We have consistently argued that it isn’t the job of our City officials to confiscate money from Park Ridge taxpayers so that it can be given to certain “charitable” causes – private “community groups” like Center of Concern – favored by those City officials.
Although we have taken a good bit of criticism for that position, Mayor Dave Schmidt and a majority of the City Council seem to have come over to that same viewpoint, as evidenced by the fact that they cut back those handouts from $190,000 to 13 community groups in 2010 to a shade under $62,000 to only 4 groups the current fiscal year. And they have tentatively cut that to zero for the 2012-13 budget, although we understand Ald. Rich DiPietro – in response to heavy-duty lobbying from those 4 groups – is asking to re-open that part of the budget discussion.
But at least one such organization has found a way to obtain funding without putting the arm on the taxpayers through the “soft touch” that City government historically had been.
As reported in last week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“Park Ridge Teen Center to get boost from local nonprofit,” Feb. 9), that local philanthropic group known as the Park Ridge Juniors has designated the Park Ridge Teen Center as its “major recipient” of its 59th annual fundraiser, scheduled for March 10 at the Park Ridge Country Club.
We applaud the Juniors for doing so. That should be the paradigm for private community group funding.
The Teen Center was one of 9 community groups that lost their City funding in 2010, with the Teen Center losing $22,000. One reason cutting the Teen Center’s funding was the correct decision by the City Council is that, like so many other of these private corporations who pass themselves off as “Park Ridge” groups, the Teen Center reportedly serves a significant number non-Park Ridge residents.
That apparently goes over well with the teens who want to hang out with their friends, irrespective of whether those friends’ parents pay Park Ridge property taxes; and with the adults who run the Teen Center out of the basement of the First United Methodist Church on Touhy, who seem to prefer whining about the lack of City handouts than figuring out how to keep their pet “charity” operating without bellying up to the public trough.
But that’s bad public policy, pure and simple, which we criticized it in our 12.29.10 post, “Learning A Lesson From The Teen Center”
Interestingly enough, the concept of “public charity” was recognized as bad policy by none other than political philosopher Alexis De Tocqueville – the acclaimed author of “Democracy in America” (1835) – in his “Memoir on Pauperism,” also published in 1835. De Tocqueville saw it as something that actually tore at the social fabric:
[I]ndividual alms-giving established valuable ties between the rich and the poor. The deed itself involves the giver in the fate of the one whose poverty he has undertaken to alleviate. The latter, supported by aid which he had no right to demand and which he had no hope to getting, feels inspired by gratitude. A moral tie is established between those two classes whose interests and passions so often conspire to separate them from each other, and although divided by circumstance they are willingly reconciled. This is not the case with legal charity. The latter allows the alms to persist but removes its morality. The law strips the man of wealth of a part of his surplus without consulting him, and he sees the poor man only as a greedy stranger invited by the legislator to share his wealth. The poor man, on the other hand, feels no gratitude for a benefit that no one can refuse him and that could not satisfy him in any case.
This may not be a popular view among those private community groups who would rather accept public welfare than undertake the heavy lifting of getting their funding directly from the taxpayers through private donation, but we think it deserves more than passing consideration. We’d like to hear the Council debate this issue for once.
Until that happens, however, we’ll be content with the Juniors’ private philanthropy.
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