Mayor Vetoes 2011-12 Budget.  Wednesday night (April 6) Mayor Dave Schmidt wielded his veto pen to another City budget.  Unlike last year, however, Schmidt did not nuke the entire budget – he line-item vetoed a total of $650,000 in various expenditures, as he explained in his veto message.  In so doing, he claims to be able to reduce the property tax increase approved by the City Council and restore some essential City services.  And he did it with advice from our well-paid City Staff, which properly gives those staffers some ownership of the cuts they should have made when the budget was originally crafted.

We can’t wait to see what vetoed line items the Council will over-ride at the Council meeting on April 18, a couple of weeks before five of those aldermen walk off into the sunset.

Adios!  Speaking of aldermen walking off into the sunset, we note that Ald. Jim Allegretti (4th) appears to be wheeling and dealing all the way to the finish line.  A story in last week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“Park Ridge City Council: Hiring own prosecutor for city traffic cases could pay off,” March 29) identified Ald. Jim as the public official extending the “invitation” to attorneys Wayne Addis and Joel Greenberg to pitch the City Council on giving them a $78,000/year contract to prosecute DUIs and other traffic-ordinance violations for the City. 

The purported carrot: a larger share of the fines going into City coffers than are now coming in through such prosecutions being conducted by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office. But guess what?  Nobody, including Addis and Greenberg themselves, could quantify with any degree of certainty how much more money the City would get – a deficiency properly noted by Alds. Joe Sweeney and Don Bach.  We hope better data is presented when this matter is next taken up by the Council at the April 25 COW meeting.

For those keeping score, Allegretti previously served as the Council “sponsor” of the ill-fated (fortunately) attempt to bring some I-294 billboards to the northwest corner of the City, as well as the more recent ill-fated (again, fortunately) attempt by Hoffman Homes to jam 20 condominium units into an area on Touhy Avenue zoned for 12.  

And Welcome!  This week’s H-A and Park Ridge Journal contain an essay by 5th Ward Ald.-elect Dan Knight about how the City’s budget process must improve.  

We concur wholeheartedly with Knight, as well as with 4th Ward Ald.-elect Sal Raspanti’s call for the implementation of zero-based budgeting instead of the lazy and cowardly just-add-x%-to-last-year’s-budget process that may be the bureaucrats’ and politicians’ dream but is also the taxpayers’ nightmare.

If Knight, Raspanti and 7th Ward Ald.-elect Marty Maloney (a fiscal hawk on the Park District Board the past 8 years) can enlist just one more like-minded alderman, perhaps we’ll finally see “fiscal responsibility” go from being an increasingly meaningless catch-phrase to a meaningful local governmental policy.

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