Yesterday’s on-line Park Ridge Herald-Advocate reports that four Park Ridge Public Works Department employees received termination notices as one of the City’s cost-cutting measures in the face of this year’s multi-million dollar budget deficit (“Four city employees handed pink slips,” August 4). 

This action came in the wake of the Public Works employees union’s reported refusal to agree to wage freezes or pay cuts.  Ironically, one of the four terminated employees repairs water main breaks and maintains and repairs our sewers, while another one patches our roadways.  

We wonder if those are the kinds of services Ald. Don Bach (3rd Ward) was considering reducing when he came up with his demand for staff cuts months ago, even while he was voting to give more public money to private community groups?

We don’t know how much these four employees were being paid, but we’re guessing that this was more of a shot-across-the-bow, a signal to the union that the City is serious about the proposed wage freeze.  And it should be.

The union is an easy target for blame, if for no other reason than it should have realized – with the City’s big budget deficit and mounting expenses cutting into already-thin reserves – that its bargaining position was weak.  On the other hand, it has a reason to question the City’s good faith when it is asked to give up contractual rights while at the same time hearing Ald. Frank “Borrow & Spend” Wsol and his Council buddies planning to squander $420,000 on ridiculous flood control “rebates.”

The City administration deserves its share of the blame as well, because those are the folks responsible for managing the City’s operations and its money.  They’re the ones who proposed the $2.5 million deficit budget in the first place, and who have failed over a number of years to control spending and/or request increased taxes in order to build sufficient surpluses in “good” years to carry us through the “lean” ones.

In fairness, current City Manager Jim Hock shouldn’t wear the jacket for all of this mess, as he inherited most of it from former City Manager Tim Schuenke, who apparently figured out that the easiest way to balance an unbalanced budget is with revenue estimates pulled out of thin air.  While Hock did himself no favors by proposing this year’s deficit budget, he’s still a big improvement over his predecessor; and, hopefully, he will learn and improve as he gets a better understanding of the community and the sometimes bizarre dynamics of City government.

But the folks who really deserve to wear the jacket for this are the members of our City Council, past and present, who we elect to keep a keen eye on the bureaucrats and represent our interests with good judgment and foresight.  Instead, they spent most of this decade as mindless enablers of Schuenke’s budgetary follies.

Whether they were the rubber-stamp Homeowners Party seat-fillers who monopolized the Council until 2003, the mixture of Homeowners and “Independents” from 2003 through 2007, or the Frimark Alderpuppets who currently predominate, none of them demanded the kind of fiscally-responsible, forward-thinking management the taxpayers deserve.  But as best as we can tell, the current crew has done more than their predecessors to erode the City’s fund balances and leave us exposed to the full fury of a bad economy and neglected infrastructure.

They were the ones who passed what appears to have been the largest deficit budget in recent City history and then compounded that insanity by refusing to pass through the $400,000 water rate increase from the City of Chicago to water users, while also approving over-budget funding increases to private community organizations.

So if you find yourself getting a little ticked off about that pothole in front of your house or that clogged street drain at the corner of your block, consider taking a stroll around the Brickton Art Center or stopping by the Park Ridge Senior Center – because that’s where some of the money is being spent that otherwise could have been used for street and sewer services.

Welcome to the reap-what-you-have-sewn world of fiscal mismanagement in a bad economy.