No matter where in Park Ridge you may live, it seems like all of us are susceptible to airplane noise as some time or other.

Where once the noise tended to track the northeast to southwest paths of runways 22R and 22L, the construction and opening of east-west runway 9L/27R has shifted the noise bombardment to areas of town that never had it before – although the old runways are still used on days when wind conditions or runway maintenance dictate. And there’s another new east-west runway on the drawing board that also will impact Park Ridge.

The new runways are part and parcel of the O’Hare Modernization Program (“OMP”), the evil brainchild of former Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley (a/k/a, “Shortshanks,” a/k/a “Li’l Richie,” a/k/a the “Dumbest But Best Name Recognition”) and designed to help replace the revenue Li’l Richie gave away to the Spanish consortium that bought the Skyway, and to a Morgan Stanley-led partnership that bought Chicago’s parking meters.

When the OMP was still in the planning stage, Park Ridge was governed by mayor Ron Wietecha, an O’Hare-obsessed buffoon who deluded himself into believing that he could make Shortshank’s blink. Wietecha didn’t even try to get Park Ridge a seat at the O’Hare bargaining table, preferring instead to blow well over $1 million taxpayer bucks on battling O’Hare as part of a Suburban O’Hare Commission (“SOC”) even as it was losing members faster than the Black Knight lost limbs in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

Wietecha was followed by interim-mayor Mike Marous, who didn’t give a rat’s derriere about O’Hare because he was obsessed with Uptown Redevelopment. Park Ridge no longer was wasting money on SOC during his administration, but feel free to thank him and his rubber-stamp council for saddling Park Ridge taxpayers with the $23 million in red ink the Uptown TIF is projected to produce by 2027.

Marous’s successor, Howard Frimark, was so clueless he didn’t even know what the OMP was until it opened up the new runway in 2008 and irate taxpayers began bombarding him with complaints about “Mayor Daley’s Air Force” strafing the 5th and 6th wards.

That brings us to the present.

Mayor Dave Schmidt and the Park Ridge O’Hare Airport Commission have been trying to get Shortshanks’ lapdog, the O’Hare Noise Compatibility Commission (“ONCC”) and its long-time chair-princess, Arlene Mulder, to support Park Ridge’s request for a supplemental Environmental Impact Study (“EIS”). We wrote about Mulder’s obsolescence in our 08.07.14 post, and we have every reason to expect that Mulder will continue to do whatever she can to frustrate Park Ridge’s bid for noise relief that might possibly result in more noise over her Arlington Heights home/political base.

A supplemental EIS could qualify Park Ridge residents for various forms of noise relief, including soundproofing. And it might also give us some leverage for turning “Fly Quiet” from a mere suggestion into an enforceable mandate.

While those aren’t perfect solutions by any stretch of the imagination, they would be a significant improvement over anything the Wietecha, Marous and Frimark administrations achieved.

Tomorrow morning (September 5) at 8:00 a.m., the ONCC will be holding an open meeting at De Paul’s O’Hare Campus, 8770 West Bryn Mawr (just south of the Kennedy and west of Cumberland). Park Ridge Mayor Dave Schmidt will be there to renew Park Ridge’s request for ONCC support for the supplemental EIS.

And this time he has an additional arrow in his quiver: a letter from Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D. Ill.) advocating Park Ridge’s position on the supplemental EIS, even if she does appear to bend over backwards to kiss Mulder’s and ONCC Executive Director Jeannette Camacho’s derrieres.

Rumor has it that residents of other OMP-impacted communities (e.g., Norridge, Harwood Heights, Chicago’s Edison Park neighborhood, Wood Dale, et al.) will be in attendance to support the supplemental EIS. You Park Ridge homeowners hit especially hard by the OMP’s new runway could do worse than showing up in support of the supplemental EIS and other forms of relief from the airplane noise that has bedeviled you the last few years.

Because that may be the only realistic chance at meaningful relief from new O’Hare runway noise we’ve got.

UPDATE (09.06.14)  We hear the crowd was so big at yesterday’s ONCC meeting at DePaul’s O’Hare Campus that more people may have been turned away than typically attend those meetings. And from the accounts we received of the meeting itself, we wish there were a video of it – because viewers could have laughed and cried about what passes for the quasi-government of the ONCC.

Chair-princess Mulder was her customary obstructionist self when it came to Mayor Schmidt’s call for an ONCC vote in support of the supplemental EIS (“SEIS”) instead of waiting for a “re-evaluation” that FAA rep/Chicago shill Barry Cooper claimed was a prerequisite to any SEIS – a re-evaluation that is not scheduled to be finished until Fall 2015. Not surprisingly, Cooper could provide no legal authority for his re-evaluation claim when challenged by Schmidt, presumably because there appears to be none.

As we understand it, the FAA can order an SEIS whenever it chooses, if only to allay the communities concerns about noise and health/safety.

Despite the efforts of Mulder, meeting chair Frank “Empty Suit” Damato (a former Chicago alderman and Crook County commissioner, go figure), and ONCC executive director Jeanette “Just Empty” Camacho (somebody important’s “niece”?), Schmidt was able to muster enough support to get the SEIS vote on the ONCC’s October meeting agenda.

Between now and then, expect all sorts of behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the ONCC’s executive committee – headed by Mulder, Damato and Camacho, the meetings of which are not even listed on the ONCC website – to kibosh a favorable SEIS vote. But even if it is held and prevails, it is not binding on the FAA.

That’s when we’ll get to see just how serious Rep. Schakowsky is about looking out for her noise-oppressed constituents.

To read or post comments, click on title.

What difference can one or two votes make on any of our local governmental bodies? Plenty.

Back on April 4 and April 14, 2014, we published posts criticizing the Park Ridge Library Board’s endorsement of the Staff’s recommendation to close the Library for 14 Sundays this summer. The vote on that decision was 6 to 3, with Trustees John Benka, Audra Ebling, Margaret Harrison, Dorothy Hynous, John Schmidt and Jerry White voting “yes,” and Trustees Joe Egan, Charlene Foss-Eggemann and Robert Trizna voting “no.”

But at the very first Library Board meeting after Patrick Lamb and Dean Parisi replaced Benka and Schmidt, that summer Sunday closing was reversed by a 7-1 vote (Hynous dissenting, White absent). And the Library reopened for the remaining summer Sundays on July 27.

Similarly, in our October 3, 2013 post we criticized the Library’s “Food for Fines” (“FFF”) program as a misuse of taxpayer dollars (estimated at $7,000 last year, because Library staff kept no record of exactly how much in fines was being forgiven) that also demeaned the voluntarism, generosity and public spiritedness of Library patrons by effectively suggesting they would contribute food to the Kiwanis food drive only if they received a quid pro quo forgiveness of their Library fines.

We also noted that $7,000 isn’t chump change for a Library that chose to close for 14 Sundays this summer in order to save approximately $20,000.

Last year, when the FFF came up for what may have been a first-ever “consensus” vote, the resolution to cancel the program lost by a 4-4 tie: Foss-Eggemann, Hynous, Trizna and White voting “yes”; Benka, Ebling, Harrison and Schmidt voting “no”; and Egan absent.

But this past Tuesday night the FFF program for this year was cancelled by a 7-0 vote (Parisi and White absent) – although the Board indicated that it was happy to have the Library serve as a collection point for food donations from those altruistic patrons whose generosity doesn’t require any quid pro quo fine forgiveness.

Those two votes produced outcomes directly opposite from what the previous Board had decided, arguably because of just two changes in the composition of the Board: Lamb and Parisi in place of Benka and Schmidt. That change in composition even appears to have changed the minds of Ebling and Harrison, who either found religion or just decided to opportunistically jump on the new bandwagon in both instances.

Whatever the reason, however, it’s the result that counts.

Some of you might not like these changes. We’re pretty sure there are some unhappy Kiwanis members out there, including the ones who showed up and spoke in support of the Library’s continuing the FFF program at the January 21, 2014 Board meeting, as reflected in the relevant excerpts of minutes of that meeting.

That’s not too surprising, given all the special interests out there who want to get their hands on taxpayer money – starting with many of our private “charitable” groups that seem to have figured out that it’s a lot easier to raise money by snookering or guilting our local elected and appointed officials into picking the taxpayers’ pockets on those groups’ behalf. That way, those groups can still claim the fundraising credit for themselves without even having to break a sweat, and without having to account to the taxpayers for how those funds are spent.

These two Library issues are just the very tip of a pretty good-sized iceberg, however, and there’s still a lot more work for the Library Board to do. Irrespective of whether or not the Library’s November tax increase referendum passes, giving all Park Ridge taxpayers the biggest bang for their Library buck will require a lot more innovation and fiscal discipline than the Library has consistently demonstrated over the past decade.

But maybe, just maybe, it now has a Board majority that is up for such a challenge.

And that might be because of just two new faces.

Robert J. Trizna

Editor and Publisher

Member, Park Ridge Library Board

To read or post comments, click on title.

There’s a common concept in business, athletics and other team/group activities called “addition by subtraction.” Essentially, it means that you can sometimes make a team better by getting rid of players who aren’t getting the job done or don’t mesh well enough with the rest of the players.

It doesn’t necessarily mean the individual is a bad person or a poor worker. Sometimes it’s just a matter of that individual not being capable of helping the team be what all teams are supposed to be: a whole greater than the mere sum of its parts.

That thought crossed our mind when we read about the recent departure of City finance director Kent Oliven, who tendered his resignation July 30.

When Oliven joined the City in November 2012 he inherited a Finance Department that had effectively been a one-man band – or, more accurately, a one-woman band – under former finance director Allison Stutts. Stutts herself had inherited a department filled with people who had neither an accounting nor a finance background; and, in many instances, reportedly had not even received any specialized accounting or finance training. Nevertheless, as we noted in our 12,21.12 post, Stutts overcame most of those obstacles, as well as then-city manager Jim Hock, who often seemed to be sabotaging Stutts’ efforts to balance the City’s budget and get a much-needed (and long-neglected) handle on the City’s Uptown TIF finances.

Even with a sub-par staff, Stutts raised the mayor’s and the Council’s expectations well beyond what they had been under her predecessor, Diane Lembesis, who, in fairness, had the disadvantage of learning the ropes under former city manager Tim Schuenke and never quite recovered. Oliven, on the other hand, had the misfortune of following Stutts and he never quite measured up.

He wasn’t able to personally crank out the work like Stutts did, which meant that he had to delegate more than Stutts did. And whether because he didn’t delegate well, or because he didn’t have sufficient staff to delegate to, the work didn’t get done as it should have.

The only annual audit done entirely on Oliven’s watch was several months late, thereby greatly complicating the budget process. At times he seemed to have trouble explaining things in ways that the Council could understand and act on. And, judging from the July 25 Memorandum by accounting manager Andrea Lamberg, the Finance Dept. as then constituted may have been (and continues to be) so far over its collective skis that Oliven’s seeking to add only 0.75 of a full-time employee/equivalent (“FTE”) seems like trying to bail out the Titanic with a Dixie Cup.

It got so frustrating for many aldermen that, at the July 28 Council COW meeting, Ald. Marty Maloney (7th) – after being informed that there has been a 100% turnover in the Finance Dept. over the last two years – opined that there was “a systemic problem in the department” and concluded with: “I have no faith right now in the department,” an opinion expressly shared by Ald. Nick Milissis (2nd) and to which no dissent was voiced.

That’s not to say that Oliven didn’t make some meaningful contributions during his tenure. His resignation letter listed a number of his accomplishments while identifying other things that still needed to be done. Whether he should have been able to get them done before now will never be known, although it probably would have helped had he taken ownership of his position and his department the moment he walked in the door. 

Taking ownership of their positions and their departments, however, is something that is virtually non-existent among the career bureaucrats in every local governmental body, perhaps because with ownership comes accountability. And we’ve yet to see any local bureaucrat who willingly embraces accountability (as our recent posts about the Hinkley incident demonstrated) – with the exception of the aforementioned Ms. Stutts, who seemed to accept both ownership and accountability with equanimity, even when it meant occasionally butting heads with the mayor, the Council, and her city manager boss.

Maybe that’s why she appeared to have no trepidations about leaving the public sector behind and starting her own private-sector financial consulting firm.

In contrast, most career bureaucrats are bone-fetchers who specialize in the go-along-to-get-along style of management. They generally just plug along in their non-descript management of the daily routine until some elected official throws out a “bone” – a particular policy, procedure, initiative or project – which the bureaucrats then chase and retrieve, more or less capably depending on whether it’s something they like or don’t.  And if they don’t like it, they tend to bury it and hope the elected officials don’t notice.

Such bone-fetchers have no desire to truly excel, which is why most government is so mediocre at best. They tend to be lifers who just want to keep those solid paychecks coming in until they can start collecting those wonderful constitutionally-guaranteed defined benefit pensions after 30 or so years on the job, 5 and sometimes even 10 years earlier than the traditional private-sector age 65 retirement kicks in. And if they’ve played their cards right and moved up the bureaucratic ladder, they can recoup their entire employee-paid contributions with just one or two years’ worth of benefits.  Meanwhile, the average private-sector stiff needs a $2 million-plus 401(k)…wisely invested, because it’s not guaranteed by the taxpayers.

Given the need for less bone fetchers rather than more, we were more than a little disappointed to hear that City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton is advertising for Oliven’s replacement by seeking someone with at least 10 years of government experience for a job that will pay between $101,588 and $142,181, “depending on qualifications and experience.”

Like the ability to fetch.

To read or post comments, click on title.

It took three weeks for the Park Ridge Police Department to finally report to the mayor and the City Council on the July 12 Hinkley Park incident in which a middle-aged Park Ridge man was beaten by three teenagers while a crowd cheered them on.

Unfortunately, Police Chief Frank Kaminski’s monolog at last Monday (08.04.14) night’s Council meeting was more noteworthy for what it didn’t say than what it did. And much of what it did say seemed like just another dose of the buck-passing that we previously criticized in our posts of 07.25.14 and 07.31.14.

You can judge for yourself by watching the meeting video, from 30:50 to 1:06:15, but to us Chief K’s “chronology” of the events leading up to the beating sounded like a mid-summer’s night snow job.

He started by confirming that two patrol cars (of the five on patrol throughout the City that night) responded to a “fireworks complaint” at Hinkley at exactly 7:58 p.m. There the officers found between 30 and 40 teens just “hanging out.” Thirty-five minutes later, at exactly 8:33 p.m., three patrol cars and a supervising sergeant responded to a “crowds gathering” complaint and found around 75 teens “hanging out.” Chief K claimed that in each instance the police officers “checked the area” before leaving the park to handle “other calls.”

That raises some interesting questions. 

• If the exact time of the officers’ arrival was so important, why wasn’t the time of their departures also important? Could it be that those departure times might show that the responding officers who “checked the area” for fireworks, alcohol, drugs, etc. really weren’t all that thorough in performing that task?

• Why didn’t the chief identify the time(s) and location(s) of those “other calls” the ROs supposedly had to run off to instead of staying at Hinkley and providing the kind of “police presence” central to the “community policing” the department claims to be practicing – especially on the second call, when the number of teens had inexplicably grown from 30-40 to around 75 in just 35 minutes?

• Why didn’t the chief talk about the reported police dispersal of more than 50 teens from the Library grounds between 9:00 and 9:30 p.m. – the ones who supposedly migrated en masse the two blocks to Hinkley and further swelled those ranks?

• Why didn’t the chief provide the Council with an actual “report” containing that kind of information, instead of passing around a sheet of ideas that he said came out of his “Chief’s Roundtable” meeting on July 29?

Not surprisingly, none of the ideas coming out of the roundtable point to any real improvement in the way the police handle wayward youths. Maybe that’s because, as Chief K has constantly reminded us since the beating video went viral, this wasn’t a policing problem but a “community problem.” Hence, the “solutions” focused on socio-political placebos like a “City wide campaign-Making Good Choices” (a successor to the less-than-impressive “Caught Being Good” campaign?), “Fund Youth Drop-In Center” (that the taxpayers wouldn’t support with direct donations after the City stopped giving it handouts), “Message from Community Leaders” to parents, “Parent sponsored events for weekends,” and “Youth outreach workers in the Parks and Community to engage young people.”

Our favorite, however, was: “Reinstate [Police Chief’s] Task Force to focus on this.” Anyone who followed the activities of the last Police Chief’s Task Force already knows what any new task force’s solution to the Hinkley problem would be: construction of another ugly building and adding a sally port to the current cop shop.

But we digress.

Sadly, most of the elected officials around The Horseshoe either weren’t interested or weren’t up to the challenge of eliciting any of the information Chief K failed to provide.

City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton – to whom Chief K allegedly reports – sat Sphinx-like during the chief’s monolog, which is the way Hamilton acts virtually every time a police or fire matter is on the agenda. One would think both the police and fire departments were autonomous, self-managing entities over which Hamilton has no authority, and doesn’t want any.

Public Safety chair Ald. Nick Milissis, an attorney, seemed intent on rubber-stamping everything Chief K said, going so far as to invoke the police department’s prior problems with “aggressive” policing – which sounded like an obtuse reference to the incident a few years ago when a youth already in custody in the back of a squad car was allegedly punched in the face one or more times by an officer, resulting in a federal lawsuit that was settled for $185,000.

Sorry, alderman, but we believe you’re better than a rubber-stamp and shill for such apples-to-watermelon comparisons.  Or you should be.

Even Mayor Dave Schmidt, also an attorney, seemed to duck into the nearest safe harbor with his: “I’ve always felt that elected officials should be very cautious about second guessing their public safety personnel about how they do their jobs and the decisions they make.” Sorry, Mr. Mayor, but simply asking tough questions is NOT “second guessing.”

Schmidt redeemed himself somewhat, however, with his final observation that the rapid growth in the size of the crowd was “such an unusual situation that it would have made sense to leave [at least one police officer] behind” to keep an eye on the situation for the couple of hours Hinkley was scheduled to remain open.

But by the time Schmidt made that observation Chief K had already off-loaded any accountability for his department’s pre-incident performance.

With flourishes of political rhetoric worthy of Marc Antony in Act 3, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” Chief K praised the Park Ridge Park District with faint damns. While claiming not to be placing blame, he complained about Hinkley’s police-ability because of the different operating hours of its various activity areas. He bemoaned Park District rules for not having been updated since 1997. He cited the Park District’s non-deployment of its private security “monitors”(or “rent-a-cops,” as Ald. Joe Sweeney referred to them) to Hinkley that evening. And he even took a backhanded swipe at park Board president Mel Thillens, noting that his police officers’ hands were tied because only the board president could legally authorize a park closing.

He also deftly created, and immediately demolished, the straw-man suggestion that the assembled teens could have been charged with “mob action.” That was an especially nifty maneuver, given how it effectively diverted attention from what is generally considered the most police-friendly “tool” for dealing with crowds of any type: a “disorderly conduct” charge, the provisions most relevant to this situation appearing in Section 14-5-2 (E), (F) and (I) of the City’s Municipal Code.

And once he had foisted enough non-blame on the Park District and the lack of “tools” in his law-enforcement “toolbox,” he conflated both the weather and Taste of Park Ridge into a back-up excuse: the need to “evacuate” the Taste around 9:30 that night due to an incoming storm – as if a Katrina were on its way and he was not about to let himself become the butt of any “Chiefski, you’re doing a heck of a job” jokes.

All things considered, it was a political tour de force by a master politician who – aided by the talismanic power of his badge – totally overmatched the faux-politicians around The Horseshoe who are charged with holding him and his department accountable to the taxpayers for the public safety and order of Park Ridge. 

For a guy who claims to be short on tools, Chief K showed himself to be quite a craftsman. 

And pretty darn crafty.

To read or post comments, click on title.

This week the media reported that Park Ridge Mayor Dave Schmidt called for the resignation of former Arlington Heights mayor Arlene Mulder as chairman of the O’Hare Noise Compatibility Commission (the “ONCC”). 

It’s about time somebody did! 

The reviews of Mulder’s performance as AH mayor from May 1993 to 2013 run the gamut from excellent to terrible.  More than a few of her critics make comparisons to former Chicago mayor Richard M. “Shortshanks” Daley at the “terrible” end.  They cite her expensive TIF projects and how, like Daley, she created an attractive “Potemkin” village with monuments like the village hall her detractors call the “Taj Mahal” and the taxpayer-subsidized Metropolis Performing Arts Center, all of which have cost, and will continue to cost, AH taxpayers bundles in bonded debt repayment and subsidies to developers.

But, frankly, we could care less about what Mulder did while managing AH. The folks who voted to make and keep her as mayor all those years deserved whatever they got, and the tax bills they will continue to get as her legacy.

Schmidt’s beef about Mulder properly goes to what he views as her conflict of interest regarding O’Hare expansion and the resulting increase in airplane noise over ONCC members like Park Ridge while AH’s airplane noise is being reduced. He is quoted in a Chicago Sun-Times article (“Park Ridge mayor wants head of noise commission to resign,” 08.05.14) as saying Mulder “has turned the ONCC into a lap dog for the Chicago Department of Aviation.”

Actually, Schmidt is wrong on the “lap dog” point.

Shortshanks created the ONCC in 1996 for the express purpose of its being his lap dog, and to siphon away membership in what at that time was a thorn in his side: the Suburban O’Hare Commission (“SOC”), of which Park Ridge was a charter member. With Mulder’s help as ONCC chairman beginning in 1997, that strategy worked so well that by May 2003, SOC’s 13-community membership had dwindled to 3: Park Ridge, Bensenville and Elk Grove Village. And by that point the O’Hare expansion had become such a fait accompli that even the bobblehead-dominated Park Ridge City Council voted to exit the SOC, prompting then-mayor Ron Wietecha’s resignation and subsequent emigration to Barrington.

AH never was a SOC member, preferring instead to cut its own deals with Chicago – first under Mulder’s predecessor, William Maki (who resigned in 1992 to become a Cook County Circuit Judge, and is now Presiding Judge at the Rolling Meadows courthouse), and then under Mulder. Not surprisingly, everything Mulder has done since becoming Daley’s puppet at the ONCC has benefited AH first and foremost, with benefits flowing to other ONCC members only if there was no risk to AH.

Apparently rewarded for her ONCC service with an appointment to the METRA Board in 2003, Mulder reportedly finagled a new train station for AH and also got the Union Pacific RR to give up some of its right-of-way land for downtown AH redevelopment. Meanwhile, however, she and the other political hacks on that Board rubber-stamped the continuing deterioration of METRA’s equipment and service under long-time CEO Phil Pagano, even as fares continued to rise.

You might remember the corrupt Pagano, who chose to avoid certain firing and likely indictment for embezzlement and sweetheart deals by taking one last METRA ride back in 2010. Mulder was such an unquestioning Pagano sycophant that even after his death and discrediting, she still referred to him as an expert railroader who built “one of the best transportation organizations in the nation.”

METRA? Seriously?

Although Mulder claimed credit for the hiring of Pagano’s squeaky-clean replacement, Alex Clifford, she appears to have done nothing to stop Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan’s uber-stooge, Board chairman Brad O’Halloran, and Shortshanks/Rahm lackey Larry Huggins from issuing their quit-or-be-fired ultimatum to Clifford in June 2013 when he balked at playing their corrupt Chicago-style political games.

Actually, Mulder did do something in connection with Clifford’s ouster: she voted to give him an obscene $750,000 “severance” package even though, by resigning, he was not contractually entitled to any severance payment. And she endorsed the confidentiality provision of that deal so that neither side could talk about it publicly, claiming that it was “the most prudent thing to do” in order to avoid potential legal action by Clifford – legal action that likely would have pulled back the curtains and exposed the kind of institutionalized corruption and incompetent Board oversight that Clifford wouldn’t tolerate.

That’s what Illinois government has come to – the payment of big-time hush money considered “prudent” management.

If there’s any reason to doubt Mulder was grossly unqualified to hold such a position of public trust, one need only read her comments to Sun-Times reporter Rosalind Rossi in a July 2013 article (“Metra didn’t have to pay outgoing CEO any severance, experts say,” 07.24.13), in which Mulder admitted that she voted for Clifford’s severance package without even knowing that his contract didn’t entitle him to severance if he resigned. But, true to form, she couldn’t or wouldn’t say whether knowing that fact would have changed her vote.

From everything we already knew or have been able to Google about her, Mulder seems to be the exact kind of career politician – 34+ years holding some public office or other, not counting the years she double-dipped at METRA and/or the ONCC – who has helped turn this state into the almost-bankrupt cesspool of public incompetence and corruption it has become, whether because she is too stupid, too clueless, too pliable, too accommodating, and/or just plain dishonest.

But even more sadly than that is how, here in Illinois, that kind of performance over that many years gets you re-elected and re-appointed; and it gets you retirement testimonials in the Congressional Record by fellow career politicians like Sen. Dick Durbin, Sen. Mark Kirk, and Rep. Jan Schakowsky.

As the passive-aggressive chair of the ONCC, Mulder appears to have done nothing concrete to help Park Ridge obtain relief from the airplane noise and pollution that have plagued so many of our residents, especially with the opening of the new O’Hare runways that substantially reduce air traffic over AH.  Instead she has feathered her AH nest and provided comfort to Chicago while only pretending to look out for her fellow ONCC members.

Schmidt was exactly right to call her out.

To read or post comments, click on title.

The sign on President Harry S Truman’s desk read: “The Buck Stops Here.” 

That sentiment was directed at what was a common practice among government bureaucrats back then, and remains a common practice today: buck-passing. Shirking accountability by finding someone else to blame for what was done wrongly, or not done at all.

In the 60 years since Truman left the White House the ranks of the bureaucrat class have swelled substantially, and the bureaucrats themselves have become far more sophisticated at buck-passing. They regularly attend “professional” conferences where they are taught to sing from the same hymnal, so to speak, when it comes to dealing with elected officials and the taxpayers who pay their salaries.

We can’t say for sure, but we suspect they learn one or more variations of the “Everybody, Nobody” story:

There once were four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody. 

When an important job arose, Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. 

Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. 

Somebody got angry about that because it should have been Everybody’s job. 

Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it. 

It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.

That story came to mind when reading Police Chief Frank Kaminski’s reaction to the July 12 Hinkley Park incident as being “a community problem” rather than a policing problem, which we wrote about in our July 25 post. Since then, Deputy Chief Lou Jogman added a couple of additional twists to the it’s-not-our-job theme, as reported in yesterday’s Park Ridge Journal (“Police: Not Much Officers Could Do To Prevent Beating,” July 30):

“We can’t go in and kick kids outs,” said Jogman, referring to the roughly 200 kids who gathered in Hinkley Park on July 12 for no particular or apparent reason.

Jogman went on to give a variety of other reasons why his department couldn’t do much to prevent that incident, including: the additional demand on the City’s limited police force by the Taste of Park Ridge; the Taste’s closing early that night due to an approaching storm; and the Park District’s arguable failure to anticipate Hinkley’s serving as a gathering spot for youths that night. He also noted that the police are not able to babysit parks.

On that last point we agree with him.

But it’s not “babysitting” to pay some extra attention to 200 teens milling around a park for no apparent reason as night is falling. Especially if, as we have heard, Park District employees made two calls to the police about misbehavior by the assembled multitude in the hours leading up to the incident – to which the police responded but left the status quo intact.

And it’s not “babysitting” to provide what’s called “police presence,” such as by spending some time walking around and asking a lot of who, what, when, where and why questions. That’s a big part of the “community policing” currently in vogue, as is assessing the circumstances and  anticipating potential problems.

Besides the reactions of Chief K and Deputy Chief J, two members of the community have endorsed the “community problem” explanation, or excuse, in letters to the editor of the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate.

Social worker Laura Smail believes that “[p]arents and other adults, including business owners, should be learning and demonstrating effective ways to engage, interact and encourage teens to make good choices and meet expectations for civil behavior.” Tricia Williams, for her part, sees what occurred at Hinkley as “not a teen or police problem but actually a community problem and we need to work on it together without blaming any one group.”

When what happened at Hinkley Park occurs in a community such as ours, there’s reason to wonder whether parenting might have contributed to the thugery, punkishness, callowness and cowardice on display in the video of the incident. But there’s an equally good reason to wonder about the efficacy of all those social services provided to our youth, both in the schools and outside them, including the anti-bullying forums, seminars and workshops; and programs such as “Caught Being Good.”

What should not be lost in translation or in prevarication, however, is the lesson of the Everybody, Nobody story. Nor should we forget that various people have special tasks that are not, and should not be viewed as, fungible or randomly assignable to others in the community.

The parents of those 200 youths at Hinkley that night, including the three combatants, have not taken oaths to serve and protect the people of this community. The parents are not being paid to do that. And the parents do not expect, nor do they deserve, the particular respect reserved for those who have taken that oath, are paid to do that job, and do it well.

Which is why the public safety buck needs to stop with the police.

Just like the public education buck needs to stop with the teachers and administrators, the sewer and water buck needs to stop with the Public Works Dept., the Library buck needs to stop with the Library Board, etc. It’s not up to parents, non-parents, taxpayers, homeowners, renters, or ordinary folks just passing through, to take up these bucks and make them their own.

So when Tricia Williams makes a recruiting pitch for the Park Ridge Parent Patrol where parents join the police on patrol from 9:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. on weekend nights – on the theory that it “allows teens to see parents and police working together to keep our community safe” – we have one simple question:

Where was the Parent Patrol around 9:45 p.m. on Saturday night, July 12?

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How many people are “too many”?

We’ve asked that question in a variety of different ways over the last several years in posts about residential development, mixed-use development, retail, façade improvements, and all the other land-use issues that have come up during that time.

Or put another way: How many people are “enough”?  And why?

That question has surfaced once again in connection with the 20-story apartment building Gart Partners LLC wants to build on part of what is now the site of the Farmers’ Market, on Prairie between Main and Garden. Last Tuesday night Gart brought its “concept plan” to the Planning & Zoning Commission (“P&Z”) to make its pitch for the zoning changes needed to make its project a reality.

Can you say 195 units on a site that would qualify for only 34 units if it was given the highest (R-5) residential rating provided in the Zoning Code? How about a 210-foot height where the maximum R-5 height is 45 feet? And because the structure would be in Target Area 4 of the Uptown TIF, it might also require amendments or exceptions to the existing TIF plan, which contemplates no residential structures higher than 5 stories.

Gart’s selling points for this structure are its agreement to pay $117,000 annually as an “apartment tax”; as much as $700,000 a year worth of additional property taxes; and the prospect of another $180,000/year in revenues if the City were to apply the “apartment tax” to its existing 300 apartment units.

Gart described it as “a whole new way of living for that side of the tracks.” And indeed it would be. Actually, it would be a whole new way of living for the entire City of Park Ridge.

The six P&Z commissioners present at the meeting seemed to view it with a mix of “you gotta be kidding me” and “just go away.” Which is what we expected.

But the way Gart dangled that carrot of $817,000 in annual additional taxes it claims just its own project would generate, we suspect these kinds of pitches will continue so long as (a) developers perceive Park Ridge as offering valuable development opportunities, and (b) the City struggles to keep annual property tax increases to under 5% while continuing to stagger under the weight of the Uptown TIF’s black-hole deficits and an estimated cost of $300 million (plus?) to implement a plan of city-wide flood control.

So it’s probably a good time to start a community-wide discussion of, in the first instance, just how many people we believe is optimal for this community, either in its “as is” condition or with a different configuration. Would we as a community like to add another 1,000, 3,000, 5,000, or more residents? And, if so, would we like them to be property owners or renters – assuming that distinction matters to a significant number of people.

Fifteen years ago the Uptown Advisory Task Force (the “UATF”) was created and began hatching its plan for the Uptown TIF, ostensibly to add a substantial retail, dining and entertainment component that would bring “vibrancy” (the unofficial buzzword for that development) to Uptown. At that time, a survey of approximately 2,500 people revealed an aversion to tall buildings and multi-family residential.

But by the time folks like former city manager Tim Schuenke, former mayor Ron Wietecha, a handful of true believers on the UATF and City Council, and hired-gun consultants like Trkla, Pettigrew, Allen & Payne, Inc. got done manipulating and massaging the Uptown redevelopment process to conform to their collective wills, we were left with the tallest and densest multi-family residential project in the City that, with one notable exception – Houlihan’s – rolls up its sidewalks by around 8:00 p.m. every night.

And not a lick of Uptown “entertainment” was added to supplement the movies the Pickwick has provided for decades.

In addition to publicly discussing what we want Park Ridge to be when it grows up, it might also be time to revisit the Zoning Code and how it does or doesn’t provide developers with reasonable, predictable guidelines as to what likely can and can’t be built in our City. Eliminating uncertainty in the zoning and permitting processes would go a long way toward eliminating any remnants of the “unfriendly to business” reputation Park Ridge allegedly acquired back in the Wietecha/Schuenke era.

That way, less time might be wasted by the various arms of City government – and by developers – on projects whose specs are so off the charts that our P&Z folks assume they are typographical errors, or outright jokes.

And, in the process, we may learn a little more about what the people most invested in this community, its residents, see in its future.

To read or post comments, click on title.

About a week ago we began hearing about the attack on a 48-year old Park Ridge resident at Hinkley Park on the evening of July 12.

After several viewings of the video of that incident it appears reasonably likely that, if not for the intervention of an unidentified young man, the victim might have suffered far more serious injuries than the bumps, bruises and concussion he reportedly incurred. That’s because the altercation was escalating and seemed on the verge of becoming a scene out of that 1963 movie version of William Golding’s “The Lord of the Flies” – complete with cinema verite feel compliments of herky-jerky cellphone camerawork.

As the attackers began kicking and stomping their collapsed victim, we half expected to hear the movie’s chants of “Kill the pig!” Instead we heard (around the 40 second mark) something so totally incongruous to the situation that, in a way, it may have been even more troubling than the movie’s chant, and far more offensive:

“U-S-A! U-S-A!”

That rallying cry, born during the miraculous gold medal run of this country’s 1980 Olympic hockey team and revived again just last month as American soccer fans cheered their team’s efforts during the World Cup, was seemingly being used by the mob of knuckleheaded Park Ridge “yutes” (yes, an homage) to encourage the attackers and/or mock their victim.

Almost two weeks later details of the incident remain sketchy, with more information available from the community at large than emanating from police headquarters.

But as best as we can tell from the available information, a sizable group of yutes had already gathered at Hinkley an hour or two before the incident. They reportedly had been shooting off fireworks and had kicked over one of those decorated Rainbow Hospice doors on the premises, which prompted two separate calls to the Park Ridge police.

The police arrived on the scene in response to each call, chatted up some of the yutes, and then departed – leaving the group intact.

Sometime around 9:30 p.m., Park Ridge police reportedly rousted another crowd of yutes from the Park Ridge Library grounds as that night’s Taste of Park Ridge events were winding down.  That crowd simply migrated a few blocks down the street to Hinkley, where they joined up with the yutes still there.

The rest, as they say, is history…captured on amateur video: a middle-aged guy with a concussion, scrapes and bruises; two local yutes in Cook County jail accused of aggravated battery and mob action; and one minor facing the same charges in juvenile court.

Before we go any further in this post, we want to make a couple of things perfectly clear.

First, we are supporters of the police, stemming in no small part from the editor of this blog’s uncle having been the chief of police of Joliet and a 3-term Will County Sheriff. And even though we have disagreed with the need for a new police station and on what is reasonable compensation for police personnel, our respect for them and the job they do has never wavered.

Second, we believe Chief Kaminski has generally done a fine job in leading the department.

Nevertheless, questions about how the Hinkley situation was handled and about the Chief’s Teflon-like comments reported in a July 22, 2014 Park Ridge Herald-Advocate story (“Park Ridge leaders call for dialogue after park beating”) deserve answers.

The Chief is quoted in that article as claiming that the Hinkley incident is “a community problem” related to parents not taking responsibility for what their kids do while out of their houses.

Sorry, Chief, but that dog don’t hunt.

When a couple hundred Park Ridge and/or neighboring community yutes congregate at night in a public park, shooting off fireworks and damaging property, that’s a POLICE PROBLEM.

When several of them attack a middle-aged guy looking for his kid while others urge them on with chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!”, that’s a POLICE PROBLEM.

And when the police disperse a group of yutes from one public site and then simply allow the group to migrate to another nearby public site where an attack takes place, that’s a POLICE PROBLEM.

Public safety and security is Job One, the main reason we have a police department.  That job wasn’t done at Hinkley Park the night of July 12.  Backhandedly laying the blame on parents, or deflecting responsibility for a solution to “the community,” is nothing less than a cop-out, pun intended.

Despite our community’s extremely low crime rate, Job One, done right, is tough enough. The taxpayers don’t need police officers moonlighting as social workers or psychologists, especially when those social service duties can be handled by folks who don’t carry guns and handcuffs but who already are part of the existing social services network.   And we already have an abundance of the latter to opine on how this incident was the product of undeveloped teen brains, or faulty impulse control, or herd mentality, or problematic parent-child dynamics, or impaired inter-generational empathy, or even the late Mike Royko’s favorite social ill: “Aggravated mopery with intent to gawk.”

Taxpayers and visitors alike need to be able to move about Park Ridge feeling, and being, reasonably safe and secure, whether it be from overly-aggressive panhandlers, purse snatchers, stick-up men, or even large groups of yutes acting stupid.

For quite some time now, Chief K has been putting “Complimentary Letters and Awards” into the public record by including them in the published City Council meeting materials. That kind of aggrandizement is all well and good so long as equal attention and publicity are given to the less-than-complimentary things involving the department.

Unfortunately, to our knowledge the police department has produced nothing that goes beyond the bare-bones description of the attack itself to address the department’s handling of the pre-incident complaints about the misbehaving yutes at Hinkley, what prompted the alleged rousting of those other yutes from the Library grounds, and how they were allowed to build to critical mass at Hinkley.

The people of this community deserve complete transparency and full accountability concerning this incident, including the lead-up to it.

And whether that explanation is good, bad, or ugly, it’s already overdue.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Years ago, the late Sen. Patrick Moynihan said: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

Making up one’s own “facts” – by editing or manipulating accurate information, or by fabricating information out of whole cloth – has been an especially pernicious problem in government, where it often seems like the bureaucrats and politicians are brazenly trying to mislead the very people they’re supposed to be representing and working for.

In the world of government and politics, truth is usually a scarce commodity.

The recognized benchmark in this country for getting at the truth is the oath by which a person swears to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. To many people these seem to be redundant pledges, but all of them are essential to the task of truth-seeking because they each play a separate but important role.

“The truth” is an accurate factual account of what the witness experienced. “The whole truth” means not leaving out any relevant material facts above and beyond the core “truth.” And “nothing but the truth” means not including any untruths in addition to the whole truth.

A fairly recent article in the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“Park Ridge library chief: Fees for DVDs, activities aren’t answer for budget cuts,” June 27) illustrates how the public can be misled when public officials don’t provide the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth – especially when the reporter is unfamiliar with the substance of what he is reporting and doesn’t adequately investigate.

The article basically parrots information released by the Park Ridge Library in the form of two reports intended to demonstrate that charging certain types of user fees would not generate enough net revenue to make it a worthwhile undertaking. The two reports in question – the June 12, 2014 “Library Revenue for DVDs and Video Games” report, and the June 13, 2014 “Fees for Programs” report – contain enough deficiencies that we have identified the more flagrant ones with annotations that should be self-explanatory.

The first report violates the “nothing but the truth” test in several respects. Item C, for example, raises a question of discrimination based on the means/needs of users, even though the Library staff has never attempted to ascertain the means/needs of its patrons. Similarly, Item D suggests a “trickle-down effect” of the Library on Uptown businesses, even though the Library staff has never attempted to quantify the amount of revenue, if any, Library users generate for Uptown merchants ancillary to their Library usage.

The second report, on the other hand, contains several violations of the “whole truth” requirement. Items 1 through 4 fail to mention that the Library’s revenue calculations based on a universe of 182 programs ignores the fact that the Library actually offers over 900 programs, for which it isn’t even considering trying to generate revenue from more than 700 of them. In other words, the report’s attendance and revenue projections are rigged to reflect a mere 20% of the potential program revenue that might be generated if all programs were included.

And, as with the other report, this one asks (at Item 6) whether attendance will decline if any fee at all is charged – without addressing the question of how the Library can justify committing its limited resources to presenting programs so bereft of value that attendees won’t even pay a $1 admission fee.

Another “whole truth” missing from both reports is that the Library Director and a majority of the previous Library Board voiced such strong philosophical objections to charging user fees that they preferred to see the Library dark and shuttered for 14 Sundays this summer rather than charge modest user fees for such things as program attendance and log-ins on the Library’s computers.  And we pointed out in our 04.14.14 and 05.29.14 posts how those summer Sunday closings proposed by the Library’s senior staff were a political, rather than a facility/budget management, decision.

The 62,414 computer log-ins during FY2013-14 would have raised over $60,000 at just $1 per log-in. Even if one-half of those users were to choose to waste their time and gas money driving to the Des Plaines or Niles libraries to avoid paying that $1 fee here in Park Ridge (where the Kinko’s on Northwest Highway charges $18 per hour for computer usage), the remaining 31,207 uses would still have generated enough revenue to have covered the cost of this summer’s Sunday operations and half of next summer’s Sundays.

The same result might have been achieved by charging as little as a $1 admission fee for ALL Library programs, for which attendance hit a five-year record of 30,213 during FY2013-14.

Unfortunately, all that fee revenue information was missing from the Library’s two reports and, therefore, from the H-A story.  And that kept the H-A story from telling its readers the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about user fees and how they could have been used to make the Library more accessible to the community this summer, and better overall.

As the Library gears up for its first referendum in 12 years – this November, to raise property taxes to maintain the current level of Library materials and services, and to restore some materials and services that were cut in recent years for budgetary reasons – taxpayers should demand the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth when considering the information that will be disseminated relative to that referendum.

Because, as Thomas Jefferson understood: “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”

To read or post comments, click on title.

If you read the local papers last week, two headlines might have grabbed your attention: “Property Values Here Take A Hit” (Park Ridge Journal, June 25); and “Park Ridge city taxes could rise more than 16 percent (Park Ridge Herald-Advocate, June 26).

According to those articles, City Finance Director Kent Oliven is reporting that the numbers coming out of the Cook County Clerk’s office show a 17.8% drop in the equalized assessed value (“EAV”) of all Park Ridge property collectively. That’s the biggest drop of any taxing body in Cook County, and it is accompanied by Maine Township’s having the largest drop of any Cook County township.

Solely for comparison purposes, Niles’ EAV dropped 14%, Glenview’s 11.6% and Des Plaines’ 16.8%. And the average drop for the entire group of northern Cook County suburbs subject to the triennial reassessment of values for the years 2010 through 2012 was 12.8%.

One saving grace, according to Oliven, is that some of Park Ridge’s larger new developments – like the new Whole Foods store – do not appear to have been counted as part of the 2013 reassessment.  But, according to Oliven, the EAV of properties within the Uptown TIF have “fallen more than the rest of the city” throughout the past decade, and he expects that to be the case this time around as well.

What does that mean for the typical Park Ridge homeowner?

If we’re lucky, perhaps nothing.

Viewed in the most simple way, the City and our other local governmental bodies still need to collect a certain number of tax dollars to operate. So if the value of the taxable property declines, the tax levy rate needs to increase to produce the same tax revenues. Conversely, when the EAV goes up, a smaller levy rate can generate the same amount of tax dollars.

So if each of our local governmental bodies operated the “wise and frugal” government Thomas Jefferson envisioned and advocated, both the new EAV and the resultant new levy to be passed this December would probably be little more than a footnote – with a higher levy being assessed on a lower EAV. But as we keep on pointing out, none of our local governing bodies appear to be all that “wise” or all that “frugal” – although the City in recent years seems to have been doing a better job than the other local governmental bodies, especially the two school districts that keep spending and spending with no increases in objectively measurable performance vis-à-vis the upper-echelon comparable communities to show for it.

And despite the Park District seemingly doing a good job at aligning its operating expenses with its operating revenues over the past few years, we’re hoping “no” but betting “yes” that the debt service for the new non-referendum Centennial water park and the new referendum-based Youth Campus Park will start turning the District’s black ink into red.

But that likely won’t happen until most, if not all, of the current Park Board members responsible for both projects have left the Board; and until the mastermind of those projects, Director Gayle Mountcastle, has either leveraged her dubious achievement into a move to another District, or retired.

That’s what occurred with the perpetrators of the Uptown TIF who ordered the whole menu of bonded debt and subsidies for the private developers, then disappeared into private life while sticking the taxpayers with the bill – and leaving Mayor Schmidt and the current Council to unravel the mess and take the public shelling for all the bad financial news about the TIF and its adverse effects on the rest of the City’s activities like flood control.

It reminds us of that line from the movie “Under Siege,” where the Tommy Lee Jones character (a former CIA agent) succinctly explains his going rogue on the U.S. with: “I got tired of coming up with last-minute desperate solutions to impossible problems created by other [%$#@ing] people.”

The Uptown TIF may not be an “impossible” problem, but it’s unlikely to be solved in any better way than through one of those hold-your-nose deals that are becoming increasingly familiar to Illinois residents as they struggle to cope with the effects of at least 30 years of virtually non-stop corrupt governance by the likes of Mike Madigan, his Democratic toadies in control of the General Assembly, and the occasional Republican accomplices like former Govs. Thompson, Edgar and Ryan.

With the Uptown TIF, we can only hope that it was merely a stupid idea.

To read or post comments, click on title.