The Park Ridge Herald-Advocate has just published its “wish list” for the City of Park Ridge (“Editorial: Greatest wish for 2010? Forget about past decade,” Jan. 11) that contains one “wish” we wholeheartedly endorse:

• aldermen educating themselves on municipal finance and the city’s budget situation. Since taking office nearly three years ago, more than one elected official has admitted to having limited knowledge of municipal finance. Such decision-making is one of the most important of aldermanic responsibilities and should be treated accordingly.

The H-A apparently didn’t believe its readers deserved to know the names of each of those elected officials who have admitted that they can’t (or just don’t want to do the work necessary to) figure out how City finances work to the extent necessary to cast an informed vote on budget matters.

But one of that hapless group is Ald. Robert Ryan (5th Ward), who admitted his fiscal ineptitude at the Council’s December 7, 2009, meeting.  Ryan’s solution to this particular shortcoming, however, wasn’t to promise to hit the books and educate himself, or to demand that City Staff provide financial reports and explanations that Ryan and everybody else, including the average resident, can understand.  Instead, he suggested the formation of another citizens task force – this time for the purpose of advising the Council on financial matters.

Brilliant!  Let appointed residents effectively make decisions for those public officials who were elected to make those decisions for us.

When Ryan – reportedly with the encouragement of then-mayor Howard Frimark – chose to run for alderman back in 2007, didn’t somebody tell him that perhaps his most important duties would be to guard the taxpayers’ hard-earned tax dollars and keep in check the often profligate spending of the bureaucrats who run City government on a day-to-day basis?  Or is it that he just didn’t care?

In contrast to Ryan, Third Ward Ald. Don Bach repeatedly has talked the talk about balanced budgets and fiscal responsibility.  Unfortunately for City residents, however, he has totally failed to walk the walk, as evidenced by his being one of the five aldermen (along with Alds. Allegretti, Ryan, Carey and Wsol) who voted to over-ride Mayor Schmidt’s historic veto last June of the Council’s giveaway of even more tax dollars to private community organizations run by folks not elected by or accountable to the taxpayers for those tax dollars. 

And although Bach has flapped his gums about drastic cuts in City personnel, he has offered little-to-nothing specific for Staff or the Council even to consider.  No surprise there.

Allegretti and Wsol wanted to hang about $1 million a year of extra debt service on the City to finance their new police station (thank you, Joe Egan, for your referendum that put the kibosh on that insanity), so we shouldn’t expect much fiscal responsibility from them – although it hasn’t escaped our sense of perverse humor that Wsol and Allegretti opposed the pass-through of water rate increases that would have netted the City approximately the same $400,000 of additional revenue – albeit for only one year – that Allegretti wants from his billboard deal (assuming that deal is even lawful, which the City Attorney disputes).   

This Saturday (Jan. 16) from 9:00 a.m. until noon, the City Council will be holding its first “budget workshop” for the 2010-11 fiscal year.  This session will be a crucial first step in a process that recently has produced million dollar-plus deficits that have put the City in an extremely precarious financial position. 

We understand that this year, unlike for past budget workshops, residents will be permitted and even encouraged to share their views about the budget and City finances.  That’s an encouraging change, instigated by Mayor Schmidt, although its practical value will depend on how many residents make the time and effort to show up, listen, and speak meaningfully to the issues.

But be forewarned: the spendthrift bureaucrats and elected officials who have proposed and presided over the recent deficit budgets and a good deal of indiscriminate spending will not embrace fiscal responsibility quietly or willingly.  In the past they relied on treating the taxpayers like mushrooms: keeping us in the dark and feeding us manure.

Now with the lights switched on (but with manure still at the ready), expect them to try to make this financial stuff sound as complicated and intractable as possible; and expect to hear about far more problems than solutions intended to discourage meaningful change and preserve the status quo with which they are all too comfortable. 

But if we fall for those tactics, we have only ourselves to blame.