The public comment segment of Wednesday night’s City Council’s budget workshop – addressing whether the City should budget $49,500 for the Center of Concern (CofC) in FY 2012-13 – ran over an hour, even though only a fraction of the 50+ CofC supporters in the audience actually spoke to the Council.  

When the smoke cleared, 3 aldermen (Joe Sweeney, Rich DiPietro and Jim Smith) voted to add that $49,500 into the budget, while the other 3 aldermen present (Sal Raspanti, Dan Knight and Marty Maloney) voted to uphold its exclusion that they, along with Smith, had approved at an earlier budget workshop.  That tie, created because Ald. Tom Bernick was once again MIA, meant the budget will come up for final approval without money for CofC – although DiPietro basically promised an amendment to include CofC funding when the final vote is taken.

As we predicted in Wednesday’s post, emotional buzzwords and phrases abounded. 

Former 4th Ward alderman (and current CofC director) John Kerin told the Council to “take off the…blinders” and not “kick our seniors to the curb,” while former 6th Ward alderman Mary Wynn Ryan warned that “We the People get to say what the business of our government is.”  And former 4th Ward alderman (and current CofC treasurer) Jim Radermacher suggested that eliminating City funding of CofC would make Park Ridge no longer “A wonderful place.”

Other CofC supporters floated fantastic financial claims, like former 5th Ward alderman Rich Whalen’s magic act that had CofC returning $3 of value “tomorrow” for every $1 of City funding “today.”  But that Ponzi-like promise actually paled in comparison to the “fabulous” return on investment of “5 times, 10 times, 500 to 1,000%” that former mayor (and current CofC advisory board member) Mike Marous projected for City funding of CofC.

Heck, if that were remotely close to provable fact, the City might be able to solve most of its financial woes by “investing” a few million in CofC.  But from the few specks of verifiable data CofC has provided about the services it actually performs for Park Ridge residents, MegaMillions might be a surer bet.

Although the CofC folks hate to hear it, CofC is just another private vendor of services.  Kerin admitted as much Wednesday night when he referred to the City’s having “outsourced” its human services function to CofC. 

But because of its clout – a board of directors and advisory board so loaded with current and former officeholders that Marous could proudly note how there were more aldermen in the audience than sitting around The Horseshoe – it has NEVER been held to ANY of the procurement or performance standards to which other City vendors are subjected.

That makes CofC perhaps the ultimate “special interest” vendor:  no uncertainty of competitive bidding, no bothersome RFPs, no annoying RFQs, no pesky contracts, not even a price list.  In other words, CofC is excused from providing anything by which an ordinary taxpayer – or the aldermen allegedly representing him – could judge whether the City truly is getting at least a dollar’s worth of service for every tax dollar paid out.

If the City bought any other of its goods or services in this cockamamie fashion, somebody would (or, at least, should) be fired.  And maybe even sued for what the legendary Mike Royko called: “Aggravated mopery with intent to gawk.”

Would the taxpayers tolerate a procurement process for street paving services whereby the City would send $49,500 to a paving contractor with the understanding that the contractor, and not the City, will decide how many streets it will pave, which ones it will pave (even if they aren’t in Park Ridge), when it will pave them, and the price it will charge per block?

Not for a New York minute.

But that’s exactly the kind of absurd arrangement the City has maintained with CofC for years.  And that’s exactly the deal Alds. Sweeney, DiPietro, Smith (and Bernick, if/when he deigns to return?) want to keep in place, notwithstanding City Council Policy No. 6 which has never been complied with since it was last amended in 1991…and maybe since it was adopted in 1974.

Throw a few more zeroes in there and this could be the kind of deal that might get even Mike Madigan’s attention. 

UPDATE:  We addressed CofC’s failure to provide meaningful information about the services it allegedly provides to Park Ridge residents in our 05.16.11 post:  https://publicwatchdog.org/archives/2011/05/16/should-city-taxes-be-raised-to-fund-center-of-concern/ , noting that the most detailed information CofC ever has provided the City – its 2011 application for City funding – claimed 6,770 “Park Ridge residents served.”  If provably true, that would be 18% of all Park Ridge residents!  Even in these difficult economic times, that kind of claim deserves a serious credibility check. 

And nowhere in that report are there any numbers to establish how many man-hours, or cost-units, of services CofC allegedly provides to Park Ridge residents for the money it gets from the City.   As we pointed out then, transparency and accountability are foreign to CofC – and remain foreign to CofC to this day, as does the concept of actually entering into a contract with the City that requires CofC to provide X units of service for Y dollars of funding.

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