Here are a few morsels to tide our readers over until we can get a little deeper into some other stuff:

Frimark On The Move?  A couple weeks ago, former Park Ridge mayor Howard P. “Let’s Make A Deal” Frimark told the Park Ridge Journal that he wouldn’t seek appointment to the Sixth Ward aldermanic seat recently vacated by Tom Bernick because the committee Mayor Dave Schmidt was forming to screen and recommend an appointee was packed with Schmidt supporters.

In the interest of full disclosure, the editor/publisher of this blog is one of four 6th Ward residents – along with Park Ridge Recreation and Park District Board president Rick Biagi, Chamber of Commerce director Gail Haller, and resident Alison Harrington – appointed by Schmidt to that committee.

The irony of Frimark’s comments is two-fold.

First, we hear that only a week or so after he made that comment, Frimark moved out of the 6th Ward (where he had been residing for less than a year) and reportedly relocated to the 2nd Ward.  With current Ald. Rich DiPietro rumored to be ending his 18-year Council tenure next year, no clear successor on the horizon, and the 2nd Ward’s history of uncontested elections, might Frimark be trying to carpetbag his way back onto the Council from that ward rather than compete with whomever Schmidt appoints in the 6th Ward?

Second, on the one occasion Frimark got to appoint an alderman – to succeed himself in the 4th Ward upon his election as mayor in 2005 – he appointed Jim Allegretti.  Neither Frimark nor Allegretti, however, disclosed that Allegretti had made a $300 contribution to Frimark’s campaign fund that had not yet been publicly reported at the time of his appointment and confirmation by the Council – which Allegretti followed up with an additional $200 contribution about a month after the appointment.

Some suspicious minds might view those two contributions as typical Illinois-style pay to play, although we prefer to just consider them an interesting coincidence.  But they may explain why Howard’s suspicious of everybody else.

One More Time For 322 Vine.  At tonight’s meeting, the City Council is supposed to again take up the saga of 322 Vine and its many alleged building code violations that the City can’t/won’t prosecute.  Hopefully, the 322 Vine neighbors and the general public will finally hear the whole story behind why City Staff dogged enforcement of the building code for almost 3 years, and why the City Attorney abruptly abandoned prosecution efforts once he interviewed the City’s key witnesses: Building Administrator Steve Cutaia and outside consulting engineer Bernie Bono.

As we have previously opined, it looks like this situation has been botched irretrievably and cannot be salvaged in a way that might reasonably square things with the neighbors.  But a full airing of the situation would still provide information that can be used to fill in or otherwise correct what appear to be gaping holes in the building code enforcement system, as well as impose some needed accountability on those code enforcers who performed the irretrievable botching and then strung along the neighbors with false hopes of some action being taken.

Airing out this malodorous situation might not come a moment too soon, as we hear some major building code issues have arisen with another single-family home that may make 322 Vine’s pale in comparison.  That might pop up tomorrow night, too.

Which means there may be a lot of tap-dancing and stonewalling tomorrow night, and perhaps even a closed session to shield the building code enforcement system and/or its enforcers from embarrassing public scrutiny of all its/their shortcomings.  Will the Mayor and the Council let them get away with going into the Star Chamber?

It’s Fun To Go To The O-N-C-C.  This past Friday (06.01.12) Park Ridge Mayor Dave Schmidt attended the June meeting of the O’Hare Noise Compatibility Commission (the “ONCC”) in Rosemont, in part to ask for the ONCC’s support of Park Ridge’s request to the FAA for a supplemental environmental impact study (“EIS”) that the FAA recently denied.

For those who haven’t been paying attention, the ONCC is the red-headed stepchild of former Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley and some compliant O’Hare-area governmental units which was born back in 1996.  As best as we can tell, its primary function has been to apply a sheen of legitimacy to whatever Chicago’s wants to do out at O’Hare.  That usually involves Chicago throwing money (mostly federal dollars?) for sound insulation at those affected communities to buy them off.  And it’s worked like a charm so far.

According to the Herald-Advocate’s Jennifer Johnson, who attended the meeting, Schmidt’s request “was met with reluctance” from Arlene Mulder, ONCC’s chairman.  In case you haven’t been following Mulder’s career, she has been an elected official in Arlington Heights since 1979, and moonlights as ONCC chairman when she’s not serving as Arlington Heights mayor, METRA board member, vice president of the Illinois Municipal League, or executive board member of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

Can you say “professional politician”?

According to the H-A story, Schmidt described Mulder’s back-of-the-hand response to his request as “bureaucratic mumbo jumbo” and branded them the words not of an ONCC chairman but, instead, of an Arlington Hts. mayor who is hoping that O’Hare expansion will totally eliminate flights over her own town, despite his attempts to reassure her that he was just looking to reduce noise over Park Ridge and was “not asking for them to point the planes at your house.”

Think Mulder gives a rat’s derriere about noise over Park Ridge? 

According to the ONCC’s own website, for January 2012 (the latest month posted on that site), only 1 Arlington Hts. complainant filed only 1 complaint about O’Hare noise.  Contrast that with the 145 complaints by 43 Park Ridge complainants during that same time period.  Whatever deal Mulder cut with Daley years ago obviously has worked out pretty well for her town, and she’s not going to support anything which might change that in any way.

Unfortunately, the ONCC has become the only game in town since the money-wasting Suburban O’Hare Commission became defunct, so Park Ridge’s continued ONCC membership is probably justified, however marginally.  But only someone who still believes in the tooth fairy would expect any real support by the ONCC of Park Ridge’s battle against O’Hare noise – at least so long as Mulder is running the show as her Chicago masters dictate.

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