Our post about the 3 Hubbies running for the Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 Board garnered some decent attention from commenters on this blog. But it also got a number of commenters from Matt Coyne’s posting a link on a couple of the local Facebook pages: Chris Buckely’s “Park Ridge Citizens Online” and Kathy (f/k/a Panattoni) Meade’s “Park Ridge Concerned Homeowners Group.”

Three comments from the Concerned Homeowners page deserve special mention because they illustrate how seemingly intelligent residents can be painfully superficial, or simply clueless, when it comes to local elective office and local politics. Or maybe they’re simply campaigning for their preferred candidates and superficial or clueless is the best they can do.

We’ll start with local real estate broker William Cline, who admitted in his Concerned Homeowners comment to being “pretty fed up with crap like this” – clearly referring to our post about the 3 Hubbies’ conflicts of interest in running for offices where, if they win, they will be able to vote on raising their wives’ salaries and benefits (and, indirectly, their wives’ constitutionally-guaranteed pensions) when the current contract expires in 2020. And while waiting to vote on that new 2020 contract they can vote on other issues that also might benefit their wives.

Cline also termed as “crap” our questioning the 3 Hubbies’ integrity “without mentioning a single issue.”

Apparently Cline can’t grasp the concept that running for a public office where you get to vote on your wife’s salary for the next four years IS “a single issue” – one that just happens to raise a significant question about the candidates’ integrity.

Fortunately, our post provoked one of the 3 Hubby candidates, “Norm!” Dziedzic, to respond on his own campaign Facebook page by giving us (and Cline) yet another “issue” that shows the inherent problem with him and the other two Hubbies (Bublitz and Schaab) running for the D-64 Board. According to “Norm!”:

“I will also openly and honestly say that I don’t believe a cost of living increase is a raise.”

Now that’s an interesting thought. If it’s not a “raise,” “Norm!”, what do you call it when an extra 1.5% to 3.25% of your wife’s $107,579 annual salary (that’s between $1,614 to $3,496 of extra cash) shows up in her pay envelope, unrelated to her performance or her 8-month work year?

A tip? Walking around money? A bribe? Or just “Ka-ching, ka-ching, baby!”?

Neither Mrs. Bublitz nor Mrs. Schaab will pick up quite as much from their non-merit COLAs, since they reportedly make a mere $92,802 and a paltry $89,411, respectively, for their 8-month work years.

And those COLA raises require no extra hours or effort, which is why Cline’s defense of the 3 Hubbies’ conflicts of interest by suggesting they could improve their household incomes more by “working a little extra with the spare time they would have by not running,” reveals just how clueless he is.

Unfortunately, we can’t say anything better about Hulting’s “there are much easier ways to make some extra bucks that [sic] giving hours of time and effort on a school board,” and Holmes-Hamilton’s referring to school board service as being “an unpaid long term volunteer position” that “takes countless hours away from family and work”

The time commitment for those offices is not some closely guarded secret, nor is the fact that there is no salary or stipend for that service. And nobody is forced to run for those offices against their will.

So if you don’t want the long hours and no pay, the solution is simple: Don’t run! And if you do run and win, don’t whine about all the reading, or the long hours, or the lack of pay.

As someone who ran and won hotly-contested elections for the unpaid Park Ridge Park District Board in 1997 and 2001 and who faithfully attended lengthy Board meetings and various other District events for 8 straight years without complaint, I can say without a moment’s hesitation or reservation that serving one’s constituents by holding public office is an honor and privilege – not some kind of chore or forced labor.

And that’s the way it should be viewed by every candidate for elective office who is fit to hold that office.

The bottom line is that the 3 Hubbies’ marital status, standing alone, calls into question their integrity by putting themselves – and their constituents – in a no-win position: Either the 3 Hubbies will vote their wives’ (and their households’) economic self-interests, or they will recuse themselves and thereby deprive their constituents of whatever knowledge and other value they allegedly might bring to the Board.

As the estimable Samuel Johnson once observed: “Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, but knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.”

From their candidacies it appears that the 3 Hubbies have a distinct preference for dangerous and dreadful. And from the tone of their comments it appears that Cline, Hulting and Holmes-Hamilton concur.

Presumably they’re hoping a majority of Park Ridge voters do, too.

Robert J. Trizna

Editor & Publisher

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