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The $20 million-plus in surplus revenues projected by its supporters have been replaced by about the same amount of projected deficits, burning off tax dollars that could be better used on things like infrastructure.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

To read or post comments, click on title.

How much in additional property taxes would you be willing to pay the City of Park Ridge so that, after a blizzard like last Sunday’s, all the streets and City parking lots would be curb-to-curb clear of snow and ice within 24 hours?

That’s a question few people – even those who chose to register off-topic beefs about the City’s snow removal as comments to our unrelated 01.29.15 post – seem interested in taking on. Even the beefers offered nothing in that regard, other than for one of them saying he/she doesn’t think we pay high enough taxes here in Park Ridge.

Needless to say, that comment was made anonymously.

But when it comes to most of the things about which Park Ridge residents (and the occasional non-resident parasites) complain, money almost always could make a difference. And often a big difference.

Take snow removal.

According to Public Works Director Wayne Zingsheim (as reported in a 02.03.15 Park Ridge Herald-Advocate article, “Park Ridge mayor questions delay in plowing Uptown lot after blizzard”), City crews worked steadily from Sunday afternoon through Tuesday morning. But apparently that wasn’t enough to clear even our primary thoroughfares from curb to curb by the time residents had to head to work Monday morning. Or to salt those thoroughfares, plow out the commuter lots on Summit and Fairview, or plow out the Library lot on Prospect.

That ticked off some residents who awakened early Monday morning to shovel their driveways in order to get to the train, only to find no place to park. And those residents who would have taken their kids to the Library in response to the school closings, only to find the Library closed because its lot wasn’t plowed.

Questions should be raised about what was done and not done, when, and why. A number of residents and the H-A article reported that neighboring communities did a much better job than we did in clearing and salting their streets. If that is true, the City’s Public Works Director owes residents some answers.

He also owes them an explanation of why two plows reportedly were already out of service when the blizzard hit – despite a couple of days of advance warning that a heavy snow was on its way – and why three more plows reportedly went down with mechanical problems during the snow removal effort. Frankly, five downed vehicles sound like too many for a properly maintained fleet the size of Park Ridge’s.

Questions also remain about why Park Ridge streets weren’t salted during the first 24 hours of the blizzard, while streets in neighboring communities were salted and noticeably clearer than ours. And we’ve heard a few folks question whether the Super Bowl and/or the running feud between the City and Operating Engineers Local 150 – which represents the City’s Public Works employees and stationed large inflatable rats at City Hall on November 24, 2014, to protest Mayor Dave Schmidt’s and a 5-alderman Council majority’s refusal to roll over for the union in a contract dispute – may have affected not only the availability of City staff but also of the private plowing contractors the City sometimes uses in emergency situations.

One thing the City could do to improve the public’s understanding of this situation is to post on its website a color-coded map showing which thoroughfares and lots have the highest plowing priority and which have lower priorities. At least that way, residents could know where their streets rank and can chart their course around town with the knowledge of what streets are most likely to be passable. Something like that should cost taxpayers next to nothing

But the additional manpower and vehicles it might take to provide 24-hour turnaround times for blizzards such as Sundays will cost a whole lot more than “next to nothing.”

So it’s up to the City – with the Public Works Department taking the lead – to proactively figure out what it would take to do a top-shelf job of snow removal and salting, and what it would cost our taxpayers. Then it’s up to the City Council to proactively discuss that issue and figure out whether the benefits justify those costs.

As part of that process the Public Works Director should be asked to fully account for his department’s performance in this last blizzard.

He should be asked to confirm whether his department had enough salt (and, if not, when did he last ask for more); whether it had enough trucks (and, if not, why not and when did he last ask for more); whether it had enough drivers (and, if not, why not and when did he last ask for more); whether it had enough mechanics (and, if not, why not and when did he last ask for more); and whether it had enough money in its budget to do the jobs it needs to do at the level it needs to do them (and, if not, why not and when did he last ask for more).

He should also be asked to explain things like : (a) which streets are our No. 1 priority streets; (b) when each of them was fully cleared – not just one lane, but at least two lanes if not curb to curb; (c) why the commuter lots weren’t cleared by 6:00 a.m. Monday when commuters started arriving; (d) why the Library lot wasn’t cleared when it could have been expected that there would be a demand for parking due to the schools being closed; and (e) exactly what happened to those 3rd party plows, and how many did the City try to call in?

These questions and discussions should occur right now, while memories of the event are still fresh in everybody’s minds – and while the City is just beginning its budget process and might be able to adjust the budget to address any real or perceived need to provide for additional snow removal expenses.  Because whether the answers to all those questions are good, bad, or ugly, snow removal is an issue that should be able to be resolved based on what it would cost to do the job the way it should be done.

And whether the taxpayers believe the benefits justify that cost.

Update (02.05.15) As luck would have it, we just discovered a relatively recent Illinois Appellate Court decision, Patullo-Banks v. City of Park Ridge, 2014 IL App (1st) 1132856 (Sept. 4, 2014), holding that the City can be liable when a pedestrian is struck by a car while walking in the street (Touhy, near 3rd Street) because careless plowing of that street (Touhy) piled an “unnatural accumulation” of ice and snow on the sidewalk, making it impassable; and the City then failed to clear the sidewalk within a reasonable time after it knew or should have known that the sidewalk had become impassable.

So besides clearing the streets, City snow plowers need to be mindful of creating “unnatural accumulations” of snow and ice on City sidewalks that might render such sidewalks impassable.

And the following is a comment from Mayor Schmidt:

I have heard a lot of criticism over the past few days. Some of it is fair, some of it is not, but certainly everyone is entitled to their opinion. Bottom line is that I agree the City could have done better, but I do not agree that it was a major failure, and I know for a fact that it was not the result of City Council action resulting in inadequate funding or supplies.

In response to [the comment from] 4:40 pm, City Hall, meaning the Public Works Director, DID call in private plowers. The fact is they were in extremely high demand, and many simply chose not to answer the call. We also had one PW worker retire the previous Friday, one is on medical leave and one worker did not answer the bell and has been suspended. The claim that the streets were not salted 72 hours later is not true. We learned Tuesday morning, about 30 hours after the storm ended, that PW had started salting the streets on Monday night and have been salting ever since. The problem with salt is that it is ineffective below a certain temperature, so the Monday night salting had little effect until the temperature began rising Tuesday. Another fact that people must understand is that salting while it is still snowing heavily is a waste of time and resources, because the plows will simply push any salt laid down to the side of the road. I did question the PW Director why he did not begin salting earlier on Monday when the sun was out and temperatures were higher. He has admitted that, in retrospect, he should have ordered salting to have begun sooner. He says he has learned from this particular experience and will adjust procedures accordingly.

I cannot address why Library management decided to close on Monday, but I do think that was as multi-departmental mistake. PW should have made the Library lot a priority, primarily for the sake of the Uptown businesses, and the Library should have stayed open on Monday. I am not happy with how that unfolded.

To read or post comments, click on title.

We’ve always believed that the single best way to improve local government is to increase its transparency.

When the taxpayers can see and hear everything that a public body is doing, the chances for skullduggery, stupidity and outright mopery are substantially reduced. That’s because connivers and knuckleheads alike are reluctant to do their worst in full view of the folks who they purport to represent – or, in the case of the bureaucrats, the folks who pay their salaries.

Over the years we’ve often written about transparency. Unfortunately, most often it has been about the lack of it, especially when it comes to things like appointments of public officials (e.g., replacement elected officials, board and commission members, and executives) and those contract negotiations which the unions insist be conducted in closed sessions so that the taxpayers can’t see and hear the unions’ often outrageous demands and the arrogance with which they often are conveyed.

The folks who sit on the boards of School Districts 64 and 207 still seem to lack any clue about what “transparency” means. Either that, or they’re learning about it from the former Soviet Union Politburo playbook. They empower their respective propaganda ministers to “manage” information, and they run into closed sessions every chance they get – as evidenced most notably by their selection processes for appointed board positions that we wrote about in our 07.07.14 and 08.29.14 posts, respectively; and by D-64’s process for choosing a new superintendent, that we wrote about in our 12.27.13 post.

Recently the Park Ridge Park District, over the protestations of its executive director, has started to get some transparency traction. Last year it even held its evaluation of the aforementioned executive director in open session, which we applauded in our 03.20.14 post.

But ever since the election of Mayor Dave Schmidt in April 2009, the City has taken the lead in the transparency race, notwithstanding the regular push-back from the bureaucrats and the occasional alderman looking to shield their antics from public view. Schmidt paid for the first video camera that recorded Council meetings, and two of his campaign supporters ran the camera and uploaded the videos until WOW through in a new camera and live meeting broadcasts as part of its entry package into the Park Ridge market.

But the current Council, following Schmidt’s lead, has raised transparency – especially as demonstrated by the reluctance to run and hide in closed sessions – to new heights.

If you don’t believe us, listen to City Attorney Everette “Buzz” Hill’s acknowledgement of this Council’s “unique” level of transparency in his colloquy with Ald. Marty Maloney about open versus closed sessions for interviews of finalist firms for the new city attorney contract, which occurred during that portion of last Monday (01.26.14) night’s Committee of the Whole (“COW”) meeting beginning around the 2:16:30 mark of the meeting video:

“You guys are a unique outfit. You have an antipathy toward closed sessions, and I’m not so sure it’s not a real healthy antipathy.”

The double-negative notwithstanding, that’s high praise coming from somebody who has seen more than his share of closed sessions: Hill said that he has observed around 50 city attorney interview processes, but never one held in open session. Hence his calling the open-session interviewing this Council has expressed interest in doing  “establishing a precedent.”

And what an outstanding precedent it is!

So despite Punxsutawney Phil’s shadow signaling six more weeks of winter, the people of Park Ridge can bask in the warmth of knowing that their City Council appears to be “unique” in its antipathy for the kind of secrecy and political cowardice practiced by so many other communities’ governing bodies – and by our local school boards.

Just because Illinois law lets them get away with it.

UPDATE (02.03.15).  Just when we dish out the kudos to the Park Ridge City Council for their “unique” level of transparency, a majority of them decide to act like the Star Chambers running D-64 and D-207.

At last night’s Council meeting, four aldermen (Alds. Sweeney, Smith, Shubert and Mazzuca) outvoted three (Alds. Milissis, Knight and Maloney) to run and hide in closed session to discuss the City’s “negotiating strategy” with the Illinois Council of Police and Sheriffs (“ICOPS”) union, the Teamsters union (representing the rank and file police) and the Int’l Association of Firefighters (“Local 2697”).

Besides playing right into the hands of those unions who want to conceal their demands and negotiating demeanor from the taxpayers while wrapping themselves in mantles of selfless public service, Alds. Sweeney, Smith, Shubert and Mazzuca also are missing the boat on why transparency in dealing with public employees is so important: the taxpayers deserve to see and hear how the Council goes about figuring out what’s a fair deal for both the employees AND for the taxpayers, and why.  And it’s that “fair deal” that the City should offer.

Apparently those four majority alderman would prefer, instead, to do that figuring out in secret, then send out their negotiators with a series of low-ball offers in the hope of getting the unions to bite.  As if that might actually happen.

The history of public employee negotiations for the City and all our other local governmental bodies, however, demonstrates that such a “negotiating strategy” rarely, if ever, works.  That’s because the unions are far more motivated to fight for their members’ own personal pocketbooks than our public officials are motivated to fight for OPM. So Sweeney, Smith, Shubert and Mazzuca are blowing smoke up their own kilts if they think they’re going to come up with a “negotiating strategy” that will snooker the unions into a better deal for the taxpayers.

Our guess, therefore, is that those four majority aldermen don’t want the taxpayers to see and hear how quickly and tightly they – and whoever comprises the City’s negotiating team – grab their ankles in response to the unions’ demands.  And while that might not be a pretty sight, that’s EXACTLY why transparency is so important.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Today we’re borrowing a page from Ira Glass’ “This American Life” with two shorter-than-our-usual posts, which we will introduce in TAL fashion: 

Act One. Cindy’s Victory.

Cindy Grau reportedly has won her battle to be on the ballot in April’s Park Ridge Park District Board election. She will face off against incumbents Jim O’Brien, Mary Wynn Ryan and Mel Thillens. According to Ms. Grau, the hearing officer denied all the objections raised by Charlene Foss-Eggemann.

Our takes on this matter can be found in our 01.07.15 and 01.13.15 posts.

Not so fortunate, however, was Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District candidate Kristin Gruss, who reportedly was removed from the April ballot when a hearing officer determined that she did not have the required 50 legitimate signatures on the petitions she filed.

We congratulate Ms. Grau on her victory and hope this serves as an object lesson to prospective candidates on the value of knowing, understanding and following the Illinois election laws; and on the risks inherent in not going so. Running for the boards of governmental bodies that control the expenditure of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars isn’t like running for student council. And, like it or not, the politics of such elections “ain’t beanbag” – even in sleepy ol’ Park Ridge.

Act Two. Liquor Liberalization.

A report in this week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“Park Ridge looks to extend liquor sale hours at restaurants, stores,” Jan. 27) suggests that Park Ridge is bringing some long-overdue sanity to its arcane and antiquated liquor laws.

If the City Council approves the liquor law rewrite achieved through the yeoman’s efforts of 4th Ward Ald. Roger Shubert, the liquor code’s current 27 license classifications will be reduced to 8. At the same time, restaurants will be able to serve alcohol from 11:00 a.m. until 2:00 a.m.; and the sale of packaged alcohol will be permitted from 7:00 a.m. until 11:00 p.m.

We applaud anything that makes the liquor code less like something Carrie Nation would have drafted had she lived to see both the Volstead Act and the passage of the 21st Amendment. While alcohol abuse is a significant problem of many dimensions, no legitimate public purpose is well-served by the current regulations. And, frankly, we think it would make even more sense to permit alcohol sales by restaurants and retail stores during whatever their regular business hours, without imposing other arbitrary hours solely for liquor sales.

In that regard we take issue with the argument of Maine Community Youth Assistance Foundation director Teri Collins, who reportedly expressed concern that longer sales hours might give teens more opportunities to purchase alcohol and stated: “We don’t want increased access to alcohol by minors.”

Neither do we, Ms. Collins. But last time we looked, it was illegal for restaurants and retail establishments to sell alcohol to minors. So competent enforcement of the laws already on the books should be taking care of that already.

But if it isn’t, we learned 80+ years ago that prohibition – even if it’s only a partial prohibition through reducing the hours of alcohol sale – isn’t a workable solution to that problem. Better enforcement, and even heavier penalties, is.

To read or post comments, click on title.

The Park Ridge City Council made a wise decision last Monday night at its Committee of the Whole (“COW”) meeting when it reached a 5-1 consensus not to proceed with $1.167 million worth of engineering work in furtherance of a $48 million flood relief project for the west-of-the-Country Club area.

The $48 million project, if built, would include 19,000 feet of new storm sewers and a whopping 32 acre-feet of water storage, most of which would likely require a massive vault under part of the Park Ridge Country Club. But despite the size and cost of the project, it would only provide protection from 10-year floods and not from the 100-year floods that have plagued Park Ridge in recent years.

From a cost-effective public works perspective it was a pretty easy decision.

Heck, even the folks from Christopher Burke Engineering – who could have pocketed that $1.167 million fee with no concerns for whether or not the $48 million project would ever be constructed – acknowledged it would cost way too much for way too little real protection.

But political considerations tend to exert a lot of influence on these kinds of decisions, especially when special-interest groups make their presence felt.  And that was the realm in which 5 of the 6 aldermen in attendance stood tallest last Monday night.

Led by Public Works chairman Ald. Marty Maloney (7th Ward), Alds. Nick Milissis (2nd), Roger Shubert (4th), Dan Knight (5th) and Marc Mazzuca (6th) voted not to waste the $1.167 million on plans that would likely sit on a shelf gathering dust. Only lame-duck Ald. Jim Smith (3rd) voted to move forward with the project, claiming doing otherwise was just kicking the can down the road.

Not unexpectedly, however, that decision was greeted with derision from folks in the affected area who don’t seem to understand, or just don’t want to accept, how any elected official might object to spending multimillions of tax dollars to protect one relatively small section of Park Ridge (680 homes out of over 13,000 residences, or less than 6%) against 10-year floods when 100-year flooding is becoming the norm. And when 100-year flood protection in other areas is available for significantly less money.

If you visit the Park Ridge Concerned Homeowners Group (“PRCHG”) Facebook page you can read read how last Monday night’s meeting was “a disgrace” and a “charade” in which the Burke representative “appeared to be in cahoots with members of the City Council.”

While there’s a possibility that some of the City’s Public Works personnel may have gotten a tad too cozy with the Burke folks, that’s always the danger when any City department works closely with one consultant for awhile. But it’s hard to argue for Burke’s being in cahoots with the entire City Council when that “cahoots” involves Burke walking away from a million-dollar piece of business.

The PRCHG folks also seem to be talking through their collective hats when suggesting that the City should be exercising its right of eminent domain to force the Park Ridge Country Club to accommodate whatever flood relief the City wants to construct on PRCC property. ED would require the City to purchase the necessary land from the PRCC – at fair market value – for construction of the water detention vault. The additional millions of dollars that would entail should make ED a non-starter.

And their complaints about the City permitting the construction of McMansions beg the question of where were all those complaints over the past 10 years or more when some (many?) of the current complainers were happily watching their own property values go up as a result of a McMansion or two being built on their blocks? And where were they over the past 15 years when previous City administrations were budgeting several hundred thousand dollars each year for the construction of relief (storm) sewers but then deferring those projects when they decided to divert that money elsewhere?

One complaint raised in the PRCHG discussion by commentators Christopher Kueppers and Thomas Sotos, however, is a good one – one that we raised in our 10.02.14 post about the controversial O’Flaherty project on Talcott: the wisdom of a “fee-in-lieu” of providing sufficient water detention.

We can see no evidence that such a fee is sufficient to effectively ameliorate the adverse effects of new developments to which it is applied. Additionally, according to an August 23, 2013 Memorandum from City Engineer Sarah Mitchell, that fee is used “for future sewer improvement projects” – so not only might it not be implemented as soon as the applicable fee-in-lieu property comes on line but, also, that fee might not even be restricted to that particular fee-in-lieu property or block.

That doesn’t sound like the best plan for dealing with a flood-prone community. But those are different issues for another day.

At least for the time being this Council has made sure that $1.167 million of taxpayer money won’t be wasted on a project that won’t do the job needed to be done.

To read or post comments, click on title. 

This week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate contains an article (“Park Ridge officials consider coffee sales in the Public Library,” December 24) about a suggestion by two Park Ridge Library Board trustees that establishing an on-premises coffee shop might be a way of increasing the number of Library visitors while also generating additional revenue.

New trustees Pat Lamb and Dean Parisi both raised the possibility of the Library’s working with a private coffee vendor. Parisi cited as an example a coffee chain in a Chicago hospital that shares proceeds with the hospital, while Lamb noted the small Starbucks located in Macy’s. That’s pretty outside-the-box thinking for Park Ridge Library Board members, and something the Library needs after years of lethargic, bobble-headed boards annually whining about not having a bigger new building and then rubber-stamping the same old way of doing things, all the while hoping for different results – or perhaps not even caring whether the results were different, or better.

Lamb and Parisi were reacting to the recent marked decline in Library in-person visits (v. “virtual” on-line visits), circulation (i.e., more materials being checked out) and program attendance.

Library visits and circulation in FY2013-14 were the lowest in 5 years, but 7 years into FY2014-15 both visits and circulation are tracking even lower this year.  And year-to-date program attendance is also on track to be the lowest in the past five years, even though the Library continues to offer in excess of 900 programs that are still free of charge and accessible on a drop-in basis with no reservations or advance commitment required.  So if visits, circulation and program attendance matter, that downward trend would not appear to be a good thing.

Staff has tried to blame the decline on “The Recession,” or on the “recovery” from The Recession. Although circulation did increase during The Recession, it actually continued to go up in the first four years following the official end to The Recession – in June 2009, according to the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the official arbiter of such dates. And while Library visits increased precipitously during the 18-month duration of The Recession, until last year they had dropped only slightly from The Recession’s end, while remaining well above pre-Recession levels.

So if maximizing visits, circulation and program attendance are valid goals against which the Library’s effectiveness in serving the community should be measured, “The Recession” doesn’t appear to be a realistic or even useful alibi for the recent decline in the Library’s numbers.

Whether getting a private coffee vendor to come into the Library proves to be do-able remains to be seen. And even if it is, whether such an idea will be successful in significantly increasing visits, circulation, program attendance and revenue is, at best, speculative at this time. Given the recent emergence of “bookless” libraries-of-the-future such as the Bexar County, TX public library and the Hunt Library at North Carolina State University, “circulation” as we have known it might be losing its prominence as a benchmark of successful libraries.

Much as we applaud that kind of creative thinking, it probably should not be coming from the part-time unpaid volunteer trustees – especially from the two newest ones – who are supposed to be focusing on overall Library policy and long-term Library operations from 30,000 feet rather than doing boots-on-the-ground micro-managing.  Such ideas, instead, should be coming from the well-paid full-time library professionals who already are “on the ground” on a forty-hour-per-week basis.

But full-time staff seems content to keep doing basically what it has been doing for years, give or take the occasional nip and tuck like the planned $15,000 “Digital Media Lab” that is intended to provide patrons with free access to hardware and software for creating media presentations, converting digital content from one format to another, and editing photos, music and video – at least some of which we understand are currently available from that local taxpaying business on Northwest Hwy. known as Kinko’s, albeit at a cost to the users rather than at a cost to the taxpayers.

That’s because the stereotypical government approach to increasing usage is with giveaways.  But when you’re the Library and you’re already giving away your visits, circulation and programs, new giveaways need to take the form of new services – even if it means unfairly competing (free versus paid) with an established, tax-paying business.

Which brings us to the title, and point, of today’s post.

We’re inviting you to offer your ideas for increasing the visits, circulation and program attendance of the Library.  And while ideas that could generate revenue for the Library and thereby reduce the funding burden on taxpayers would be preferred, we’ll publish whatever comes in.  As always, however, we reserve the right to criticize and, under appropriate circumstances, ridicule.

But don’t let that stop you…as if it ever has before.

[Note: The editor and publisher of this blog, Robert J. Trizna, is a member of the Park Ridge Library Board of Trustees.]

To read or post comments, click on title.

When was the last time you saw two large inflatable rats in front of Park Ridge City Hall, their inflatable paws holding inflatable sacks of inflatable public money?

Never, that’s when.

So when the rats and their keepers – a contingent of the City’s Public Works employees and their representatives from Local 150 of the Union of Operating Engineers, bearing signs like “Time to Veto Dave Schmidt” – showed up outside City Hall for the City Council meeting on the evening of November 24, it was most definitely a significant event.

As background, one needs to remember that Local 150 has no love for Park Ridge Mayor Dave Schmidt. It was Local 150 that very publicly supported Schmidt’s opponent in the April 2013 election, Larry Ryles. In fact, Local 150’s $1,000 contribution to the Ryles campaign is the only contribution by a union to any candidate for our non-partisan local offices that we can remember or find evidence of.

That’s because Schmidt has been the first Park Ridge mayor to have the audacity to say “no,” or even “maybe not,” to the unions representing City employees. And to public employee unions used to having their way with the majority of feckless public officials who seem to derive more than a little faux self-esteem from spending OPM (“Other People’s Money”), “no” is not an acceptable option.

Especially when Schmidt can back it up with the support of a majority of the City Council.

In this case, as we understand it, Local 150’s beef with the City is the unfair labor practice charge it filed in which the union claims the City is overcharging Public Works employees for health insurance by keeping them on the City’s insurance policy rather than letting them transfer to the union’s coverage. The union claims the City is breaching the contract it cut with the City, while the City says that particular health insurance provision was not part of the contract the City Council approved.

That contract reportedly has not yet been signed by either party, presumably because the draft that Local 150 claims its members ratified contains healthcare terms different from the ones in the draft the City Council initially approved. That confusion is something we blame on City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton and the City’s crack negotiating team, who are very well paid to get this kind of basic stuff right. But that bungled effort has already been the topic of our 06.14.13 post and our 03.14.14 post.

It was Schmidt’s veto of the Council’s 4-3 approval of that bungled contract, which was sustained by a 5-2 vote of the Council on April 7, 2014, that apparently provoked the “Veto Dave Schmidt” signs.

The Local 150 unfair labor practice, and a similar counterclaim filed by the City, are currently being arbitrated before the Illinois Labor Relations Board, a public body which effectively has become an arm of public-sector unions over the many years that public sector union-beholden Democrats have dominated Illinois state government, not only stacking state laws to favor public employee unions but also controlling the appointment of the arbitrators who decide these kinds of disputes. So taking on a union in such a proceeding is an uphill battle.

But it’s one that has to be fought because surrendering would announce to Local 150 and to all other City employee unions that our current elected officials are a bunch of easily-intimidated ankle-grabbers who will sell out the taxpayers almost as readily as their soft-touch predecessors.

If you have any doubt about that point, consider the irony of all these Local 150 types ripping Schmidt and the Council for “wasting taxpayers’ money,” the second most popular Local 150 sign slogan behind “Veto Dave Schmidt.”

In the Bizarro world of public-sector unions and their members – including police, firefighters and teachers – the doling out of tens and even hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars in raises and benefits, without any increase in productivity or efficiency, is wise spending. And spending a fraction of that money fighting the unions’ demands, on the other hand, is a waste of those funds.

Which is why Local 150 member Doug Karowsky can shamelessly argue that “the City Council had a duty to the taxpayers to be financially responsible” while somehow considering that such a duty could be discharged by the Council’s rolling over for the union’s wage increases and benefit demands.

In 1798 the French foreign minister Tallyrand demanded bribes of $250,000 for himself personally, $50,000 pounds sterling for France, and a $100 million loan to France, in order to stop French ships from plundering American ones. U.S. Sen. Robert Goodloe Harper responded to that demand with the famous toast: “Millions for defense but not one cent for tribute.” And later that year American warships and armed private merchant ships captured 80 French vessels and chased French warships out of U.S. waters.

We’re not suggesting that the City spend “millions” – or anything remotely close – on battling Local 150.

But Park Ridge taxpayers should be glad that Schmidt and the Council have let the word go out to friend and foe alike that at least one local governmental body will not be seduced or intimidated by public-sector unions bearing signs and demanding unwarranted raises and/or better benefits.

Or by their inflatable rats.

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Readers of this blog know that one of our major pet peeves –stuck in there one step below corruption and one step above stupidity – is greed masquerading as need.

That’s why we’ve written some nasty posts about “freeloaders” (shorthand for residents looking to get something for free or with a heavy subsidy from their fellow taxpayers) and “parasites” (shorthand for non-residents looking to scam a freebie or subsidy from local taxpayers). We especially like to apply those terms to folks who portray themselves as needy when it’s pretty obvious they’re just being greedy.

So we were a bit dismayed to see how residents of several Park Ridge housing developments seem to once again be aspiring to “freeloader” status in seeking do-overs of deals done decades ago.

At last Monday (November 24) night’s City Council Committee of the Whole meeting, Mr. Lee Tate, ostensibly representing the residents of the Park Ridge Pointe development, showed up to once again offer to the City ownership of what we understand to currently be, by law, Park Ridge Pointe’s “private” property: its streets, curbs, sidewalks, fire hydrants, sewers, etc.

That offer to turn over property isn’t any altruistic gift by the Park Ridge Pointers, however.

The quid pro quo for that offer is that the City would start providing certain City services that up until now have been provided and paid for by Pointe residents themselves under the terms of a legal deal cut by the Pointe’s developer in order to get City permission to build the Pointe the way the developer wanted – with narrower streets, shorter setbacks and non-compliance with other then-code requirements that enabled the developer to wring more units, greater density and greater profit out of the site.

In other words, the residents of Park Ridge Pointe currently are doing the right thing by paying for services they are legally obligated to pay, yet they seem intent on becoming…wait for it…freeloaders…by welching on those obligations.

If the City Council lets them.

Starting at 2:27:20 of the meeting video, Mr. Tate invokes “the Fairness of Taxation” before adopting a best-defense-is-a-good-offense strategy by claiming, incredibly, that “the City…is the freeloader” in this situation because it has been getting full-boat City taxes from the unit owners in these private developments while not providing services like snow removal, street repair, etc.

There’s nothing “unfair” about that, however, nor is the City anything close to a “freeloader.”

The City already lived up to its part of that legal bargain decades ago by permitting the construction of residences (homes/condos/townhouses) in these “private” developments that wouldn’t even have been built except for the developers’ agreements to keep all the streets and infrastructure “private” and to undertake, apparently in perpetuity, their maintenance/repair/replacement – a legal bargain that the current residents are trying to weasel out of after decades of performance.

To hear Mr. Tate tell it at last Monday’s COW, however, he and his fellow residents/aspiring freeloaders were victims of outright snookery by the City.

How? Because the City didn’t tell them at the time they bought their homes/units that they weren’t getting these City services.

As we understand it, Park Ridge Pointe’s (and every other developments’) legal obligations for privately obtaining those certain public services normally provided by the City is reflected in each development’s homeowners’ association documents AND in the title documents that are a matter of public record and given to buyers as part of every real estate purchase. Any competent real estate broker and any competent real estate attorney should have known about those obligations and should have explained them to the purchasers of units in those developments at or before closing.

Mr. Tate and every other one of those residents, therefore, knew or should have known what obligations they were buying into. If they didn’t, shame on them. And shame on their brokers and attorneys if those professionals didn’t properly inform their clients.

In neither event, however, should it be the City’s problem. It also shouldn’t be the City’s job to bail out careless buyers and/or incompetent brokers and attorneys.

So if it’s “fairness” the folks in Park Ridge Pointe, Bristol Court, and all those other similarly-situated developments want, it’s time they realized – and time the City Council told them in no uncertain terms – that they’ve already got it; and that they have had it for decades.  Truth be told, the fact that they are living in non-code compliant housing is proof of it.

But if these folks think they’ve got valid legal claims against the City in this regard, they should hire themselves an attorney and file those claims rather than continuing to browbeat the Council into letting them welch on the deals that were cut decades ago and that they legally agreed to when they bought their units.  And they should most definitely stop trying to become freeloaders.

There are enough of those already.

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One of the many pleasures of the holiday season is the proliferation of holiday movies.

We try not to miss Frank Capra’s “It’s A Wonderful Life,” the gold standard of Christmas movies and currently No. 20 on the AFI Top 100 list. We can’t help but chuckle when Clarence orders “mulled wine, heavy on the cinnamon and light on the cloves” from the Pottersville version of Nick the bartender, and try as we might we can’t keep from getting misty every time those good folks of Bedford Falls come up big to save George and the Bailey Bros. Building & Loan from prison and ruin.

But running a close second in our book is 1942’s “Holiday Inn.”

The combination of Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Marjorie Reynolds and an original Irving Berlin score that debuted the iconic “White Christmas” is tough to beat. And “Holiday Inn” contains more top-shelf Berlin tunes than just “White Christmas,” one of our favorites being Crosby’s Thanksgiving number called “I’ve Got Plenty To Be Thankful For.” 

That’s the way we felt yesterday after reading “District 64 considers changing residency verification policy” (November 25) in this week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate, and realizing how the Park Ridge-Niles District 64 School Board – and long-time Board member John Heyde in particular – keeps providing one object lesson after another on how a local governmental body can spend more and more tax dollars running an underachieving school system.

According to the H-A article, D-64 finally got the bright idea that it might be giving away $14,000 of its taxpayers’ hard-earned money on each student who is not actually living in the District and whose parents aren’t paying property taxes, either directly as homeowners or indirectly as renters.

Not surprisingly, however, D-64 didn’t come up with this bright idea on its own.

It had to borrow it from Maine Twp. High School Dist. 207, which decided several years ago that ferretting out all those non-resident students and their…wait for it…parasite parents who were helping themselves to free $17,000/year D-207 educations was well worth the cost of doing so.

According to D-64’s overpaid (at around $220,000/year, not counting every bennie) finance superintendent, Rebecca Allard, students whose parents own an in-district residence (house, townhouse or condo) have their residency checked only once: when those students are initially enrolled. So if a family packs up and moves out of the District, its kindergarten –aged student could remain enrolled in D-64 schools without the parents paying any taxes toward the $14,000 per-student annual cost until the student graduated middle school as much as 8 years later.

Total cost to the District’s taxpayers for such a grades 1-8 scam: a whopping $112,000. Per student.

Because D-64 hasn’t been checking the residency of students from purported Park Ridge homeowners other than at enrollment, we’d bet dollars to donuts that these kinds of scams have been run to the detriment of D-64 taxpayers for years, perhaps costing millions of dollars.

And even though the residency of students of renter families is reportedly checked annually, that still might not provide all that much more fiscal integrity.

That’s because for years there have been rumors of families from Chicago’s northwest side neighborhoods renting one bedroom condos in Bristol Court, Park Ridge Pointe, or smaller multi-family developments for between $12,000-$18,000/year just to establish an in-district address so they can get $28,000 (for 2 students) or $42,000 (for 3 students) of D-64 education – or from $34,000 to $51,000 of D-207 education – rather than sending their kids to Ebinger. Norwood Park, Taft, or paying private school tuition.

With that much money on the line one would think that, once the D-64 Board members understood how much taxpayer money they might be losing, they would get right after implementing a solution to this problem. Like maybe adopting D-207’s policy of checking every student’s residency every year.

But one would be wrong.

The overpaid Allard, while explaining a process like the one used by D-207, immediately disparaged it by pointing out how “labor-intensive” it would be, noting all the overtime that would have to be paid to District employees.

But Allard’s reluctance is nothing compared to that of our elected D-64 Board members who are supposed to be keeping an eye on spendthrift bureaucrats, incompetent teachers, and the overall cost-effectiveness of how our property taxes are being used in the interest of education.

Both Board President Tony Borrelli and member Vicki Lee seem to be looking for some kind of on-line way of avoiding the in-person show-up process that D-207’s Supt. Ken Wallace claims is most effective in catching violators.

But leave it to Heyde to show, once again, how little respect he has for the taxpayers who educated his own kids and who provide all those tax dollars that he has been throwing at underperforming teachers and administrators alike.

Heyde not only echoed the overpaid Allard’s concern about employee overtime, but he went her one better by whining about the inconvenience of a D-207-like process to D-64 parents:

“What District 207 is doing is a pain in the neck for parents. My question would be – do we think we’re going to find enough kids who don’t belong in our schools that it’s worth the burden on the families? Not to mention the cost to the taxpayers in terms of overtime.”

In other words, it’s the convenience of D-64 parents – who already are getting around a 200% return on the D-64 portion of their property taxes for just their first D-64 student, and who are getting an extra 300% return for each additional D-64 student – that is more important to the sensitive Heyde (and to Lee and Borrelli?) than whether the taxpayers are getting ripped off by non-resident parasites who have no qualms about scamming FREE D-64 educations for their kids.

Since the overpaid Allard and the sensitive-spendthrift Heyde can’t seem to figure this out on their own, we’ll offer this suggestion to alleviate any concerns about the cost of employee overtime in this residency-check process:

Instead of paying employees to do these basically clerical residency checks, how about recruiting all those PTO-member volunteers who devote scores of hours to saving $10-20,000 a year on photocopying and clerical costs, or who spend hundreds of hours planning and staging variety shows to raise similar bucks?  Then the cost of the checks would be virtually nothing.

Fortunately, all reports are that the overpaid Allard will be riding off into retirement and her guaranteed six-figure-pension in June 2015.

Unfortunately, we haven’t heard any similar report about whether the sensitive-spendthrift will try for another four years of dis-serving D-64 students and disrespecting D-64 taxpayers. And since another teachers union contract negotiation is coming up in 2016, we can see how Heyde might want to stick around for at least a couple more years to negotiate one last sweetheart contract that meets or exceeds the one he and then-fellow Board negotiator Pat “One-and-Done” Fioretto pushed through 3 years ago.

The only silver lining to this latest tale of D-64 Board buffoonery is that Board member Dathan Paterno appears to have climbed off his anti-Common Core bandwagon long enough to actually make some salient observations about the need for much better residency oversight, to wit: “If we can dissuade others from [stealing D-64 educations]…at a certain point, we won’t need to do this.”

Let’s hope so, although parasites are extremely difficult to dissuade – as the Library species, and the number and ferocity of its defenders, already have demonstrated.

But if this effort is successful, maybe then the D-64 Board can start figuring out how to provide the kind of educational quality and measurable performance that comes a lot closer to matching what D-64 taxpayers are being forced to finance.

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We live in a society with two generally distinct sectors–the public and the private.

The private sector is non-monopolistic, with monopolies actually being illegal in most instances. Because there is so much competition in the private sector, decisions are based almost exclusively on economics rather than popularity. Popular decisions that produce bad economic results usually lead to drops in stock prices, the firing of management (albeit with golden, or at least silver, parachutes), and even bankruptcy.

The public sector, on the other hand, is monopolistic.  Government services tend to come from only one source of supply: e.g., only one fire department, one police department, one system of public education. That’s because those are customarily considered “essential services” which usually cannot be efficiently or economically provided by the competitive free market – although the consistent increases in the costs of such public services has created the outsourcing/privatizing movement.

Public sector decisions are always political decisions, with popularity rather than economic soundness tending to be the more important consideration. Witness the City’s “investment” in the Uptown TIF, a politically popular project (at least with our then-elected officials – the taxpayers never got a vote on it) that was economically unsound from the start due to an over-commitment of City funds and debt with no commensurate economic upside in return.

Those costs to the City were soft-peddled and even concealed from public view by the Uptown TIF perpetrators and their successors. For several years the City ran deficits and processed the Uptown TIF costs through the General Fund to paper over those costs. Only recently did the City, under Mayor Dave Schmidt’s administration, start coming clean with the taxpayers, as politically painful as that has proven to be.

Once again this year, Council Finance Chairman Dan Knight has prepared an essay on the new tax levy that has been sent to the local newspapers and was published in last week’s Park Ridge Journal. It is reprinted here with Ald. Knight’s permission.

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By now most Park Ridge residents have either read or at least heard about our City Manager’s presentation of a preliminary December 2014 (for payment in 2015) tax levy to the City Council that is some 23% higher than the prior year’s levy. In actual dollars that 23% represents a $4.1 million increase over the prior levy, and your 2015 tax bills should reflect that increase.

There’s no doubt that on the face of it, both in real dollars and as a percentage, this is a stunningly large increase. Bearing in mind that the City’s portion of the total typical tax levy is roughly 12%, a 23% increase in the City’s share equates to about a 2.75% increase in the total tax bill. On a fairly typical $12,000 tax bill this equates to a $330 increase.

A $330 increase is not to be taken lightly, especially by those on fixed incomes. But you deserve an explanation of the rationale behind that increase, and why it is almost unavoidable.

Here it is.

The first factor is the back-end loaded nature of the Uptown TIF debt the City remains obligated to pay, which hits this levy with a vengeance because the total required debt service payments for the TIF bonds and the required payments of the TIF-related intergovernmental agreement obligations (with both local school districts and the park district) far exceed the tax revenue the TIF brings in. Those TIF expenses will require an additional $2.1 million in payments this coming year, as previously-deferred principal payments kick in; and as the prior abatement of those TIF-related taxes has ceased. Just the TIF alone represents 50% of the total increase.

Next, the success of the recent Park Ridge Library tax increase referendum has enabled the Library Director and Board to levy over $1 million more than last year’s approximately $3.7 million, for a total of $4.7 million.  That accounts for another 24% of the total levy increase.

Finally, escalating police and fire pensions have the boards of both pension funds asking for an additional levy of $300,000, which amounts to 8% of the increase.

Just those three elements of the City’s total tax levy consume 83% of the total increase sought.  Worse yet, the City has almost no flexibility to reduce those requests because there is absolutely no flexibility as to the TIF or the library increases; and there is very little flexibility, if any, in the pension fund levy requests due to state pension funding mandates.

Over the past few years City tax levy increases were deliberately held to a far more modest level: in the 2% to 4% per annum range. But the demands imposed on the City as described above give the City Council no reasonable hope of achieving such a small increase this year. That said, the Council will work as usual to be sure the balance of the levy is rationalized and any additional increases sought are modest and absolutely necessary.

The fact that this year’s total Uptown TIF debt of $3.4 million will comprise nearly 16% of the City’s total tax levy teaches us a painful lesson: taxpayers and other stakeholders must pay attention to what their elected officials are doing when they are doing it, not years later after the damage has been irreversibly done. It is in the present, rather than in the distant future, that public officials can best be held accountable for their actions on our behalf.

In the case of the Uptown TIF, irrespective of one’s tastes and opinions about the appearance and functionality of both the residences and the retail components, the financial components that were locked in 10 years ago and still have another 13 years to run have been a disaster – and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future, according to the City’s outside TIF consultants.

Like you, as a resident and a taxpayer I look forward to the day we are out from under the crushing pressures of the TIF. And I hope and trust that, as badly as we taxpayers have been burned collectively by this “gift” from a decade ago, we have learned enough from the experience that we will never let something like it happen again.

The City Council will discuss this new tax levy at each Council meeting leading up to the levy’s adoption at the Council’s December 15th meeting.? I heartily encourage you to attend those meetings and provide your input to those of us – the mayor, your aldermen, the city manager and senior city staff – who owe you a completely transparent process and accountability insofar as how we address this challenging situation.

Dan Knight

5th Ward Alderman, Park Ridge

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Had we had this type of transparency, candor and accountability from the City administration(s) back in 2002-06 when the Uptown TIF was cooked up and jammed down the taxpayers’ throats without a referendum, the current Council might not be stuck grappling with such long-term intractable problems, or having to propose unpopular tax increases.

But we didn’t.

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