It’s that time of the year again, folks, and we don’t mean Christmas. Or Hanukkah. Or Kwanzaa, Saturnalia, or Festivus, either.

We mean Cook County property tax time. Or, more specifically, the second installment of the 2014 property taxes. And judging by a post on the Park Ridge Concerned Homeowners Group Facebook page, that’s got a lot of you griping up a storm about the continually-rising costs of living in the City of Park Ridge.

We suggest you read the Concerned Homeowners’ string started by Phil Poole on December 18 to get yourself up to speed on the comments that we’ll be riffing on in this post. Otherwise, you may find yourself scratching your head out of confusion rather than from befuddlement at some of those comments that pass for insights and fiscal thinking.

What we find most interesting about those comments is that their primary focus seems to be on the City of Park Ridge’s property tax increase – even though the City spends pretty much the same amount of money serving, protecting and maintaining a community of 37,000+ people that Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 spends on educating a mere 4,500 kids.

Education is important, to be sure. But how exactly does one justify spending $70 million a year to educate 4,500 kids (an average of $15,555 per kid) at the same time we’re spending $70 million to provide 37,000+ residents (at an average of $1,892 per resident, including most of those same 4,500 kids) with essential City services (police, fire, sewer, water, streets, sidewalks), a Library, and those huge-ticket capital improvements such as flood remediation?

For residents with kids in our public schools, the justification for more and more indiscriminate school spending is pretty much just plain math.

Even if the size of your home and land puts you among Park Ridge’s Top 25% residential property taxpayers and your annual property tax bill is $21,000, only around $2,100 of that goes to the City – while approximately $7,000 goes to D-64 and another $7,000 goes to D-207. So if you’ve got just one kid in D-64 schools, you’re getting over $14,000 of education for your $7,000. In investment vernacular, that’s a 100% ROI. Annually.

Add a second kid to D-64 and that gives you $28,000 of education for your $7,000, raising your ROI to a whopping 300%. Also annually. What’s not to like about that, especially if one of your principal life’s goals is to suck more money out of the system than you pay in?

Do you think that might explain the dead silence about D-64 (and D-207) taxes and tax increases from many of those commentators on the Concerned Homeowners page – you know, those with kids in D-64 (and D-207) schools – who happily barbecue the City for its taxing/spending increases while at the same time spouting mindless socialist rimshots like: “[A] city should act like a big family” and “People will not work harder because they get payed more.”

Seriously?

Which brings us, albeit indirectly, to the recent decision by the City Council to appeal a Cook County Circuit Court decision over-ruling the Park Ridge Planning & Zoning Commission’s withholding approval necessary for a developer to construct a four-story, 22-unit residential building at 400 Talcott, even though the development met the requirements of the City’s Zoning Code.

We’re no fans of increased residential density for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is the likelihood such increased density brings more flooding and more school-aged kids adding to our school-tax deficits. But when a developer satisfies our Zoning Code requirements, that should be the end of it – especially when both the City’s former and current law firms agree that the likelihood of the City’s prevailing on appeal is low.

If you want a place to lay the blame for this fiasco, it should be the Zoning Code. And if that’s not enough for you, blame the 17 residents who comprised the Ad Hoc Zoning Ordinance Rewrite Committee that, with the assistance of an outside consultant, produced the current Zoning Ordinance 10 years ago. But don’t blame the developer just because you think he’s a jerk, or a bully, or because you dislike his project.

And whatever you do, don’t say and do things which stupidly suggest that the City is now just trying to make life miserable and unduly expensive for the developer in the hope that he’ll give up and go away. That’s bad in principle, it’s bad policy, and it’s exactly the kind of thing that causes naysayers to brand Park Ridge as “unfriendly to business.”

With that kind of reputation, how can Park Ridge expect to get any of those businesses that some of our more clueless residents claim are just waiting for the City’s elevator pitch – like a centrally-located Jimmy Johns?

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