Better grab a sandwich and a beverage, not-so-gentle readers, because this is a long one.
On October 13, 2010, and on December 29, 2010, we published posts about the Park Ridge Teen Center in response to the whines and howls from the Teen Center crowd when the City cut its funding – along with the funding for all but three other private “community groups”: Center of Concern, Meals on Wheels, and the Maine Center for Mental Health.
But apparently you can’t keep an entrenched entitlement down.
According to a March 8 article in the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate and a similar article in the March 13 edition of the Park Ridge Journal, the Teen Center is again threatening to close its doors at the end of this April because of…wait for it…the City’s cutting off of its funding.
Back in 2010!
If you think it’s not merely a coincidence that this latest threat arrives just in time for the April 9 election, then you have been paying attention. And you also understand how slick the folks running challenger Larry Ryles’ mayoral campaign can be.
Of course, it could be just a coincidence Teen Center board member Kate Kerin and friends are bringing up this imminent closing – without any prior warning – just before next month’s mayoral election. But that would mean the Teen Center operators didn’t know what their finances were; or they just had the financial rug pulled out from under them; or they suffered some other major setback. But if any of those things had occurred, wouldn’t they have made it into the Teen Center’s press release?
They didn’t, so we have to assume that the timing of the announcement is an orchestrated political stunt.
Which should come as no surprise, considering that Ms. Kerin is the wife of former 4th Ward alderman John Kerin, who over the years contributed over $700 to Howard Frimark’s campaign fund. Kerin also was a member of the old, post-Marty Butler Homeowner’s Party (the “old HOs”) and is rumored to be part of the “new Homeowners” group (nominally known as the “Citizens for Non-Partisan Local Elections”) that just gave Ryles a whopping $10,000 from that group’s $15,000 war chest it received when the old HOs went out of business in early 2009. Kerin also gave the old HOs almost $700.
Besides being a one-term alderman, Kerin is a former chairman of the old Economic Development Corporation, a weird public-private group that spent City money but held closed meetings and achieved little actual economic development over the roughly 12 years its existence – other than recommending the Uptown TIF. He’s also a Center of Concern board member and advocate, which makes him another Kerin whose pet ox has been gored by Schmidt’s efforts to stop tax dollars from going to unaccountable private corporations.
Using something like the Teen Center as a political pawn was never beneath Frimark, so there’s no reason to think it’s beneath his newest BFF, Ryles – or beneath Frimark/Ryles supporters such as the Kerins. And there’s no reason to think that the timing for moving this particular pawn to help Ryles defeat incumbent Mayor Dave Schmidt (who beat Frimark 4 years ago) is just happenstance.
Mrs. Kerin is quoted in the H-A article as pointing out that: “Since the inception of the Teen Center, the city of Park Ridge was our main funding source.” Indeed, the City had been a/the major source of funding for almost all of those many private “community group” corporations who fed at the public trough despite providing many/most of their “services” to non-Park Ridge residents, including the Center of Concern, Maine Center, Meals on Wheels, and the Park Ridge Senior Center, as run by private corporation Park Ridge Senior Services, Inc.
All those groups would still have been getting their government handouts if it were up to Frimark’s then-alderpuppets Don Bach (3rd), Jim Allegretti (4th), Robert Ryan (5th) and Tom Carey (6th), who voted to throw another $190,000 at those groups back in 2010 but came up one-vote short of over-riding Schmidt’s veto. Since those alderpuppets’ departure from the Council in May 2011 without even seeking re-election, however, the Council has adopted two more budgets that haven’t included Teen Center funding.
But it looks like the Kerins and their Teen Center comrades are counting on a Ryles victory to change all that.
Despite Mrs. Kerin’s sky-is-falling laments 3 years ago, the Teen Center managed to remain open, reportedly by soliciting a major donation from the Park Ridge Juniors in 2012, and donations from other local groups like the Park Ridge Community Fund and the Kiwanis Club. Why those groups have shut their wallets is a question neither the H-A story nor the Journal story addressed, presumably because the Teen Center’s press and its designated talkers preferred it that way.
We’ve always viewed the Teen Center as another one of those manufactured “needs” that are really “wants” or “amenities.” Realistically, how many Park Ridge youths actually need a place to watch t.v., play games, and generally hang out? That might even explain why the Teen Center reportedly serves so many teens from Chicago’s nearby Edison Park neighborhood (one of the more affluent neighborhoods of Chicago) and “from all of Maine Township.” The only Teen Center users quoted in either article were from Chicago, with one girl talking about how she was invited there by her friends from Taft high school.
And THAT’s where the rub comes in.
As a matter of public policy, Park Ridge taxes should be used for Park Ridge property and Park Ridge residents. Period.
If private corporation Park Ridge Teen Center, the private United Methodist Church (which provides the location) and other private community groups want to fund a teen hang-out 8 hours a week, or 80 hours a week, we don’t particularly care where the teens come from – even if we doubt those Edison Park kids have any more of a need for the Teen Center than their Park Ridge counterparts. But Park Ridge taxpayers should not be forced to fund the recreation and entertainment of non-Park Ridge teens with tax dollars confiscated by the City and diverted to those private groups – especially when a good chunk of that money is going to pay for administrators and “adult supervisors” doing what should be unpaid “volunteer” work.
While the Teen Center leadership claims that they made “valiant fundraising efforts,” we sure didn’t see or hear about them. But if they really did make serious fundraising efforts, then their inability to raise enough funds to keep their doors open speaks even more volumes about the lack of that widespread community support Teen Center proponents invariably claim.
Like the Park Ridge Senior Center (as run by private corporation Park Ridge Senior Services, Inc.), the Park Ridge Teen Center looks and sounds like just another semi-private club run by a select few for the benefit of a select few. No vote of the taxpayers or their elected representatives created any of these private organizations; and no taxpayer oversight, either direct or indirect through their representatives, has ever been volunteered by those groups.
That’s particularly problematic when, for example, non-profit resource Guidestar shows no Teen Center Form 990 tax return since 2010. So the ability of the City or the general public to keep a meaningful eye on these groups is virtually non-existent. Yet the folks who run these private “community group” corporations cling tenaciously to their privacy, even when they demand public funding – and, even then, they prefer their handouts without any commensurate disclosures or accountability.
Kind of like those private corporations and banks that insist on privatizing their profits but always want the government to “socialize” their losses by means of subsidies and bailouts.
The Kalo Foundation and the Mural Committee have shown how to rally public support and raise money privately, without demanding handouts from the City and without badmouthing the City when they don’t get those handouts. The folks running the Teen Center might learn a lesson from the Kalo and Mural folks.
Unfortunately, demanding handouts from the City and beefing about not getting them seem to be more their style than real fundraising.
Especially when there’s less than a month before an election, an incumbent who vetoed their handouts, and a challenger who keeps on emphasizing his “big heart.”
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