Are Billboards Back?  At Monday night’s City Council COW meeting, Ald. Jim “Billboards” Allegretti resumed his fight to get “supermajority” re-defined so that it requires only 5 aldermanic votes rather than the current 6 votes from a combination of the mayor and all 7 aldermen.  That’s a pretty clear indication that Allegretti and his newest best friends at Generation Group, Inc. (“GGI”) will be back trying to end-run the Planning & Zoning Commission’s rejection of billboards for GGI.

With Allegretti’s having voted Monday night against increasing water rates, we can’t wait to hear him renew his impassioned pleas for the needed revenue that GGI’s billboards will bring into the City.  And when that time comes, we hope he brings along his public-spirited law officemate, Frankie DiFranco, whose sincere concern about the City’s financial welfare mysteriously evaporated when the billboard deal fell off the table.

District 64’s Got A Secret  Sounds like the Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 Board has narrowed its choices for the replacement of retiring Supt. Sally Pryor down to five candidates, at least according to a story in this week’s Park Ridge Journal (“District 64 Supt. Search Down To Five Candidates,” Feb. 24).  But we find it strange and troublesome that those candidates weren’t identified in that Journal story.

Whether the cause of that omission is incompetent reporting by Dwight Esau or intentional concealment by the District 64 Board, we see no good reason for this kind of secrecy – especially for any of the candidates who already are Dist. 64 employees and whose application for the superintendant’s position would not cause the same kind of concern by their bosses that an application from another district’s employee might cause his/her bosses.   

Richie D. Talks Trash  This week’s Journal also quotes 2nd Ward Ald. (and Finance Committee chairman) Rich DiPietro about the new budget, thusly: “If I had my way, we’d try to get [the new budget] done by Easter (Apr. 4).”

That’s just a bunch of hooey. 

Why wasn’t Richie D demanding the acceleration of the budget process back in November, December or January – when it might have mattered.  And just as significantly, April 4 is only 3 weeks before the deadline for passing the budget, so Richie D’s “way” is pretty much just more of the same old same old.  Which means we shouldn’t expect a better budget this year than in the past.