At this past Saturday’s City Council budget workshop, the Chief of Police and the acting Fire Chief presented their explanations of the budget cuts which, as we understand it, they themselves suggested – however reluctantly – for their respective departments when told to cut their budgets to reflect the City’s shaky financial condition.

If true, that’s an important fact because it means that those chiefs – drawing on their years of professional experience and their knowledge of the needs of this community – evaluated their departments’ services and personnel and came up with the best ways to meet the across-the-board expense reductions required to break the cycle of multi-million dollar deficits that are imperiling the future of Park Ridge.

That’s also an important fact because it makes questions like Ald. Don Bach’s “So the elimination of the traffic division could conceivably make the streets of Park Ridge less safe?” just another example of the cheap, disingenuous pandering we have come to expect from Bach and certain of his Council allies.  Anything that reduces the services provided by the police department “conceivably” could make our community less safe, albeit by an insignificant degree, just like adding several more police officers “conceivably” could make our community more safe, albeit by a similarly insignificant degree.

So when we hear Bach ask a loaded question like that, we want to ask him what alternative cut(s) is he proposing in lieu of cutting the police and fire departments?  And that’s the same question we want to ask Ald. Robert Ryan when he insists that the $200,000+ of contributions to private community groups be reinstated because those groups “really help people in need in our community.”

We deserve specific alternatives from those aldermen because, now that a draft budget has been proposed by City Staff that still shows a $227,000 deficit, just sending the matter back to Staff with the simple demand for something different is both governmentally and politically gutless – and an abdication by those elected officials of their aldermanic duties, not the least of which is to guard the public purse.

And to show we’re not just picking on our elected officials, we put that very same challenge to those residents who publicly complain, with hyperbole instead of hard evidence, that cuts in police and fire “will affect my way of life and my family’s way of life” (Tony Amelio) by “reducing the safety of this community” (Gene Spanos); or who, on behalf of School District 64, demand crossing guards for the elementary schools with the disclaimer that the District is unlikely to shoulder even a portion of those costs (Dist. 64 Board president John Heyde). 

In the context of that kind of irresponsibility, Dick Von Metre’s was a welcome voice of reason Saturday morning.   Von Metre, a member of the Library Board, noted that 10 years ago Park Ridge’s population was pretty close to what it is today, yet it was adequately policed by only 55 sworn officers.  Consequently, the cuts currently being proposed for the police department would still leave that department with more officers than we had back then.

That’s a variation on one of the arguments that successfully persuaded the voters to overwhelmingly reject the big and expensive new police station in last April’s referendum: “How has the current police station made us unsafe, or allowed criminals to go free?”

Of course, those who want to convince themselves that we were unsafe a decade ago, or that Park Ridge is decidedly more dangerous today than it was back then, will have no problem doing so.  Panic peddling is always an easy sale, especially in up-scale communities like ours where “real” crime, fortunately, is mostly something we read about as occurring elsewhere.

Almost 80 years ago, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt stated: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”  For our local panic peddlers, “fear itself” seems to be more than enough.