’s left of the Suburban O’Hare Commission has fared despite spending millions of dollars on unsuccessful litigation.

The same goes for the casino.  This, too, was ignored by everybody in City government – from the mayor on down – until the announcement that it was awarded to Des Plaines and will be built at River Road and Devon.  But while the casino does not have all the federal weight behind it that the new runway does, even the most optimistic among us need only look and listen to Frimark’s pathetic presentation to the Illinois Gaming Board a few weeks ago to know that there is nothing we can do, short of begging for Des Plaines to toss us a few table scraps, to change or improve that situation.  

So let’s not waste the remaining five weeks of this campaign season grilling our two mayoral candidates about the runway or the casino.  And, more importantly, let’s not let those two candidates use the runway and the casino to dodge the more meaningful and substantive Park Ridge issues on which they – and we – really can have some influence.