On Wednesday we noted how a proposed budget that started Monday night’s City Council Committee of the Whole meeting being $227,000 in the red seemed to get redder as the night wore on and more spending was added.  Wednesday night’s budget workshop, however, made Monday night’s spending spree look tame by comparison, even though the Council claims to now have a “balanced” budget – thanks to a proposed $5 increase in the price of the City vehicle sticker.

We’re not sure how that modest bump in vehicle sticker pricing did that trick, especially since the Council added a variety of new expenses, including the tentative approval of Ald. Don “Air Marshall” Bach’s proposal to add $165,000 in expenses to address O’Hare expansion issues, including an allowance of $10,000 for “community awareness” and another $105,000 for our very own lobbyist to persuade the FAA, members of Congress, the airlines, etc. to stop running air traffic down the Belle Plaine Corridor.  

The Spanish philosopher George Santayana famously said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  And the Council’s conduct proves him right yet again.

For the amnesiacs on the Council and throughout Park Ridge, between 1994 and 2003, the City spent in excess of $1 million of our tax dollars fighting O’Hare and “investing” in an airport down in Peotone, all while a member of the Suburban O’Hare Commission (“SOC”).  That failed to stop O’Hare expansion, and the Peotone “investment” was a total bust.  From 2003 to last year, the two remaining members of SOC (Bensenville and Elk Grove Village) continued to pour money into more legal battles, also without success. 

$50,000 of the budgeted $165,000 is earmarked for “environmental” studies, even though we understand that none of the previous studies of noise and air pollution conclusively attributed dangerous levels of either exclusively to the airplanes flying thousands of feet overhead – as distinguished from, for example, all the ground-level pollutants generated by the vehicle traffic on the Kennedy Expressway to the South, and on the Tri-State Tollway to the West. 

So what makes these guys sitting around The Horseshoe now think that another $165,000 will do what the previous $1 million-plus couldn’t? 

Did anybody stop and think that the $105,000 these guys are budgeting for a lobbyist is probably less than what the City of Chicago’s team of lobbyists spends each year just on U.S.D.A. prime beef at Morton’s and Sam & Harry’s for FAA and Congressional honchos?  Or that the same $105,000 would more than pay for one Park Ridge cop or firefighter?

Taxpayers should at least be grateful that nobody seconded Ald. Robert Ryan’s (5th) proposal to spend $200,000 on fighting O’Hare, with the added money going for legal fees.  Ryan apparently just can’t grasp the fact that all of the court challenges to O’Hare expansion and operations over the years have been spectacularly expensive and equally unsuccessful.

In making their cases for budgeting money to fight O’Hare, Bach ranted about how Park Ridge has “backed down and backed down and backed down” from Chicago and the FAA until it now faces “a crisis of epic proportions,” while Ryan railed about the “environmental degradation” impacting Park Ridge.  Given that kind of demagoguery, we’re surprised they stopped short of issuing dire warnings of higher rates of cancer, tuberculosis and birth defects among our residents because of O’Hare.  That sure would boost our property values, wouldn’t it?

Frankly, earmarking $165,000 to fight O’Hare won’t make or break a $50 million+ budget.  But the flabby/flaccid thinking and the pandering decision-making it reveals calls into question the validity of every other decision these City Council members have made – and will continue to make – in formulating the 2010-11 budget.

If they’re willing to throw $165,000 of our tax dollars to the wind on O’Hare, how much more are they throwing away on other equally misguided frolics?