We’ll make this as simple and straightforward as possible:

The Park Ridge Recreation and Park District’s plan to commit almost all of its non-referendum bonding authority to a new $7.1 million outdoor pool complex at Centennial Park that can be used only 3 months of the year is fiscally irresponsible without first asking the taxpayers/voters through an advisory referendum.  

Entiendes?  Verstehst du?  Ne comprenez-vous?  Czy rozumiesz?  ?? ?????????? Capito?  Got that?

That’s why we hope a lot of residents turn up at TONIGHT’s Park Board meeting, where this project is arguably the main event on the agenda.  Kick off is at 7:30 at the Maine Leisure Center, 2701 Sibley.

Our branding of this project as “fiscally irresponsible,” however, should not be taken as our saying that the current Centennial Pools aren’t finally at the end of their useful lives, 20 years after having been prematurely pronounced dead the last time the Park District wanted to use millions of dollars of its non-referendum bonding power to build a new aquatic facility at Centennial.  And we’re not suggesting that a pool complex different from the two main pools now on that site wouldn’t be a suitable replacement – although we do think the proposed design leaves a lot to be desired. 

But what kind of stewards of the public purse would exhaust all of the District’s non-referendum bonded debt, and another $800,000 of “earmarked” funds, for a facility that will be operated no more than 90 days each year, weather permitting – especially without having a detailed business plan locked and loaded that demonstrates how the operations costs of that new facility, along with the debt service, will be covered? 

Frankly, bad ones. 

Because this kind of “investment” and this kind of debt are – to quote Vice President Joe Biden, albeit in a very different context – “a big f-ing deal.”  And both its short and long-term effects on the Park District and its taxpayers will be so significant and substantial that an advisory referendum should be automatic for any Park District official who actually gives a rat’s derriere about what The People think. 

Not surprisingly, the District has already produced a nifty marketing handout, and it has begun the “fun with numbers” exercise to support its claim that this project – requiring $6.3 million of bonded debt at an assumed 2.93% interest rate for a 15-year term that will end up costing taxpayers approximately $8.2 million when the debt service/interest costs are figured in – “won’t raise taxes.”  To this latter point, the District has put out a kind of spread sheet filled with a bunch of numbers in columns under headings that don’t mean jack to most taxpayers.  

As best as we can tell from that jumble, the main economic theory behind the “no new taxes” claim is that, because there already are existing bonds that will be retired by 2017, the cost to the taxpayers of servicing the debt on those existing bonds (for which the taxpayers already are being taxed) will simply be extended for the last 11 years of the new bonds’ term.  In the bizarre world of government economics, that means no tax “INCREASE.”

In the real world, it means the taxpayers won’t be getting the tax DECREASE to which they should be entitled when the current bonds are retired – or at least some better maintenance and additional amenities from the the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year that is currently being paid on those existing bonds.

Noted philosopher George Santayana is known for his quote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  And this latest Centennial Pool project takes us back to 1994, when the District last intended to use its non-referendum bonding power to build a “water park” to replace the “failing” Centennial Pools. 

Sound familiar?

Back then, the Park District executive director and the Park Board members – along with a number of resident aquatics advocates – insisted that “most people” wanted the water park.  But a group of NIMBYs and some community activists from other parts of town strenuously objected, blowing holes in the District’s “facts” and arguments, and demanding an advisory referendum. 

They got one, and the project was resoundingly defeated.

That little bit of history alone should be enough to wake up the current Board and Staff to the woeful wrongheadedness of exhausting the District’s non-referendum debt for this project without the legitimacy that a successful advisory referendum this April would provide.  And if the referendum should be unsuccessful but the Park Board members still believe the project is the right thing to do, they can display their individual profiles in courage by ignoring those referendum results and doing the project anyway.

One more blast-from-the-past is instructive.

In 1990 the Park District rushed to judgment on a plan to build the Community Center to replace the YMCA that was closing on that site.  The Park Board didn’t want to go to referendum on that project because, although it claimed it knew what “the people” wanted, it didn’t want to run the risk of being told “no” in the definitive manner elections tend to provide.  So it used up most of its non-referendum bonding power to do the project without a referendum, slapping together a variety of features, camel-like, to make sure it came in under the non-referendum debt ceiling. 

And what we got is the current structure: undersized from the moment it opened, with an indoor pool too short and too narrow to hold even kids’ swim meets, with a grossly insufficient work out area, and with such a dysfunctional design (e.g., the only way into the swimming area is by walking, literally, through the locker room showers) that a Bally’s manager who inspected the facility in 2004 stated that Bally’s wouldn’t agree to manage that facility even if it were given it for free.

But heedless of this history, the Park District wants to push this project through, hamstringing its finances for the next 15 years, without a referendum.  That’s wrong on basically every level. 

And tonight is an opportunity for the taxpayers of Park Ridge to let them know just how wrong, and how unacceptable, it is.

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