Every Park Ridge adult resident who hasn’t been in a coma for the past decade knows about the Uptown TIF. And every such resident who has paid attention to City government knows what an economic disaster the Uptown TIF has been so far.

The $20 million-plus in surplus revenues projected by its supporters have been replaced by about the same amount of projected deficits, burning off tax dollars that could be better used on things like infrastructure.

Instead of “the gift that keeps on giving,” consider the Uptown TIF the gift that keeps on taking – in this case, money out of the pockets of Park Ridge taxpayers – compliments of the three former mayors and many of the twenty-five former aldermen who were so offended about being held accountable for that boondoggle by Mayor Dave Schmidt that they publicly endorsed Schmidt’s opponent in the April 2013 election. But to no avail.

While those former mayors and aldermen continue to lie low, however, Schmidt and the current Council have been struggling to make the best out of a bad situation.

And as reported in last week’s Chicago Tribune (“Park Ridge votes to refinance downtown TIF debt,” February 3), the Council voted unanimously last Monday night to refinance between $16.4 million and $17 million of outstanding TIF bond debt with the expectation of saving as much as $1.9 million in bond interest. The final vote on that refinancing proposal is expected at next Monday (Feb. 16) night’s meeting.

Schmidt and the Council have been looking at such refinancing for a while now, and had asked City staff and its bond advisor, William Blair & Co., for ways to do it that would maximize the City’s savings.

Back in November and December, City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton endorsed the bond advisor’s recommendation to either call the Series 2006B bond and issue a new one, or to pay off the existing bond with a conventional bank loan. But at the December 8, 2014 meeting, Schmidt and Alds. Knight and Mazzuca wanted more information and better comparisons between the total costs and savings of a new bond versus bank loan. So the decision was deferred.

That deferral drew flak from several quarters, including from 1st Ward aldermanic candidate John Moran, who wanted the bank loan and its $630,000 savings locked in right then and there.

According to the Tribune article, however, the delay actually worked to the City’s advantage because it could refinance that Series 2006B bond and a newly-callable 2005 bond together, saving administrative costs. And what looks like just plain luck has kept the interest rates basically the same.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that, as reported by the Tribune, the Uptown TIF will consume approximately $2 million of the more than $3.9 million recent tax increase. The TIF costs are also expected to increase by an average of $400,000 a year in six of the next eight fiscal years because the TIF district can’t service the TIF debt from its own tax base, as TIFs are supposed to do.

And what this Uptown TIF was going to do, according to then-mayor Ron Wietecha and a compliant city council back in 2003 when this red-headed step child was born. Of course, that was before Wietecha resigned the mayor’s chair two years into his third full term and fled to Barrington; and before successor Mike Marous agreed to take the reins solely for the remainder of Wietecha’s term and engineered the sweetheart deals on the City’s dime for Uptown developer PRC Partners; and before his successor, Howard Frimark, spent his four years in office trying to cut deals for his buddies.

Given how those three mayors and a few handfuls of their former aldermanic TIF aiders and abettors couldn’t get the voters to show Schmidt the door in 2013, we’d like to think they might show up at City Hall for one of these Council meetings at which the Uptown TIF refinancing is being discussed, and offer some innovative solutions to the problem they stuck Schmidt and this Council with – if only as a sporting gesture.

But apparently none of them wants to admit maternity or paternity of that red-headed step child.

And none of them is offering to pay child support, either.

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