One of the many self-improvement aphorisms goes something like: “If you want to become something you’re not, you have to stop being what you are.” 

That’s a lesson that still hasn’t been learned by our City government which, despite the occasional declarations of devotion to fiscal responsibility, can’t quite seem to translate those words into deeds.   

Last night the Council voted 6 (Alds. Sweeney, DiPietro, Smith, Raspanti, Bernick & Maloney) to 1 (Ald. Knight) to over-ride Mayor Dave Schmidt’s veto of the budget line item giving an across-the-board 3% pay increase to the City’s non-union employees.  The principal argument for those raises: those employees haven’t had a raise in 3 years.

No discussion of improved performance or greater efficiencies from those non-union employees generally.  No attempt to differentiate performance or productivity among them.  Just a blanket, everybody-gets-one, 3% raise that added $185,766 to the 2011-12 budget.

How many Park Ridge residents paying the taxes to fund those raises haven’t had a raise themselves in the past 3 years unless they could prove they earned it with increased productivity – and their employer could afford to pay it from increased profits?  How many Park Ridge residents paying the taxes to fund those raises have lost their jobs altogether, or have become substantially under-employed in the past 3 years with a commensurate decrease in pay and benefits?

But that didn’t seem to factor into the equation for our newest guardians of the public purse, who will also soon be making decisions about the City’s unionized employees seeking multi-year contracts that lock wage and/or benefit increases into the uncertain future when they should be getting only one-year deals that more accurately reflect existing economic reality.  And don’t expect those union deals to come with any guarantees of increased productivity.

Similarly, the Council voted 5 (DiPietro, Smith, Raspanti, Bernick & Maloney) to 2 (Sweeney & Knight) to over-ride Schmidt’s veto of the budget line item providing for a total of $65,776 in no-strings-attached donations of our tax dollars to four private community groups.  Not surprisingly, the lion’s share ($49,500) of those donations went to the uber politically-connected Center of Concern, whose board of directors and advisory board sport 19 current or former public officials, at least 10 of whom have sat around The Horseshoe at 505 Butler Place.

No attempt to ascertain what specific services the residents are getting in return.  No attempt to require a specific dollars-for-services contract from those private recipients of the taxpayers’ involuntary largesse.  Not even any attempt to comply with the City Council’s Policy No. 6.  Just four arbitrary amounts added to the budget as proponents of those organizations showed up just long enough to make sure the vote went the way they wanted it and their organizations’ places at the public trough were ensured.

How many Park Ridge taxpayers consciously have chosen to directly donate their hard-earned money to local charities other than the four favored by the City Council?  How many of those taxpayers consciously have chosen not to make donations to those organizations, for whatever reasons or for no reason at all?  Do those residents really need City officials making these kinds of spending decisions for them, using their own tax dollars?

Let’s be clear here: the quarter-of-a-million dollars being budgeted for the pay raises and private community groups is only .44% of the City’s 2011-12 budget.  And it’s also only a small fraction of the millions of dollars of deficit spending by the previous City Council over the past 3 budget years – which not only depleted the City’s reserves to dangerous levels but also caused the City to lay off police and public works employees, and to suspend or reduce several City services.  

But a quarter of a million bucks still buys a lot of the essential things that City government is obligated to provide its residents, most of which – like paved streets, well-maintained sewers, emerald ash borer control, tc. – are not of the warm-and-fuzzy, feel-good variety that Park Ridge politicians love.

One resident, in speaking against such donations last evening, asked when the people of Park Ridge gave the Council the right to make charitable donations for them? 

A good question, to be sure, but one that ignores our City’s fiscal history that has been shaped too often by the egos of public officials who seem to assume the public’s position on every spending request favored by those officials is “yes” whenever they don’t hear a deafening “no.”

Correction (06.23.11): The Youth Commission is not a “private” corporation/organization but a commission of the City.  As such (and unlike the other three private organizations), it is not subject to City Council Policy No. 6; and it is lawfully entitled to whatever funding the City Council chooses to provide. 

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