As promised, Mayor Dave Schmidt wielded his veto pen last night to the City Council’s recent passage of $190,000+ in handouts to various private community groups. 

Schmidt’s veto message [pdf] makes the same point he previously made about it being bad policy for City government to donate public funds to private organizations who provide non-essential services when the City is cutting back on funding essential services.  But it also adds two new points that we wholeheartedly endorse.

The first point is the fact that the City’s own Policy No. 6, (which tracks Article VIII, Section 1 of the Illinois Constitution) establishes that public funds generally “should not be used to support any private non-governmental organization” unless the Council first makes four specific findings that such use justified, including the community’s “need” for the private services and the extent of the community’s “financial support” for those services.  We haven’t seen even one of these 13 organizations demonstrate any specific community “need” for the various services they provide; and the fact that these organizations are putting the arm on our pandering politicians for funding suggests a distinct lack of “financial support” from the community overall.

The second point is having those organizations actually sign enforceable contracts with the City under which they will get specific compensation for specific services rendered to Park Ridge residents, just like it does with its other private outsource vendors.  Using Center of Concern, for example, the City and the CofC would sign a contract for the same $55,000 the Council wants to donate, but which would identify what specific services CofC would provide Park Ridge residents and at what per-unit price(s).  The $55,000 would serve as a “cap” on the City’s obligation. 

At the end of the year, CofC would provide the City with an accounting of exactly how many units of what kinds of services it actually provided, thereby enabling the City to decide whether it got full and fair value for its $55,000.  Depending on that analysis, the City could decide whether, and in what amount, it wanted to contract with CofC for services the following year. 

In other words: Pay only for what you get, get only what you pay for.  What a novel concept! 

That’s why any organization that truly intends to give the City’s taxpayers fair value for the public funding it seeks (rather than reap a windfall “profit” that it can divert to other communities or other purposes) should warmly embrace this particular kind of contractual quid pro quo compensation.  Conversely, any organization that doesn’t do so is sending a pretty strong siignal that it wants a lot more “quid” than its “quo” is worth.

Unfortunately, there’s little chance that the undisciplined spendthrifts who comprise a majority of our City Council will vote to sustain Schmidt’s veto.  They have become far too accustomed to giving away other people’s money for them to care about things like the Constitution, the City’s own policies, the City’s sorry finances, or the words of long-dead white guys like James Madison that Schmidt quoted in his veto address.

Alds. Allegretti, Bach, Carey, DiPietro, Ryan and Sweeney don’t even seem capable of comprehending that “government charity” is an oxymoron; or that what they espouse is just another name for “welfare”…but without even the basic welfare requirement that the recipients demonstrate need and qualifications.

Or you can call it robbing Peter to pay Paul, with “Peter” being us taxpayers and “Paul” being those private groups that can’t or won’t do the fundraising required for them to be self-supporting.