Tomorrow night the City’s Planning and Zoning Commission (“P&Z”) will be considering text amendments to the City’s Zoning Ordinance to allow billboards that are now prohibited. Those amendments are desired by Lombard-based The Generation Group, Inc. (“GGI”)[pdf], and the aroma coming from this amendment process is a lot closer to week-old catfish than to rose petals.
Carrying the water for GGI in this matter is 4th Ward Ald. Jim Allegretti, who seems hell-bent on changing City ordinances to enable the City Council to trump P&Z decisions about billboards. And he appears to be “gaming” the process by getting the City to be the applicant rather than GGI, which allows GGI to avoid the disclosure requirements under the City’s ethics ordinance [pdf] that were adopted at the April 2, 2007 City Council meeting [pdf] in the face of accusations by then-mayor (and Allegretti puppeteer) Howard Frimark that more-stringent disclosures were “motivated by politics rather than integrity.”
[We pause for a moment of “pot calling the kettle black” contemplative silence]
Allegretti’s walk on the billboard wild side started back in June when the attorney, agent and possibly owner of GGI, Joseph J. Loss, sent a letter to Allegretti [pdf] requesting four special use permits for four billboards proposed for the Renaissance Office Center properties.
Leaping into action, at the July 13, 2009, City Council Committee of the Whole (“COW”) meeting [pdf], Allegretti successfully advanced both the process whereby the City Council (rather than GGI) would submit the billboard text amendment request to P&Z, and the process whereby the City Council could over-ride any P&Z decision on amendment requests by simple majority vote rather than super-majority vote – and, for good measure, City Clerk Betty Hennemann once again sanitizing the minutes to conceal the identities of who voted how on those two issues.
Allegretti next got formal Council approval for the City to be the applicant for the billboard amendments by misrepresenting the relevant law by (as reported in the August 17 minutes [pdf]) stating that private-party applicants like GGI “would have no recourse” to challenge an application denial by P&Z – even though he attended the April 27, 2009 meeting [pdf] where City Attorney “Buzz” Hill stated unequivocally that an applicant denied by P&Z “always has the right to appeal” that denial to the Circuit Court of Cook County.
And just last Monday night, Allegretti led the 4-3 (Allegretti, Bach, Carey and Ryan) approval of the first reading of the zoning text amendments that would let the Council trump decisions by P&Z on this billboard issue.
Which takes us to tomorrow night’s P&Z meeting where that commission will get to consider the City Council’s request to make billboards legal.
As noted in the November 10, 2009 memo [pdf] of the City’s Community Preservation & Development Director Carrie Davis, GGI is now represented by prominent Park Ridge attorney and consummate “insider,” Jack Owens – who is aggressivley lobbying P&Z for GGI’s billboards even though all GGI has to do is watch Allegretti and the City Council do GGI’s bidding.
If the odor from all of this rigmarole isn’t dank and pungent enough in its own right, we direct your attention to two articles published in the Des Plaines Journal & Topics: one from September 2004 [pdf] that links convicted felon and allegedly mobbed-up former Cook County under-sheriff James Dvorak to another billboard company with ties to GGI’s Mr. Loss that won billboard rights in Des Plaines; and the other from January 2008 [pdf] which identifies Loss as the attorney for yet another billboard company that got a favorable ordinance change from the Village of Deerfield [pdf].
We’re not quite sure exactly what to make of all this, but we do wonder exactly what is motivating Allegretti’s (and Owens’) full-court press to drive the City Council into neutering P&Z in order to give GGI its billboards. And it creates an impression that there is more to this deal than meets the eye.
Even if it can’t escape the nose.