Once, just once, we’d like to see somebody, A-N-Y-B-O-D-Y, in a management position within one of our four main local governmental bodies actually offer something insightful and constructive about how to compensate their – or, more correctly, OUR – public employees.

And we don’t mean by simply increasing the previous year’s pay by the cost of living, or by some arbitrary percentage.

Heck, we’d even offer a trophy for the accomplishment, something at least as tall, shiny and expensive as those silly faux self-esteem “participation” trophies given to kids just for showing up – or sometimes even just for signing up – for a sport or activity.

Unfortunately, City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton won’t be winning any trophy this year, judging by his “Compensation Study” dated June 23, 2014 – the basic premise of which is that the best way to determine fair and reasonable compensation for our public employees is to look at what other communities are paying their public employees.

That kind of thinking is seriously flawed because it assumes three key facts not in evidence: (1) that what other communities are paying their employees actually is fair and reasonable for those communities, rather than inflated amounts; (2) assuming it is, that the job duties and conditions of specific positions in those other communities are directly comparable to specific positions in our community; and (3), assuming they are, that such “comparable” compensation is fair, reasonable and affordable for our community and its taxpayers.

Interestingly enough, Hamilton’s Agenda Cover Memorandum suggests that his own study fails to satisfy all three of those criteria, as he writes:

“Not all the communities [in the study] are of similar size, nor would each community be considered comparable to our City. In addition, employees with similar job titles do not necessarily perform the same duties and may be treated differently for overtime purposes in some instances.”

So what’s the point, Shawn? Did you set up that compensation study as one of your goals for this just-concluded fiscal year, and then figured you had to provide some kind of deliverable no matter how worthless it might actually be?

Setting appropriate public employee compensation has become more difficult in the past decade or two, as the membership and power of public-sector unions has far outstripped that of their private-sector counterparts. The union-directed wages and benefits also have trickled down to the non-union employees, who seem to keep getting raises for nothing more than holding their jobs for another year – as do their counterparts in neighboring communities, presumably because all the bureaucrats managing those staffs sing from the same hymnal.

Which is why the idea of basing what we pay on what other communities pay is just plain foolish.

First of all, does anybody but our own public employees think they are being paid too little and/or receiving too few benefits?  If so, can you identify the City (or D-64, or D-207, or Park District) employees who have voluntarily left their employment here to accept a comparable position in any of those neighboring communities – and by “neighboring” we mean the greater Chicagoland metropolitan area?

We can’t think of many. In fact, we can’t think of ANY.

Second, the pay and benefits our community offers its public employees should be viewed in light of the fact that when any public-sector jobs open up here, there reportedly are far more than enough quality applicants, especially for police and fire jobs.

And why not? Not only is the pay good, but the work isn’t all that difficult or dangerous, relatively speaking. For example, our police don’t have to ride herd on groups of gang-bangers shooting it out every Saturday night in front of the Pickwick, or play real-life Grand Theft Auto; and with no building other than Lutheran General topping 5-stories, firemen don’t have to worry about battling prospective Towering Infernos.

That’s not meant to disrespect either department but, rather, to highlight how fortunate we (and they) are to be living and/or working in such a safe and affluent community – one where the crime rate actually keeps dropping to the point where Location, Inc., a leading location-based data and risk analysis firm, last year ranked Park Ridge the 72nd-safest community in the nation, based on the number of reported property crimes and violent crimes per 1,000 residents in 2011.

In light of these happy facts, we have a suggestion for Mr. Hamilton:

Instead of wasting time studying what neighboring communities pay their employees, try studying what it would cost the City to outsource as many of these services as possible. And once you’ve done that, correlate those costs with the fully-loaded (i.e., including the costs of pensions, sick days, vacation days, uniform allowances, etc.) costs of the City’s in-house people who currently provide those services, to determine what the economic differential is between in-house and out-sourced.

We can’t find anything in the Illinois statutes, or in the City Code, that requires all of these services to be performed by City employees.  So with the Uptown TIF albatross chained around the City’s neck for at least another 11 years, multi-millions of dollars of flood remediation to be done, and the recent report that Park Ridge’s collective property value has dropped 17.8%, all City costs need to be put on the table if our community is to stay afloat financially without extremely painful tax increases.

That’s why the “this-is-the-way-we’ve-always-done-it” management style of years gone by no longer cuts it. If City taxpayers can’t get the best price AND the best value from the current system of in-house public employee staffs, then it’s time to look at private-sector alternatives.

Maybe exploring the private-sector option will show that we’re already getting a bargain from our public employees.  Maybe not.  But it’s time for an outside-the-box approach to what has become a chronic problem of ever-increasing personnel costs with no end in sight.

And if our $155,000/year City Mgr. – who just happens to be the third lowest-paid city/village manager on his list of 27 comparable communities – can’t figure that out on his own, then it’s high time the Mayor and City Council told him so.

In no uncertain terms.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Tonight’s Park Ridge City Council meeting has two significant issues on the agenda: (1) final approval of the language of the binding Library tax levy increase referendum; and (2) further discussion of an advisory referendum for flood remediation for Mayfield Estates and the Northwest Park neighborhood.

The simplistic view, seemingly shared by more than a few residents, is that these are just individual one-off decisions about the Library and a couple of Second Ward flood projects. Worse yet, these are nothing more than attempts by the Council to pawn off on the voters tough decisions on two very different issues, with the victory or defeat of each being the only consequence.

The real take-away from these two exercises should be how they enhance our City’s representative (i.e., republican with a small “r”) form of government. Both of these referenda demonstrate how giving the taxpayers a voice on major issues in the most objectively measurable way – through their countable votes – actually adds even greater transparency, accountability and legitimacy to the process.

Let’s start with the Library referendum, which was initiated by the City Council because the Library (i.e., senior Staff’s and Library Board majority’s) refused to live within its statutory taxing authority. Rather than propose a tax increase referendum, however, the Library administration chose to demonize the Council for ignoring the will of what it claimed to be the vast majority of residents who purportedly wanted more City funding of the Library. And when that didn’t cause a majority of the aldermen to cower and buckle, the Library amped up the pressure by intentionally and irresponsibly inflicting gratuitous pain on Library users and its own staff by closing the Library on 14 Sundays this summer.

But thanks to the Council, this Library referendum will give all taxpayers who choose to vote this November the chance to tell the Council(and the Library administration) in no uncertain terms whether they are willing to pay higher taxes for certain Library amenities. And because it will be a binding referendum, even the slimmest-majority – 50.00001% of the vote – will give the Library the extra cash it wants for each of the next four years, without having to sway a Council majority on that issue.

So although the Council said “no” to the Library, it was willing to give the Library – and the voters – a chance to prove a majority of aldermen wrong. And even if a majority of voters say “no,” the Council still has the ability to reconsider and give the Library more money, albeit without any illusion that such a handout is what a majority of voting taxpayers wants.

What could possibly be wrong with that?

That is representative/republican government in action, in one of the ways Madison described in Federalist No. 10:

[T]o refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose.

Whether the referendum passes or fails, the Council will have the benefit of having heard the “public voice…pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose.”

While a Library referendum will be on the November ballot, the mere thought of obtaining a similar “public voice” on flood control for Mayfield Estates and the Northwest Park neighborhood seems to have inspired fear and loathing from the residents of those areas.

Like the Library administration, those Second Ward folks would prefer to browbeat the Council into simply handing over $20 Million in bond proceeds, plus interest, for flood protection for less than 450 homes – even though that $20 Million figure is “soft” because no “hard” cost for turning Northwest Park into a temporary detention area (assuming the Park District will permit it) has been determined.  And as is so often the case when a small group of people claim entitlement to Other People’s Money (“OPM”) for their own personal benefit, those Second Ward folks are insisting that a referendum would be “divisive” and pit one area of town against the others.

That’s what’s known as the pot calling the kettle black. Or, in this case, the takers calling the payers “cheap.”

Whether by selective blindness or outright dishonesty, those Second Ward folks fail to see that THEY are the ones creating an “us v. them” mentality – if one exists – by demanding that all the City’s taxpayers foot the bill for Second Ward flood relief projects costing (in the case of Mayfield Estates) more than TEN TIMES what flood relief for other parts of town is costing ($100,000+ per home v. relief sewers at a cost of approximately $10,000 per home).

Ald. Nick Milissis (2nd), with the help of an analysis by municipal finance expert and resident Shawn O’Leary, has come up with a variety of arguments for why no referendum should be required by the City to take another plunge into the deep end of the debt pool – and the sooner, the better. And, not surprisingly, those arguments purport to demonstrate that adding another $20 Million of bonded debt to the current $30 Million carried by the City won’t have any effect on the City’s bond rating or on future flood relief projects for all those other areas of town experiencing flooding.

We vigorously disagree. But that’s not the point of this post.

If those arguments are legitimate and not just a bunch of municipal finance mumbo jumbo, can’t the taxpayers be trusted embrace them – via an advisory referendum vote? Shouldn’t those taxpayers who choose to vote have a chance to voice their opinion on whether they want the City saddled with another $20 Million of long-term debt, especially when it will provide flood relief to no more than 450 of the City’s 13,000-plus households?

And if this $20 Million of additional bonded debt truly is the great idea its proponents are proclaiming it to be, persuading the voters should be an easy task.  Heck, from the way Mr. O’Leary talks up such debt (“I am…astonished that any city with significant capital needs is not jumping at the opportunity to take advantage of this rate environment”), why aren’t he and Ald. Milissis advocating for $150-300 Million of bonded debt to address ALL the City’s flooding issues – before the rates go up and/or” our bond rating falls any further from its already-downgraded Aa2, with a negative outlook, thanks in large part to the Uptown TIF?

Thomas Jefferson noted that “[w]henever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”  So let Ald. Milissis, Mr. O’Leary and their fellow Second Ward residents inform the rest of us about the abiding wisdom of the Mayfield Estates and Northwest Park flood relief plans.

And then let the “public voice…pronounced by the people themselves” be heard via an advisory referendum this November.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Today we are posting what was submitted by 2nd Ward Ald. Nicholas Milissis as a comment to our 06.09.14 post.

While we vigorously disagree with many of its “Fact”s (and its conclusions and opinions masquerading as “Fact”s), it is the most thorough and thoughtful argument we have heard, to date, for the City’s undertaking the two flood control projects intended for the Second Ward at the expense of all Park Ridge taxpayers.

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Jumping the shark is an idiom created by Jon Hein that was used to describe the moment in the evolution of a television show when it begins a decline in quality, signaled by a particular scene, episode, or aspect of a show in which the writers use some type of “gimmick” in an attempt to keep viewers’ interest. The phrase is based on a scene from a fifth-season episode of the sitcom Happy Days when the character Fonzie jumps over a shark while on water-skis. The usage of “jump the shark” has subsequently broadened beyond television, indicating the moment when a brand, design, or creative effort’s evolution declines.

Pub dog I count myself as one of your fans but I have to say in this latest post you have jumped the shark.

Without adding to what has become an already emotionally charged conflict I will attempt to address several disturbing positions that have been brought up in council by other aldermen, by you and some of your anonymous posters.

Someone far wiser than me said: Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts. So here we go in no particular order:

MYTH: Northwest Park and Mayfield are projects that will cost 100 million dollars or more.

FACT: Northwest Park and Mayfield are the only two projects that are currently deemed feasible at the 100-year level protection and have engineering designs that are construction-ready. Should the council approve them they could start tomorrow for a combined price of under $20 million dollars (3.3 for Mayfield and 16 for Northwest). Country Club is the third area with the heftier price tag and with a guarantee only against a 10 year flood. The council is not currently considering that option as presented and is seeking better alternatives. Lumping all three projects together, which are at different stages, have different solutions and different levels of protection is merely a tactic to artificially inflate the price tag and create sticker shock.

MYTH: Mayfield Estates refused to install sewers when it was annexed 50 years ago and again refused to install them subsequently when the city approached the residents there and offered them that option.

FACT: The city chose to annex Mayfield in an “as is” condition. The city and its elected officials at the time made that decision knowing full well that Mayfield wasn’t developed with a sewer system. The city at the time had every right to set any requirements and terms it wished as part of the annexation agreement. It didn’t. That point is now moot and the city has been responsible for Mayfield for the past 50 years. The only paperwork that exists from that situation half a century ago is a now expired agreement in which the only provision was that the city couldn’t force the Mayfield residents to install a sewers for the first five years after annexation. Those five years came and went and the agreement expired. Now we seek to punish residents who were not part of that agreement and who have been paying the same taxes everyone else pays in Park Ridge by wanting them to pay for desperately needed infrastructure. The city took on Mayfield, enjoyed the extra taxes it realized by annexing it for five decades and did zero to at least maintain the rudimentary system Mayfield had in place (clean culverts, maintain drainage ditches etc). Now the city officials will turn around and ask that Mayfield shoulder the costs of the only solution there is to prevent it from literally disappearing under the flood waters? I don’t think so. Oh and by the way, Park Ridge Pointe which was developed many years after the Mayfield annexation and which brought the City hundreds of new taxable property parcels, resides on Mayfield land which would not have been part of the City had it decided 50 years ago not to annex. Mayfield residents have been paying their share like everyone else in our city towards hundreds of infrastructure improvement projects over the years that benefited many other places around town. Let’s stop calling those poor neighbors and full fledged Park Ridgians freeloaders.

MYTH: Funding these projects will be the equivalent of another Uptown TIF.

FACT: This is a very deceptive way to compare the Uptown TIF to legitimate capital projects. This argument can be reduced to: “The sewer projects could cost as much as the Uptown TIF and the Uptown TIF is really squeezing the budget!” But this is a false comparison. First, the Uptown TIF identified two payment sources for the bonds: TIF increment from the projects and, if that was insufficient, a citywide property tax levy. When the TIF increment proved to be insufficient the city made the policy decision to abate the property tax levy for the bonds and make up the shortfalls from the city’s existing budget (i.e. the general fund). It’s not that the debt-in and of itself-pressured the budget: it was the combined insufficiency of the increment coupled with a decision by the city itself not to make use of the other available and reliable revenue source (property tax levy). The TIF situation is not analogous to bonds issued for bread and butter capital improvement projects. Whether secured by sewer fee revenues and/or property taxes, to assume the debt would have the same impact on the city’s financial picture is to believe that the city would see both a collapse in sewer fee payments and a spike in property tax delinquencies heretofore never experienced in Park Ridge. Barring such a collapse, why on earth would this council or any future council ever abate a levy for duly issued capital improvement purposes and bring those obligations into the operating budget (such as has been done for the Uptown TIF debt)? It makes no sense at all and simply would not happen under any reasonable scenario. (My thanks to resident Shawn -a municipal financing market professional- for this analysis. For verification purposes I can provide his full name to the editor of this blog who has my contact info).

MYTH: Avoiding these projects will save the city and its tax payers money.

FACT: These problems are not going away and recent experiences show flooding is getting worse and occurring more often. Flooding will continue to affect residents who in turn will continue to seek assistance from the city and their elected representatives. A slim majority of aldermen on this council seem intent on killing these projects and as a result any subsequent ones. However, elected officials come and go and the make up of the council changes every two years. A new council a few years down the line, or as early as 2015, might decide to move ahead with the projects. What will it cost the city to complete these same projects in one, five or ten years? Again I turn to my friend and expert Shawn who says: It is astonishing that any municipality with capital needs would sit on its hands at this point in time. We are living in a period of near generational lows in terms of financing costs for state and local governments. This period won’t last forever-we will revert to the mean at some point. I believe it is likely that if this council passes on this opportunity today the flooding issues will only continue and at some point, a future council will move ahead with the projects. The problem is that interest rates (and likely construction costs as well) will be higher by that time. Shawn goes on to calculate that this delay could end up costing the city 15% to 36% more to complete the same projects. The bottom line is that these projects are necessary, affordable and don’t, by any reasonable analysis, present a threat to this City’s financial future. Delay will only ensure that Park Ridge misses this prime opportunity to finance these projects at rates we are unlikely to ever see again.

MYTH: If these projects are allowed to go forward the city won’t have any money to help those in other areas with flooding issues.

FACT: See analysis above. Projects can be completed in stages much as they have up to now. Northwest and Mayfield are number 10 and 11 in a list of 12 projects 9 of which have already been completed around town. This council is concurrently working with and has asked Burke Engineering to identify additional areas for which to complete flood remediation projects. Don’t listen to the rhetoric and outright lies meant to turn you against your fellow citizens. More projects are being identified and should the elected officials carry out their duties instead of trying to find ways to derail any progress, eventually all will be helped. Preventing the two projects from happening will only bar any other ones from happening down the line, mainly because no other alternative or solutions have been provided. The momentum and substantial money already spent in the studies leading up to these projects will be wasted.

MYTH: My taxes will go up if these projects are approved.

FACT: These projects will be financed through a raise in the annual sewer fee not your taxes. If both projects (Mayfield and Northwest Park) were to be approved that would translate to $9 per month on every household’s sewer bill across town.

MYTH: This is a Mayfield/Northwest Park problem not mine.

FACT: This is a Park Ridge problem. When flooding in those areas is reported in the newspapers people outside our city don’t differentiate between areas in Park Ridge. They only hear and see that Park Ridge (or Flood Ridge as it is now being referred to) floods and now its city government refuses to fix the problem. If you think that doesn’t affect everyone’s property values or how potential buyers decide whether they will move here or not you are sorely mistaken.

MYTH: The people who live in the areas where the projects are to take place are irresponsible freeloaders looking for a handout from the city.

FACT: Many other residents have already been helped by similar (albeit cheaper) projects without being subjected to this level of verbal abuse and animosity on this blog or scrutiny by the elected officials. For example, a project was completed in Alderman Sweeney’s 1st Ward (which of course he voted in favor of) that benefited a miniscule number of houses in the Lahon/Overhill area. Yet now he is denying (through his latest vote) the same relief to a much larger number of residents in the 2nd ward. Interestingly enough he justified his vote in favor of a referendum by saying there are more areas in his ward that need help so he’ll vote against the Northwest Park and Mayfield projects being completed through bond issuance/no referendum (i.e. the way the Overhill/Lahon project in his ward was completed). I guess that somehow seems fair in his mind. The people in the Northwest Park and Mayfield areas are responsible homeowners. They are not simpletons or cheapos who are not aware or don’t want to spring for any possible measure they can install themselves. They have already spent tens of thousands of dollars of their own money on overhead sewers, check valves and even changing the grading of their driveways in order to control flooding on their property. The problem is not on their properties. It’s overland flooding that they have to deal with. Overland flooding is a direct result of inadequate (too small, antiquated or non existent) sewer infrastructure which becomes overwhelmed during rapid and severe storms and the water ends up on the streets. Only the city can address that problem. When your street turns into a river and the water starts coming in from your front door or in from your downward sloping driveway your overhead sewers and check valves are not much good.

It’s indicative that you chose to highlight Ms. Schwieder’s (a resident attending these meetings for the first time) understandably and justifiably emotional outburst but ignored those of residents like Della Burns who spoke poignantly and logically about the issues I covered above.

MYTH: A referendum is the best way to decide this question once and for all.

FACT: A referendum in this case is highly inappropriate and an easy way for those who voted in favor of it to avoid having to make what in their mind is a difficult (not to mention unpopular) decision. This is not a question of public policy. We are not asking the residents whether smoking should be banned, whether a pool that will be used by everyone should be built or a police station that will serve the entire city should be expanded. These are infrastructure projects in specific areas of the city, each with its own set of challenges, solutions and price tags. Trying to compound two or three different projects in one referendum question violates the standards and requirements of a legally valid and acceptable referendum question. Some aldermen have been swept along the excitement of “referendum fever” (there will potentially be three on the ballot this coming November) without giving much thought to its viability and/or feasibility. A compound and confusing question is almost certain to not only get challenged but defeated. So for those opposing these projects it’s a win win. They will either get the voters who are unaware of the above lengthy analysis to vote it down or the referendum will be defeated before it even makes it to the polls. Either way they have detrimentally delayed or outright killed the only viable solution for these areas problems.

I could go on but I won’t since I have already taken up a lot of space. I thank you for indulging me and hope you and some of the anonymous posters here will at least consider the information provided and rethink your positions on this subject.

Nicholas Milissis

Alderman, 2nd Ward.

To read or post comment, click on title.

Last Monday night (June 2) the Park Ridge City Council held a special committee meeting to once again discuss the elephant that’s been parked in the corner of the Council chambers for the past few years.

Flood control.

This time, however, the discussion focused on whether the entire community should be allowed to vote in an advisory referendum on spending – or, more accurately, borrowing and spending – upwards of $20 million on flood control for two relatively small areas of Park Ridge, both in the Second Ward and serving approximately 450 homes: Mayfield Estates and the Northwest Park neighborhood.

Most of the assembled multitude in the gallery last Monday seemed to be from those two areas, and they were vocal in their opposition to such a referendum. They branded it “divisive” even as they insisted flood control was “a Park Ridge issue” affecting the entire community.

In other words, “we’re all in this together” – with everybody sharing the cost of what benefits only a few of us – and don’t you dare take a vote that might prove otherwise!

That’s a standard tactic for people who want to spend OPM (“Other People’s Money”) on their own pet project while insisting that “everybody” wants it, especially when they don’t think they can muster the 50.01% majority of “yes” votes needed to pass a referendum for the project.

We call that the “Tim Schuenke Rule,” which is as dishonest as it is anti-democratic and anti-republican (note the small “d” and “r”) because it’s based on manipulating and/or intimidating a majority of the officials of the relevant local governing body – assuming that a majority of that governing body hasn’t already convinced itself to cut the voters out of the process, as the City Council did back in 2003 with the Uptown TIF; and as the 2012-13 Park Board did with the new Centennial Water Park that opens this coming weekend.

Manipulating/intimidating the aldermen is what almost every speaker tried to do last Monday night, with one speaker even threatening litigation…a hollow threat, to be sure, because those folks aren’t about to spend their own money on lawyers to file a losing lawsuit, as Farmers Insurance appears to have conceded in dropping its flooding suit against all Cook County municipalities including Park Ridge.

With the legal claim to public monies for expensive flood control infrastructure gone, the Second Ward residents seemed to be desperately scrambling for some kind of moral high-ground. That meant continuing to portray themselves as helpless victims of unfair treatment, such as by pointing to 9 other City flood control projects totaling over $5 million that already had been done without referendum.

Not surprisingly, however, they failed to mention that those other 9 projects provided a total of approximately 2.5 miles worth of relief sewers to a number of different areas of town. By a purely back-of-the-envelope calculation, those projects benefited almost 10 times the number of residences projected to be benefited by the Mayfield Estates and Northwest Park projects combined – and at around a quarter of the cost being projected for those two projects.

Those facts, even if articulated, probably wouldn’t have made that crowd any less ornery.

Which is why a Watchdog bark-out goes to Ald. Marc Mazzuca (6th) for his solid job chairing that raucus meeting.

He was spot-on in noting how this Council has taken on these tough flood discussions that previous councils ignored. And he demonstrated his knowledge of Santayana’s warning that “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it” by comparing the long-term financial burdens of flood control to the burdens of the Uptown TIF.

Such comparisons and history lessons, however, seemed lost on most of the crowd – no more so than on Birch Street resident Meg Schwieder, whose unenlightened self-interest can be seen and heard in all its glory from 52:45 through 1:01:12 of the special meeting video.

We particularly liked her “That’s your problem, not mine” response to Mazzuca’s invocation of the TIF-created financial problems. We can’t tell whether she just couldn’t grasp or simply refused to accept Mazzuca’s point that every major long-term bonded debt incurred by any of our local governmental bodies becomes “all of our problems,” often for a decade or more. But her comments highlight just how shallow, short-sighted and greedy a view some of our fellow residents take of this flooding problem, if not other City problems.

Fortunately, four aldermen – Mazzuca, Marty Maloney (7th), Dan Knight (5th) and Joe Sweeney (1st) – expressed their support for an advisory referendum, with Sweeney pointing out that areas in his ward flood almost as often and as much as Mayfield Estates. He also advocated a comprehensive City-wide flood mitigation program, which could run over $100 million.

But only if it gets taxpayer support via a City-wide referendum.

That’s not what the folks in the audience Monday night wanted to hear. But that’s what they needed to hear. Now let’s see if that 4-alderman Council majority can hang tough on putting this issue to referendum.

And let’s see whether those Second Ward residents reconsider some Special Service Area cost-sharing arrangements rather than risk going “all-in” with a referendum.

To read or post comments, click on title.

If you were one of the people who showed up at the Park Ridge Library this past Sunday looking to check out a book, read a magazine, surf the Net, or just hang out, you probably were disappointed to discover that you happened to pick the first of what is scheduled to be 14 consecutive Sundays that the Library will be closed this summer.

The official party line on the closings is that the Library doesn’t have the $20,000 it would cost to keep it open those 14 Sundays.

That’s an outright lie.

The truth is that keeping the Library open those 14 summer Sundays just isn’t a priority for the Library’s executive staff who recommended its closing, or for 6 of the 9 Library Board members (pres. Margaret Harrison, vice-pres. John Benka, secretary Audra Ebling, treasurer John Schmidt, trustees Dorothy Hynous and Jerry White) who voted to approve that recommendation.

Or you might say that it just isn’t as much of a priority as giving the Library’s employees $20,000+ of raises.

Or as much of a priority as continuing the free use of the Library’s computers instead of charging a nominal $1 per log-on.

Or as much of a priority as continuing the Library’s free programs and movies instead of charging a nominal $1 per attendance.

In fact, based on the Library’s own computer usage statistics, a $1 computer log-on fee could have generated over $60,000 – enough money to keep the Library open all 14 Sundays this summer AND next, while also giving the Library employees their raises.

And, based on the Library’s own program attendance stats, a $1 attendance fee per program or movie could have generated $30,000 – enough to keep the Library open all 14 of this summer’s Sundays and also cover 1/2 of the employee raises.

Even if computer usage would decline by 50% in response to a $1 fee (as all those financial geniuses chose to spend $1-plus on the gas for their round-trip to the Niles or Des Plaines libraries for free computer usage), summer Sundays could still be saved…and with an additional $10,000 to put toward raises or other uses.

But user fees are anathema to senior Library staff and this Board majority. And keeping the Library open Sundays this summer wasn’t a priority for them.

Actually, closing it was.

That’s because the Library’s senior staff and the Board majority wanted a very visible symbol of the Library’s financial situation to anger the taxpayers enough that they would demand that the City Council give the Library more tax money.  But after failing in that effort and now facing a Library tax increase referendum this November, the staff and Board majority will use the Sunday closings to try to sell a “yes” vote to those same taxpayers.

Interestingly enough, although that senior staff and Board majority wanted a visible symbol to motivate the taxpayers, they didn’t want to cause the Library’s core weekday user base – e.g., kids, seniors, the voluntarily and involuntarily unemployed – any inconvenience.

So summer Sunday users – the largest group, on a per-hour basis, of Library users (according to the Library’s own, albeit very flawed, data) – became expendable.  Or “acceptable collateral damage” in military parlance.

Ironically, a half-baked “Survey-Monkey” survey commissioned by the Library’s senior staff and Board, with the wink-and-nod expectation that it would reveal overwhelming opposition to any kind of Library fees, actually showed just the opposite.

As reported in a recent article in the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“Survey: Most Park Ridge library users would pay for adult programs,” May 20, 2014), 62.8% of the survey’s 530 respondents to questions about “adult” programs said they would be willing to pay a fee to attend programs at the Library. And of the $1-$3-$5-other price range surveyed, 41.9% indicated they would be willing to pay $5 for computer classes!

Even the majority (54.5%) of the 244 respondents who said “no” to a question about paying for children’s programs was not the resounding mandate the senior staff and Board majority seemed to be hoping for, with a number of those folks indicating they’d pay a $3 program fee if it were charged.

The senior staff’s and Board majority’s response to such “Survey Monkey”-shines?

“We need to do our homework and due diligence on this, because if the referendum gets shot down, we need to come out of the gate with an alternative money source,” said Library Resources Committee chair Jerry White.

In other word: Let’s not try to salvage some of this summer’s Sundays by starting to charge user fees now when, instead, we can keep the Library closed and hope it ticks off enough voters that they pass the referendum in November, so we won’t have to start charging the user fees we really don’t want to charge.

To the people in charge of the Library, closing the Library to the entire community one day a week for 14 weeks is better than deferring $20,000 of raises for less than 50 employees.

And closing the Library to the entire community for 14 summer Sundays is better than charging computer users and program attendees a nominal $1 user fee.

Those are the priorities of this senior Library staff and this 6-person Library Board majority.

And all you Sunday Library users aren’t.

Robert J. Trizna

Editor and publisher

Member, Park Ridge Library Board

To read or post comments, click on title.

To hear Park Ridge City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton tell it, he and his staff have been asking Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District 64 since January for information the City needs to verify and confirm the amounts D-64 claims the City owes for the outstanding annual TIF payment (a/k/a the “TIF Bribe”) before it will pay this year’s bill.

To hear D-64 Board president Tony Borrelli and D-64 attorney (and former D-64 board president) Dean Krone tell it, D-64’s staff has reached out to the City 11 times since January to help the City figure out exactly what the City owes.

Either somebody’s lying, or somebody’s incompetent. Oh, wait…maybe it’s both.

It shouldn’t take four months to get data from D-64, especially since it appears to be data D-64 itself actually needed to calculate what it claims the City owes it for this year’s TIF Bribe. So either City staff is lying about the legitimacy of its requests and the diligence of its efforts, or D-64 is lying about the promptness and completeness of its responses.

Or maybe both.

But there’s one simple way to resolve that issue: a joint meeting of the City Council and D-64 Board, with senior staff present.

Hold it at City Hall next Thursday night – so as not to conflict with a possible Game 5 in the Blackhawks’ conference final series with the LA Kings – and let the respective sides explain their positions and make their arguments face-to-face, in public and on television, with the press scribbling away.

Let Hamilton look right at Supt. Phil Bender and tell him what he needs and why. Let Bender tell Hamilton when it was produced, or when it will be produced, or why it won’t.

Let City Finance Director Kent Oliven go toe-to-toe with D-64’s Rebecca Allard on the completeness or incompleteness of the financial data that’s already been exchanged, if any, and the relevance of what’s still missing.

Let City attorneys Everette “Buzz” Hill and TIF-expert Matthew Welch debate the legal issues of this dispute with their D-64 counterparts, Dean Krone and Ares Dalianis.

And then let Mayor Dave Schmidt and the City Council discuss with Board President Tony Borrelli and the D-64 Board, then and there, how this dispute is going to be resolved with the least aggravation and expense to their collective taxpayers.

All of it in public, on television and video-recorded for posterity. No back-room deals, no closed-door sessions, no behind-the-scenes whispering, no he-said-she-said silliness, no sound bites, no spin, no propaganda.

That means D-64’s minister of propaganda and spin, Bernadette Tramm, can stay home – because the City has no equivalent taxpayer-paid public relations flak with whom she can spar about the “message” of the meeting.

It’s way past time for cutting through all the posturing and other nonsense that seems to have plagued this effort since at least January and has pushed the respective governmental bodies closer to stupid litigation than to wise resolution. That means more light and less heat.

Which brings us to Board Pres. Borrelli’s e-blast Monday afternoon about the TIF dispute.

We think highly of Borrelli. We endorsed his election to the Board three years ago, and we have praised many of the initiatives he has brought to that previously-opaque and unaccountable backwater body – although we harshly criticized the way he and “his” Board mishandled the process of hiring the new superintendent, including the closed session discussions of how much to pay her.

Unfortunately, Borrelli’s blast seems to have borrowed liberally from the Bernadette Tramm playbook of political tactics, misdirection and obfuscation. It responds to the detailed points of City Mgr. Hamilton’s 5-page April 7, 2014 letter not with specific counter-points but with D-64 – aggrandizing bloviation that, distilled to its essence, demands that the City keep on making what may be TIF Bribe overpayments simply because it has done so without question for the past 11 years:

“We would describe the April 7 letter from the City as an emphatic ‘no’ to our simple and reasonable request that the City live up to its financial obligations – as it has done routinely each year since 2003. Certainly, the April 7 letter was not an invitation for further dialogue and compromise.”

If you can’t see B. Tramm’s fingerprints all over statements like that, you really haven’t been paying attention to the propaganda being churned out by D-64 the last few years to cover up mediocre performance at premium prices.

Eliminating, or at least reducing, that kind of propaganda is yet another reason why the taxpayers deserve a face-to-face joint City and D-64 meeting about this TIF dispute immediately, as in next Thursday, May 29.

And remember: Ms. Tramm isn’t invited.

UPDATE (05.23.14) Instead of the very public meeting we suggested in this post, we understand that there was a meeting this morning between the City’s bureaucrats and D-64s bureaucrats, along with their respective legal counsel.  And, disappointingly, it was not a “public” meeting; i.e., neither the public nor the press were invited to attend.

Of course, that’s just the way the bureaucrats like it.  Public scrutiny, or “sunshine,” is about as welcomed by bureaucrats as it is by vampires.

Nevertheless, we can only hope that the same bureaucrats who have so ineptly handled this situation over the past several months have somehow become enlightened and will be able to make some serious progress toward getting this situation resolved. But the fact that it’s being done behind closed doors makes us wonder just how much the taxpayers are being sold down the river.

Judging by City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton’s latest missive to D-64 Supt. Phil Bender, a May 22, 2014 letter, we’re still not sure.

The letter points out some of the boneheaded terms of the existing intergovernmental agreement between the City and D-64 which our City officials back in 2003-04 were only too happy to sign off on in order to lock in the TIF Bribe – which it sounds like the City is trying to renegotiate.

But one idea that we hadn’t heard discussed all that vigorously by the Council until now is actually being presented in Hamilton’s letter as a proposal: “The City requests the taxing districts to cooperate in the legislative extension of the TIF term by 12 years.”

We’ll have to go back to the Kane McKenna report to look into all the pluses and minuses of such a 12-year extension.

But from our knowledge of TIFs, that’s never a good thing.

To read or post comments, click on title.

We’ve been pointing out for years how it’s the taxpayers – present and future – who pay the price for all the incompetence, waste, graft, fraud and corruption to be found in most of the almost 7,000 units of government in Illinois.

Unfortunately, Illinois ranks No. 1 among the 50 United States when it comes to positively rank government, so it’s more than a little annoying to realize that Illinois taxpayers are figuratively pouring truckloads of their tax dollars down various governmental rat holes.  That being the case, it’s even more annoying when local governmental bodies botch their respective jobs so thoroughly that they end up in litigation with each other.

Can you say “taxpayers paying legal bills for both sides of the same dispute”?

That might be what we’ll soon be looking at here in Park Ridge, judging by the stories in last week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“District 64 to Park Ridge: Pay money owed or go to court,” May 12), the Park Ridge Journal (“City Contests TIF Funds Owed To D64,” May 14) and The Bugle (“Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 demands money from city of Park Ridge,” May 12) about Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 threatening to sue the City of Park Ridge over an approximately $600,000 payment allegedly owed D-64 this year.

And annoyance becomes infuriation upon the realization that this dispute arises from that multi-million dollar albatross dangling around the City’s neck.

Yes, of course we mean the Uptown TIF.

As described in City Finance Director Kent Oliven’s April 11, 2014 Memorandum, the TIF’s originally-projected property tax revenue of $73 million has now been cut by almost 50% (47.5%, to be precise) because of the County’s decision to reduce assessment levels in 2009, and because property values have declined almost seven percent more in the TIF district than the 20% decline in the rest of the City.

As if that news isn’t bad enough, we’re now being told that the TIF-related bonds were “back-end loaded,” meaning that the annual TIF debt service payments will actually increase by an average of over $400,000 a year in 6 of the next 8 years, peaking in a debt service payment of $4.875 million in FY2022.

Those ill-conceived Uptown TIF bond obligations made over a decade ago already have caused the City’s debt rating to be downgraded, raising the City’s borrowing costs even though Moody’s has expressly recognized that current City management is responsibly biting the bullet “is implementing the necessary policies to balance TIF operations and rebuild General Fund liquidity” – through major expense cuts, layoffs, and tax and fee increases.

Needless to say, the City doesn’t have the luxury of wasting money – whether by overpayments to D-64 under the TIF-related September 8, 2003 intergovernmental agreement (a/k/a, “The Bribe Agreement”) or by litigation.  And we can’t imagine D-64 has a spare hundred grand laying around to litigate with the City.

But according to an April 7, 2014 letter from City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton to D-64 Supt. Philip Bender, D-64 has been improperly charging the City for “new students” in the TIF district whose addresses are not in the TIF district and, therefore, don’t qualify for new-student payments.  D-64 allegedly also has been charging the City for half-day pre-K and Kindergarten students for whom D-64 is not entitled to payments.  And the City claims it has been improperly charged for “new students” in the TIF district who aren’t “new” because they moved there from elsewhere inside D-64.

If that isn’t enough to sort out, there’s also a dispute about payments made to D-64 related to “new property” which – according to Matthew Welch, a TIF-specialist attorney hired by the City – may not even legally exist in the TIF district under applicable state law, as interpreted by the Illinois Department of Revenue.  Such “new property” charges might account for almost 3/4 of the City’s annual payment to D-64.

Consequently, it’s possible the City already has overpaid D-64 by millions of dollars over the past 11 years – and may have overpaid D-207 and the Park District, too!

So the City wants a reconciliation of its account with D-64 before coughing up another $600,000 for this year’s installment, which sounds reasonable notwithstanding the apparent lack of any sound justification for somebody(ies) at City Hall being asleep at the switch on this for the past 11 years.

But that’s not what D-64 wants to hear, especially when its own free-spending habits reportedly have made some of its programs and even its class sizes dependent on receiving that annual $600,000 (or so) from the City.  At least that’s what D-64’s leading tax/borrow/spend Board member, attorney John Heyde, is warning – while at the same time suggesting the City is acting in bad faith and attempting to “rewrite history just because [“The Bribe Agreement”] no longer suits [the City].”

So in addition to having the benefit of advice from attorney Dean Krone, who was a member of the D-64 Board back in 2003 and whose school law firm is the District’s regular counsel, D-64 now has hired former D-64 Board member Ares Dalianis of a different school law firm to handle any TIF-related litigation with the City.

Apparently it pays to be a former D-64 Board member who practices school law.

Before this turns into a full-blown legal battle on a collection of wide-ranging issues, however, D-64 owes the City a complete accounting of all the students for whom it has been charging TIF fees under The Bribe Agreement.  That way, the parties should be able to at least narrow the scope of any remaining disputes so that any litigation is as simple, narrow and efficient as it can possibly be.

Ideally, the only issues that would require court resolution would be purely “legal” ones related to whether or not there is – or can be – “new property” within the meaning of the PTELL/”tax cap” statute as interpreted by IDOR, an issue described in greater detail at Pages 4-5 of Hamilton’s April 14, 2014 letter, which would appear to have been written by the City’s TIF attorney.

From the sound of things, both the City’s counsel and D-64’s counsel may have screwed up in their haste to approve The Bribe Agreement 11 years ago.  But the last thing Park Ridge and D-64 taxpayers – not the exact same group of taxpayers, you know – need now is to have that screw-up compound by hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees because two cash-strapped local governmental bodies fighting over the same bone.

Hamilton’s letter seems to lay out the City’s position clearly and straightforwardly.

Where’s D-64’s equally clear and straightforward response?

To read or post comments, click on title.

We haven’t had a chance to complete our review of the recently-passed 2014-15 City of Park Ridge budget, which is the first one in 5 years to escape any form of veto by Mayor Dave Schmidt. But at least one budget decision the Council made was a sound one: deciding not to re-establish a full-time City economic development position.

A full-time ED “coordinator” has been the No. 1 fantasy of the Chamber of Commerce and a number of local business owners ever since the City nuked the ED “director” position – and its $100K-plus compensation package – back in 2010. At that time the Council didn’t see enough measurable business generation or maintenance to justify the expense.

It was the right decision then, and it’s the right decision now.

As we’ve previously noted on several occasions, economic development in Park Ridge appears to be limited by several factors – most notably our lack of available land to accommodate big-box, high volume, or otherwise high sales tax-generating businesses. Accessibility is also problematic, with a limited number of major roadways available to transport non-resident customers quickly and easily into our commercial areas, including Uptown (former home to the Bredemann Toyota and Buick dealerships, and the Napleton Cadillac dealership).

Like it or not, Touhy, Greenwood, Northwest Hwy. and Dee Road are not favorites of non-residents looking to get somewhere quickly and easily.

But none of those problems was enough to stop City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton, Community Preservation and Development Director Jim Testin, and Finance Director Kent Oliven from enthusiastically endorsing the hiring of a new full-time ED person, even if they couldn’t seem to articulate sound business reasoning for that endorsement.

According to a report in this week’s Park Ridge Journal (“Economic Development Won’t Get Full-Time Director,” May 7), Hamilton and Testin, apparently with some help from Ald. Roger Shubert (4th), went so far as to modify the ED job description to include tasks seemingly unrelated to new business development but likely to build support from certain special interests, such as “serving as a liaison to local human and social service organizations.”

How does that translate into a more thriving retail/business climate?

The flabbiness of such bureaucratic thinking was highlighted by Ald. Marty Maloney (7th), who asked Hamilton the threshold $64,000 question: “Is the end result [of creating the new position] to positively increase sales tax revenues?”

Not surprisingly, Hamilton provided one of his typically weak non-answers, suggesting that simply having someone marketing and doing public relations for the City was a good enough end result for him. In other words, Hamilton doesn’t need measurable economic benefit from the holder of a position costing the taxpayers six figures because mere activity is as good as actual achievement.

For his part, Testin, from whom we had grown to expect more substanctive analysis, couldn’t seem to avoid reaching for that easiest of bureaucratic alibis ever since the recession hit in 2007 – claiming that a fluctuating economy would make it hard to use economic factors to judge an ED’s job performance.

Tell that to every private-sector manager who has to judge an employee’s performance by economic factors, usually on a quarterly basis and sometimes even on a weekly basis.

The Journal story reports that Maloney was joined in his inquiries by Ald. Marc Mazzuca (6th), who noted that not only would the ED position itself cost between $116,000 and $120,000 once benefits were figured in, but that Hamilton, Testin and Oliven had left out any marketing budget for ED activities such as traveling to trade shows and developing marketing platforms to tell Park Ridge’s story.

Kind of like hiring a painter but not figuring in the cost of paint, brushes and tarps.

Interestingly enough, the Journal story ends with a look back to 2010 when the ED position was eliminated, and recalling how local insurance broker (and then-Chamber of Commerce president) Dave Donovan defended the then-ED director by pointing out how she had secured 40 new businesses, the expansion of 5 others, and generated $5 million in new tax growth during her 5 years on the job.

We remember those discussions quite well, which is why we remember that Mr. Donovan and his fellow ED director fans never seemed able to directly tie most of those new businesses to the ED director’s efforts (a la Testin’s excuse, above).  Instead, they were content to figuratively give the rooster credit for the dawn.  And when counting up her “wins” they conveniently ignored her “losses”: the various businesses that had closed during that same 5-year period, not the least of which was major sales tax generator Napleton Cadillac.

That’s the kind of half-baked “analysis” that invariably leads to the making of bad decisions, and their continuation.

The best thing City government can do to enhance ED is to put its own economic house in order so that it doesn’t discourage businesses from coming here and staying here by high taxes, unreasonable restrictions, and substandard services.  As we have seen with Whole Foods, Mariano’s, Chipotle, etc., we don’t need an ED director or coordinator to attract quality retail.

But so long as our highly-paid senior City management team can’t seem to (or doesn’t want to) apply basic business principles and metrics to the operations they are managing and the initiatives they are recommending, Park Ridge taxpayers will need to rely on our $100/month aldermen and our $1,000/month mayor to micro-manage those operations and initiatives – including whether or not to hire a full-time ED person.

Fortunately, in this case Alds. Maloney and Mazzuca performed like another pair of “M & M boys,” albeit from another era and another venue.

Nice hitting, guys!

To read or post comments, click on title.

Anybody who has read this blog for any length of time knows how much we harp on transparency and accountability.  After honesty and integrity, there aren’t two qualities we’d rather have in government.

But transparency and accountability should serve a legitimate public purpose rather than being merely gratuitous.

Which brings us to an article that just appeared yesterday in the on-line version of the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate, breathlessly titled: “Park Ridge officials decline to release income taxes.” (May 6, 2014)

According to the article, the H-A requested that Mayor Dave Schmidt and the City’s seven aldermen release their 2013 income tax returns to the public. No reason was articulated for that request, although its reference to “the release of tax returns by Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn and gubernatorial opponent Bruce Rauner last month” suggests that the H-A sees some connection between the highest office of our state and the highest offices in our City.

The mayor and all seven aldermen refused the H-A’s request.

As well they should have.

In the first instance, there’s no Illinois law that requires local government officials to publish their income tax returns. In fact, there’s no Illinois law that requires our gubernatorial candidates to publish theirs, or that requires such disclosures from our state senators and state representatives. And as best as we can tell, there isn’t even any federal law that requires presidential candidates to publish their income tax returns, even if such publication has become de rigeur in those campaigns in much the same way as in gubernatorial campaigns.

So what’s the point of such disclosures by the mayor and the Council, H-A?

What information do income tax returns contain that so directly bears on the decisions made by our City officials on City issues that it warrants an invasion of their personal privacy (and that of their spouses, where joint returns are involved) to which income tax returns are generally entitled by law?  Not surprisingly, the H-A article doesn’t say.

But given that City government is funded by property taxes, wouldn’t it make more sense for the H-A to have requested copies of each official’s property tax bill?  Or just to have obtained them directly from Cook County?

When aldermen vote for or against a property tax increase, or when the mayor vetoes a property tax increase, it might be interesting to know how such a decision will impact their own tax bill – which might provide at least a sliver of understanding about why they cast their votes the way they did.  It stands to reason that an alderman with a $600,000 home might be less inclined toward a big tax increase than an alderman with a $200,000 condo, given that the City’s portion of the former’s tax bill could increase by three times the increase to the latter’s.

Had the H-A actually given some thought to the reason for disclosure of tax information rather than merely knee-jerk reacting to what our state’s gubernatorial candidates were doing, it would have asked for property tax bills.  And we’re betting it would have received full compliance from the mayor and the aldermen.

But that wouldn’t have made for as nifty a headline.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Those words were spoken by then-city manager Tim Schuenke a little over a decade ago when he was telling the then-Library board and staff how they could get a new library as part of the Uptown TIF.

The “8” represented a majority of the City Council back then.  The “8,000” was a convenient symbol for the number of voters it might take to win a referendum.

Back then the Council had 14 members – 2 from each ward – before master manipulator Howard Frimark was elected mayor and decided to go Schuenke one better.  Frimark sponsored and passed a referendum in November 2006 to cut the Council from 14 to 7.

Because, of course, it’s easier to convince (and elect) 4 than it is to elect and convince 8.  And with the “right” 4, you can pretty much tell the 8,000 to pound sand.

The relevance of Schuenke’s pithy statement comes to mind now that two referendums are being discussed.

One of those is for an increased tax levy targeted to providing more money on an annual basis for the Park Ridge Library to replace the extra funding – above and beyond the base funding prescribed by Illinois law – the City used to voluntarily give the Library back when “tax, borrow and spend” was the unofficial motto of City government.

The other is for a multi-million dollar bond issue to pay for the cost of flood remediation for 2-3 distinct sections of the City.

Those who want to take more out of government than they pay in didn’t mind a bit when the City was deficit spending to the point where its General (operating) Fund balance dropped so low that occasionally money to cover the City’s payroll had to be borrowed from one of the City’s enterprise funds, like the Sewer Fund or the Water Fund.  Nor did they care all that much, if at all, that such reckless management, along with the Uptown TIF debt, was leading to the downgrading of the City’s credit rating that continues to this day – as noted in City Finance Director Ken Oliven’s April 11, 2014 TIF Update Memorandum:

“The Uptown TIF obligations caused the City’s debt rating to be both downgraded and put on negative outlook in 2012.  This increased City borrowing costs for debt issued that year.”

Notably, Oliven’s memo goes on to quote a Moody’s rating report that “[a]lthough management is implementing the necessary policies to balance the TIF operations and rebuild General Fund liquidity, the positive results have yet to be demonstrated in audited results.”  That’s a pointed reference to the efforts Mayor Dave Schmidt and the Council have made to reduce spending while keeping annual tax increases in the moderate 3-4% range.

But Moody’s goes on to warn that “[i]f actual operating results in fiscal 2013, 2014 and 2015 negatively deviate from current expectations by a significant magnitude, the city’s credit rating will likely face downward pressure.”

That means higher borrowing costs for the City, especially if/when it issues the tens of millions of dollars of bonds it will need to pay for the flood control projects currently being debated.  And which should go to referendum.

Not surprisingly, these kinds of ominous warnings from bond rating agencies don’t faze the folks who think their own particular one-trick ponies are entitled to special funding treatment by the taxpayers.  They know that their best chance for getting such special treatment is convincing 4 of the 7 people sitting around The Horseshoe at City Hall instead of having to go to referendum and convince 8,000 voters– as they might need to do for any referendum issue on the November general election ballot.

Like the referendum the City Council gave a preliminary green light to at last night’s City Council COW (Committee Of the Whole) meeting.

The basic concept of going to referendum for a separate Library tax levy increase was approved by a vote of 5 (Alds. Milissis, Shubert, Knight, Mazzuca and Maloney) to 2 (Alds. Sweeney and Smith).  Nevertheless, the idea of a binding referendum rather than a merely advisory one passed unanimously.  And going to referendum this November passed 6-1, with Ald. Smith voting “no.”

That decision, having passed through the COW, still has to be approved by the full Council on two readings.  Meanwhile, the actual text of the referendum question and the dollar amount of the levy increase will need to be determined.

That’s a blow for the Library Staff and a majority of the Library Board who didn’t want a referendum of any kind.  They had hoped to pressure at least 4 aldermen into handing over an extra half-million dollars or more a year of unmarked City funds than to ask the taxpayers directly for those funds earmarked expressly for the Library.  That way, they never would have to find out by actual vote count how many taxpayers really wanted the Library to get all the funds the Staff and Board majority insist they do.

But if a referendum couldn’t be avoided, they preferred the April ballot to November’s.

Because they’d rather persuade 4,000 voters in April than 8,000 in November.

To read or post comments, click on title.