We’ve always been big on intergovernmental cooperation between/among our various units of local government – so long as that “cooperation” is a win/win for each of the units of government involved in the deal.

Keep your eye out for that “win/win” at tonight’s Park Ridge City Council meeting, when the Council is scheduled to vote on the final reading of the zoning MAP Amendment and a number of variances the Park Ridge Park District is seeking for the construction of the $13 million-plus Youth Campus Park (the “YCP”).

As best as we can tell, the Park District has done a pretty good job of designing the YCP to be neighborhood-friendly, or at least as neighborhood-friendly as an 11-acre park facility can be.  According to City Engineer Sarah Mitchell, the YCP design is in full compliance with the City’s stormwater management ordinance for a 100-year rain event – although last month Ald. Dan Knight (5th) and a couple of other aldermen expressed concerns that such compliance be clearly and unequivocally memorialized in writing before final Council approval is given.

We’re still not sure that has been done, but we trust the Council will ensure that’s the case before final approval is granted.

In looking at this YCP MAP Amendment/variance deal, we see a big “win” for the Park District but no commensurate “win” for the City.  That imbalance might be resolved, however, by a suggestion from Ald. Jim Smith (3rd) – if we understand it, which is not always the case with Smitty’s suggestions – that the Park District commit itself to making Northwest Park available for stormwater detention IF the City decides to go ahead with that portion of the Burke flood control proposal that includes such a detention area.

Obviously, the cost of making Northwest Park suitable for stormwater detention would have to be borne by the City, and would have to include a provision for an ongoing City obligation to protect that park from substantial damage caused by water detention.  Unfortunately, it sounds as if the Park District has told the City to pound sand any time such a commitment has been raised, which doesn’t sound much like the “win/win” spirit that’s supposed to be the hallmark of intergovernmental cooperation.

And Park Board members who have spoken publicly on this topic sound far more combative than cooperative.

Park Commissioner/state representative candidate (or should that be state representative candidate/Park Commissioner?) Mel Thillens has accused the City Council of “holding up a process that was politically supported by the [YCP] referendum…for no good reason.”

It’s Local Government 101, however, that while the Park District’s referendum results authorized the Park District to borrow and spend $13 million-plus to build the YCP, it didn’t also require or even authorize the City to grant a MAP Amendment or a bunch of variances from the City’s Zoning Code to enable the construction of YCP.  That’s because Local Government 101 also teaches that the City Council’s job is to look out for the City’s interests and the City’s taxpayers, neither of which is exactly the same as the Park District’s.

And one of the City’s interests that can be linked to the MAP Amendment and the variances sought by the Park District is doing what it can to ensure its ability to construct the flood relief projects that already have been identified as priorities by the Burke study, like the Northwest Park detention area.

So we see nothing wrong with the City’s linking its approval of the YCP MAP Amendment and variances to the Park District’s providing an ironclad agreement to make Northwest Park available to the City for flood water detention so long as that: (a) does not require the Park District to pay for any of the conversion costs; (b) any such conversion will be done with all reasonable expedience so as not to take those athletic fields out of commission unduly; and (c) the City agrees to underwrite future repair of any damage to Northwest Park from stormwater detention.

In fact, the Park District’s agreeing to the detention area as a quid pro quo for the zoning relief it wants from the City is the very LEAST the Park District can do for the City and its taxpayers.

As Ald. Marc Mazzuca (6th) pointed out in response to the complaints from the Park District that what amounts to the City Council’s rightful circumspection and due diligence is costing the taxpayers money: “When you’re spending $13 million of taxpayer money to fundamentally change the land use for an 11-acre parcel, it would seem one extra meeting shouldn’t kill you.”

Exactly.  If the Park District deserves its zoning “win” at YCP, so does the City.  And that should include the Park District’s ironclad agreement to the City’s right to use Northwest Park for stormwater detention if necessary.

Before the City gives its final sign-off on the Park District’s YCP zoning accommodations.

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Most people are familiar with the plaintive cry: “Don’t just stand there, do something.”

When it comes to government, that call often proves an irresistible Sirens’ song to the aim-to-please politicians and path-of-least-resistance bureaucrats.  And when doing “something” can be accomplished with other people’s money (“OPM”), the sky is often the limit on how much OPM will be spent.

The City of Park Ridge currently is hearing the steady drum beat from certain residents who want “something” – anything – done about flooding.  And we’re with them…to a point.

Since his election in April 2009, Mayor Dave Schmidt has pushed for some form of solution to at least the worst areas of our chronic flooding problem.  He formed the Flood Control Task Force and staffed it with a number of knowledgeable volunteers who produced some solid work product, with the exception of a penny foolish, pound foolish mis-step: recommending that the City’s taxpayers subsidize individual homeowners for their installation of “private” flood control devices like overhead sewers and check valves.

Blame it on OPM intoxication.

The City Council also engaged Christopher B. Burke Engineering to study the flooding problem and devise a seemingly comprehensive flood remediation program.  Unfortunately, it appears the entire Burke program would cost the City $100 million or more, which might make some kind of sense if it provided the entire City with protection from the 100-year floods we seem to be getting every year or so.

But it doesn’t.

Instead, it provides a handful or so of areas with protection against only 10-year floods.  And, frankly, spending multi-millions of dollars on multi-year bonded debt merely for 10-year flood protection is, in a word, “irresponsible.”  And if that word’s not enough for you, try “wasteful.”  Or “stupid.”

Unfortunately, access to OPM often inspires ideas that fit those descriptions.

And for people with flooding problems, the only questions seem to be: “Why not?” and “How soon?”

Certain folks around The Horseshoe at 505 Butler Place have indicated their concern about spending that much money for what looks to be very little relief for a relatively few people.  City staff promptly held its collective finger to the wind and then suggested that the City hire another engineering firm to “validate” the Burke report.  Or, failing that, hire another engineering firm to provide a “second opinion” of the Burke report.  Or simply decide to move forward on the Burke recommendations, costs be damned.

Fortunately for City taxpayers, this mayor and these aldermen – unlike so many of their predecessors – seem to understand that difficult problems needing expensive solutions require serious thought and sound judgment.  That’s why we hold out hope that they won’t let themselves get stampeded by the folks who want to blow millions of tax dollars on half-baked flood control measures of dubious value.

Which includes any 10-year flood solution, for starters.

As best as we can figure it, the only ways to achieve meaningful flood control are to: (a) pump the water out of Park Ridge; or (b) safely store it in Park Ridge – what is commonly called “detention.”

Pumping it out of Park Ridge, however, requires a cooperative receiver of that water.  And from what we’ve seen over the years, when flooding hits this area there seems to be a decided shortage of neighboring areas pleading: “Send us your run-off, your back-up, your stagnant ponding yearning to flow free.”

To the contrary, in almost every such situation the widespread suspicion among Park Ridge flooding victims is that somebody – the IEPA, the MWRD, the Army Corp of Engineers, or Satan himself – is actively preventing the evacuation of water from Park Ridge by every avenue.

That leaves detention as the most dependable way for Park Ridge to independently manage its flood water.

Under the Burke flood control program, two of the three main projects involve storm water detention: at Northwest Park and at the Park Ridge Country Club.  And it might be part of the Mayfield Estates project, although that would require the City to acquire and demolish as many as 8 of the 23-homes in that neighborhood, at a cost of several million dollars.

Residents living west of the Park Ridge Country Club want the City to build a detention area on Country Club property.  But that would cost at least $23 million and would only address 10-year floods for approximately 165 residences.  Adding the splitting of sanitary and storm sewers to the Country Club detention area would benefit 680 properties, but would drive that cost up to almost $49 million and still protect against only 10-year floods.

That kind of money for merely 10-year flood protection should be considered D.O.A. by the Council…unless the residents of those affected areas would be willing to turn them into Special Service Areas (“SSA”s) that would be separately taxed to cover the cost of what appear to be expensive and incomplete solutions to localized flooding problems.

For those 165 properties west of the Country Club, 10-year flood protection would cost them around $140,000 each, while the amped-up $49 million project for 680 properties would cost a relatively bargain-basement $72,000 per property.  That’s without debt service costs, of course.

We’re not sure of all the legal wrangling required to get these SSA referenda on an election ballot, but there’s no way all the details can be worked out and the language finalized before the filing deadline for putting them on this March’s primary ballot election.  But there should be plenty of time to get that done between now and the filing deadline for next November’s general election.

Expect to hear a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth by the folks in those proposed SSAs if the Council starts moving in that direction.  Expect to hear “Why not?” and “How soon?” replaced by: “We pay taxes so why should we have to pay extra to keep our basements dry?”

That’s the kind of changed tune you get when OPM becomes YOM:

“Your Own Money.”

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Listening to the recent debates about amending the Park Ridge sign code to permit electronic message boards (“EMB”s), the chorus of a well-known R.E.M. song kept running through our mind: “It’s the end of the world as we know it.”

To hear the anti-EMB folks tell it, EMBs are the devil’s tool that will turn quaint Park Ridge into a vulgar Rosemont, increase traffic accidents by distracted drivers, otherwise cause various forms of lesser mischief that erode the “character” of Park Ridge, and may even cause the heartbreak of psoriasis.   The pro-EMB folks, on the other hand, suggest that prohibitions and even significant restrictions on EMBs put local businesses at some form of competitive disadvantage and reinforce the perception of Park Ridge as “unfriendly to business.”

We like the “character” of Park Ridge, and we get the sense we’re not alone in that.  But what exactly is the “character” of Park Ridge, and how will EMBs ruin it?  And if Park Ridge is so “unfriendly” to business, explain Whole Foods and Mariano’s both opening stores here within a six month stretch?

The City’s Sign Task Force had recommended that EMBs be permitted, albeit with a number of restrictions.  That recommendation, however, was over-ruled by the City’s Planning & Zoning Commission at its September 24, 2013 meeting.  At a special meeting on November 19, 2013, and at another one this past Tuesday (12.03.13) night, the City Council entertained public debate on whether EMBs should be banned completely, per the P&Z recommendation.

As best as we can tell from Tuesday’s meeting, EMBs won’t be coming to Park Ridge anytime soon for a very practical reason: there appears to be no good way to permit EMBs with limitations that satisfactorily balances the competing rights and interests of the pro- and anti- factions without subjecting the City to an increased risk of litigation.

City Attorney Everette M. “Buzz” Hill, Jr., in a memorandum, identified a number of legal issues that appear to be irreconcilable – in light of the competing interests and agendas – other than by either a blanket permission or a blanket prohibition.  Many of Hill’s observations echo those articulated by the executive director of the Illinois Sign Association in his letter of August 15, 2013.

Frankly, while we don’t have any strong desire to see EMBs in Park Ridge, we believe that EMBs can be permitted in ways that would be constitutional and yet not be the end of Park Ridge’s “character” as we know it.  Just like allowing and even liberalizing alcohol sales, or eliminating City subsidies to private community groups, haven’t been the end of that “character,” either, despite dire warnings from opponents of those two decisions that they would.  We agree with Alds. Milissis and Knight that EMBs are a significant-enough and growing issue that the City must find ways to accommodate them if at all possible.

That leads us to the real point of this post: what appears to be a lack of efficient management of the time and resources of the City’s committees, commissions and task forces – and, ultimately, of the Council itself.

As best as we can tell, neither the Sign Task Force nor P&Z had the benefit of the analysis and opinions contained in Hill’s memorandum; and the Sign Task Force did not have the Illinois Sign Association’s letter.  That would have put both those bodies at a significant disadvantage in undertaking their tasks relative to EMBs.  It also causes us to wonder whether both bodies’ efforts and outcomes re the EMBs would have been different – or at least less time-consuming – had they had those legal opinions and insights from the beginning.

The members of the Sign Task force and P&Z – like the members of all other City citizens’ committees, commissions and task forces – are volunteers who perform valuable services to the community without compensation.  Similarly, the mayor and the aldermen provide an extraordinary amount of service and undertake substantial responsibility for nominal compensation.

But when a significant portion of the time and effort devoted to a particular task – in this case, to EMBs – by these officials may have been wasted because they lacked significant information that could have been obtained at the beginning of the process rather than at the later stages, we have to wonder why it wasn’t.

For this committee-commission-task force process to work, everybody has to operate at a high level.  It should be City staff’s responsibility to procure and provide those volunteers with the kinds of legal opinions, industry insights, and reasonable foundation of relevant data sufficient to inform those volunteers about the matters they will be addressing.  Otherwise we end up with the classic GIGO situation.

And the Council ends up having to re-invent the wheel.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Over a year and one-half ago the Police Chief’s Advisory Task Force (the “PCATF”), in an obvious attempt to stampede the then-City Council into approving a $1 million-plus three-phase police station “improvement” project, issued a 75-page PowerPoint presentation – titled “Cost Effective Strategies to Address Risk Factors at the Police Facility.”

That presentation described the police station as an unhealthy and unsafe facility buried in the basement of City Hall.  And mold was portrayed as the most demonstrable of those health and safety problems – so hazardous that a discussion of it comprised Pages 33 through 38 of the presentation.

Yet remediation of that mold problem was put off until the final year of the proposed three-year improvement program, even though Chief Frank Kaminski publicly acknowledged the possibility that the Council could choose not to fund the second and/or third years of the program.

Guess what?

At its November 25 COW meeting, the City Council voted to postpone the $389,500 Phase II of the project for budgetary reasons.  That postponement helps the City hold its property tax levy increase to 2.2%.

And guess what else?

According to an article in this week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“City Council postpones Park Ridge police station improvements,” 11.29.13), in response to Mayor Dave Schmidt’s recent request that City Staff re-assess the air quality of the police station and formulate a cost-effective proposal for addressing the mold problem, Chief K said that problem might be remedied by hiring a cleaning company to clean the cop shop at least twice a year.

Golly, who would have figured that this hazardous mold problem that supposedly needed more than one-half million dollars of preliminary work – via the first two phases of the three-year project – before it could be addressed can now be remedied after just one phase by…wait for it…cleaning?  Okay, cleaning at least twice a year.

Why wasn’t  “cleaning” – even four times a year – the FIRST solution that occurred to Chief K and the PCATF?  Could it be that mold was just the most convenient scare tactic available to people who cared more about the ends – one million dollars-plus of non-essential wants rather than needs – than about the honesty and transparency of the means?

We sure hope not.  But we find it hard to believe that Chief K and the PCATF members could be so clueless.

Ald. Nick Milissis (2nd) proposed the postponement, suggesting that Phases II and III of the cop shop project might be reconsidered after the City decides whether and when it will sell two City-owned buildings: the old public works garage at Greenwood and Elm, and the Fire Dept. house/office next to the Devon Avenue fire house.  That’s the kind of fiscally-sound thinking the taxpayers need to see more of from aldermen other than Milissis and Ald. Dan Knight (5th).

Our concern, however, is that now that sale of those two properties has been identified as a possible source of revenue for Phases II and III of the cop shop project, there will be a new single-minded push to get those properties sold without any thought given to the City’s future property needs.  According to the H-A article, Chief K already is talking about selling the old public works building “as soon as we can”; and a property needs analysis is underway, with completion scheduled for February-March 2014.

That raises our suspicions even further.  Hopefully, this Council won’t allow itself to be sold the same lame bill of goods that so easily bamboozled a majority of the previous Council back in 2012.

Ronald Reagan is known for his “trust, but verify” admonition.  When it comes to anything involving the Park Ridge police station, however, the Council should drop the “trust” part and just go with “verify.”

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Talk to any Park Ridge alderman and he probably can tell you about how often a Park Ridge resident complains to him about some problem involving the Park Ridge Park District, or Park Ridge-Niles School District 64.

That’s because too many residents apparently don’t know enough basic civics to realize and/or understand that the City is a different governmental body from the Park District or District 64 – or that each of those bodies is basically autonomous, with their own separate budgets and tax levies.

That means if the Park District or D-64 were to run out of money, the City wouldn’t cover their bounced checks.  And vice versa.

While most of the City’s taxpayers are also taxpayers of the Park District and D-64, the populations of all three are not identical because their borders are not the same.  For example, certain parts of Park Ridge (such as Park Ridge Pointe) are not within the Park District’s boundaries, and certain parts of the Park District and D-64 are in Niles.

Not only is this concept lost on many ordinary residents, but it seems to be lost on certain City officials, according to a story in last week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“Officials looking into Park Ridge Baseball’s rent-free use of city building,” Nov. 21).

As reported in that article, for the past two years Park Ridge Baseball/Softball, Inc. (“PRBS”) – a private corporation that runs the Park Ridge Park District’s baseball and softball programs as an “affiliate” of the Park District – has been using the City’s former public works building at Elm and Greenwood, rent free, for winter practices.  In the process, PRBS has run up approximately $9,500 a year in gas and electric bills.  Not surprisingly, the idea was initially approved by then-city mgr. Jim Hock, which should make it suspect on that basis alone.

We have a problem with $9,500 being charged to the account of the City’s taxpayers, some of whom are not even Park District taxpayers, just so a private corporation affiliated with the Park District can have a free practice facility for its program participants.  That’s not a king’s ransom, to be sure, but it is another one of those situations where the principle is what counts – as well as the concern that, if the little things can be botched, then bigger things also are at risk of of going awry.

Like those no-bid contracts for $32,000 of fire hydrants, $150,000 of defibrillators, and million dollar-plus professional service fees for sewer and flood control consulting and design.

How do our highly-paid City officials explain PRBS’s free use of a City facility?  Like they took a crash course from the Bill Clinton School of Parsing and Dissembling.

City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton says he doesn’t think the free use constitutes a violation of the City Council Policy No. 36 because PRBS is an affiliate of another public body, the Park District; and those baseball practices constitute “approved meetings” of “other governmental bodies.”  Amazingly, City Attorney Everette “Buzz” Hill seems to agree with Hamilton, claiming that the phrase “approved meetings of other governmental bodies” can be broadly interpreted to include a gathering of baseball or softball players organized by a private corporation that effectively serves as a vendor of the Park District’s baseball and softball programs.

The silliness, if not outright disingenuousness, of such a tortured interpretation of Policy No. 36’s plain language should be obvious to any plain-speaking, plain-hearing person.  Unless, of course, the first thought that pops into your head whenever you drive past Kalina Field or Hinkley Park while a baseball or softball game is in progress is: “Gee, I didn’t know the Park Board was meeting tonight”; or “What number on tonight’s agenda is ‘runners on the corners, two outs and your .091 hitter at the plate?’ ”

Then again, you have to remember that Bill Clinton didn’t have “sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” either.

Don’t expect the absurdity baseball practices being treated the same as Park Board meetings to bother the folks who run PRBS, or the parents of the li’l sluggers who get to sponge off City taxpayers, if only to the tune of $9,600 a year, and thereby avoid having to pay the City to use the old City garage space.  That way, those parents can more easily afford to pay the $200/hour it reportedly costs to rent space at The Dome in Rosemont, or to pay the costs of “supervision” whenever PRBS uses the Park District’s own facilities.

Not surprisingly, long-time PRBS czar Garry Abezetian calls the arrangement “a great partnership” that “saves the kids and families in the program from having to rent space.”  He must have taken the Bill Clinton course, too, because all partners in a “partnership” are supposed to benefit from the “partnership’s” activities; and, try as we might, we can’t see what benefit the City and its taxpayers are getting out of this deal.

According to Abezetian, PRBS has paid for some “improvements” to the old City garage, like “new carpeting and lighting and a fresh coat of paint.”  Of course, all of that just happens to benefit…wait for it…PRBS!  The City previously was able to rent that facility to NICOR for $250,000 in the last year of NICOR’s tenancy, without any of those “improvements.”  We seriously doubt any prospective purchaser of that property is going to care one whit about, or pay one dime more for, those amenities.

We don’t begrudge PRBS, or any other community organizations which satisfies the eligibility requirements of Policy No. 36, the use of City facilities.  Section I (A) of that Policy, however, permits non-City use of City facilities – other than the current Public Works Service Center and the Library – only for “[a]pproved meetings of other governmental bodies (i.e., Maine South Clinical Government Class and the Cook Co. Zoning Board).”  Kids’ baseball practices and games are not “approved meetings,” nor are they conduct of another “governmental body.”

That means we have yet another instance of “what’s-in-it-for-us?” private mooching – like with those D-64 “boycotters” we wrote about in our 11.18.13 post.  And our City officials don’t seem any more inclined or competent to deal with such moochers than are our D-64 officials.

So just stick that $9,500 of gas and electric charges on the taxpayers’ bill, and chalk it up to the shameless once again prevailing over the spineless.

Who, in this instance, also have shown themselves to be clueless.

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Once again this year, approximately 100 volunteers from an assortment of Park Ridge organizations have ensured that the City’s Uptown area will be lit up for the holidays.

This past Saturday members of the Park Ridge Indian Scouts/Indian Princesses, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the Pistols Girls Softball program, and their parents – fueled by food provided by All on the Road Catering, Applauz Catering, D’Agostino’s Pizza, Houlihan’s, Jersey Mike’s Subs, Lisa’s Italian Ice and Noodles & Co., and using lights provided by an anonymous donor  – decorated the trees throughout the Uptown business district.

Prior to 2009, the City would spend thousands of dollars each year to hire private companies to decorate the trees.  But Mayor Dave Schmidt and the City Council decided that those costs could not be justified when the City was in the midst of cutting other expenses in order to reduce annual $1 million-plus deficits, much of which were caused by the disastrous Uptown TIF financing.

That’s when the private citizens stepped up to the plate, creating the Holiday Lights Coalition

The Park Ridge Herald-Advocate, however, is reporting that the lights aren’t quite as numerous or as bright as in past years– because the volunteers did not have access to a bucket lift to string the higher branches of the larger trees.

That’s a shame.  But it doesn’t have to be that way.

There’s got to be somebody with ties to Park Ridge who has access to a bucket lift and who can donate a few hours of its use this Saturday or Sunday.  How about the AT&T folks, who are in the process of polluting our parkways with their U-verse cable boxes?  The cost of providing a bucket lift for several hours this weekend shouldn’t cause even a fraction of a penny drop in the dividends AT&T will be paying its shareholders.

But if no such donation is forthcoming, why don’t the Uptown merchants and the Chamber of Commerce chip in to cover the cost?  After all, it’s those merchants who are the principal beneficiaries of a bright and inviting shopping and dining area.

Volunteers with no financial stake in the matter have marched the lighting effort 95 yards down the field.  Now it’s time for one more private donor, or the Chamber and the Uptown merchants, to take the ball and punch it over the goal line.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Last week’s local papers published a guest essay by Ald. Dan Knight (5th), the chairman of the Park Ridge City Council’s Finance Committee, about the financial problems and disappointments presented by the Uptown TIF.

Readers who didn’t pay attention to the TIF process when it was being created and implemented by past mayors (Ron Wietecha and Mike Marous) and City Councils (from 2003 through 2006) can benefit from the short history and explanation of the TIF presented by Knight.  But the essence of that essay is whether the City should stop abating the property taxes that otherwise would be levied specifically to pay the TIF-related General Obligation (“G.O.”) bonds.

Until now, the City has abated those property taxes related to servicing the TIF-related G.O. bonds, which are backed by the City’s full faith and credit (i.e., all of its assets and taxing ability).

This is significant in two respects, the first being transparency.

According to Knight’s essay and the front page of the Agenda Cover Memorandum by the City’s Acting Finance Director, Kent Oliven, the City’s customary abatement of those taxes that otherwise would be specifically levied by the County to cover the annual debt service on the City’s four TIF-related bond issues (Series 2004A, 2005A, 2006A and 2006B) means that those expenditures are “rolled into the City of Park Ridge line on a property tax bill” while TIF-related levies would “have their own line” on that bill.

We’re not sure why that has been done for all these years, but one explanation that comes readily to mind is that those mayors and aldermen responsible for the TIF decided that the luster of their grand Uptown project might dull a bit in the public’s eye if the million-dollar-a-year debt service cost kept popping up as a separate line item on each semi-annual tax bill.  Such an explanation seems to be born out (based on admittedly anecdotal evidence) whenever ordinary citizens discuss the TIF and the Uptown redevelopment it funded.

Ask residents if they like the development itself, and most respond with an unqualified (and often smiling) “yes.”  But inform them that the TIF has been running up $1 million annual deficits totaling approximately $6 million so far, which the City’s General Fund has been covering, and the response usually changes to an irritated “What?”  And follow that up with the expert projections now suggesting that the TIF will produce a total deficit of more than $20 million over its lifetime instead of the $40 million windfall profit the TIF-addled mayors and aldermen were touting less than a decade ago, and the average listener will go from the irritated “What?” to an incredulous “WTF”?!?!

And all that’s without telling them how all those TIF deficits have led to a downgrade of the City’s bond rating.

The second significant aspect of the TIF-related tax abatement involves how that abatement has resulted in the TIF’s looting of the General Fund by the approximately $6 million referenced above.

So the City Council is going to take up the abatement issue this November and December as part of its 2014-15 budget process.  The Mayor and the Aldermen will discuss whether to raise the City’s tax levy to cover all or part of the debt service cost of those TIF-related G.O. bonds, thereby reducing or eliminating the continued erosion of the General Fund.  Oliven suggests that doing so would send “a signal that the City is aware of its debt obligations and is willing and able to raise taxes, if necessary, to meet those obligations.”

This is what it’s come to: further reduce expenses, or raise revenues through a higher-than-usual tax increase.

We’d love to see former mayors Wietecha and Marous, former city manager Tim Schuenke and all those TIF-loving aldermen return to take a bow for those results of their grand TIF plan, and maybe share with the current Council and City Staff all the reasons why the TIF garnered their enthusiastic support.  But we’re guessing that isn’t likely to happen.  The ones we’ve talked to recently seem to have partial Alzheimers (Half-heimers?) when it comes to the TIF’s financing and projections.

Which proves the old adage that success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.

Which the current Mayor and Council have been forced to adopt.

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What a difference a few months make.

Back in January, February and March, Fire Chief Mike Zywanski was trying to stampede the City Council into buying Zoll replacement defibrillators on a no-bid basis because the current ones were past their useful life and implicitly jeopardized the safety of Park Ridge residents.  He kept that shtick up until a few pointed questions from Mayor Dave Schmidt and Finance Committee chair Ald. Dan Knight (5th) forced him to admit that public safety would not be threatened by delaying that purchase.

At Monday night’s public works Council COW meeting, bowever, Chief Z sounded like a man who had found religion – even if the epiphany was produced by a whack on the head with a Bible or the City Code – when he proclaimed that not only did his evaluation Committee test two brands of defibrillator besides his beloved Zoll, but that the Committee is now looking at “reconditioned units,” “military surplus” units, and purchasing cooperatives.

Wow!  Next thing you’ll know, Chief Z will be featured on the new Joe Francis exploitation video: “Fire Chiefs Gone Wild!”?

Chief Z even brought Battalion Chief Tim Norton along with him, who confirmed (in response to a question from Knight) that the current defibrillators are still in good working order.

That’s good to know, because according to Chief Z there’s still a lot to do before he brings a formal purchase recommendation to the Council – even though the Committee (according to its August 28 meeting minutes) already has unanimously recommended the Zoll.  Chief Z talked about the need to solicit information and opinions about the competing defibrillators from users besides the four Committee members, and to get pricing information.

So in true cart-before-the-horse fashion, Chief Z’s evaluation Committee has unanimously recommend the Zoll device: (a) without getting any written evaluations from the PRFD personnel who performed most of the 220 field tests of the competing units (at least 70 for each model); (b) without contacting other fire departments to get their input and experience with the three devices; and (c) without getting any pricing.

As the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland absurdly demanded: “Sentence first – verdict afterwards.”

Amazingly enough, from simply listening to Chief Z describe this process Monday night, you might have thought he really had no idea how lame and inept it actually sounded.  And without the Council meeting videos providing close-ups, it’s impossible to pick up any facial “tells,” gestures or body language that might reveal whether he was buying his own story.

Chief Z also mentioned the need for him to get together with the City Attorney to find out whether this purchase needs to go out for bid/RFP.  When that occurs, however, you can bet the ranch that the main topic of conversation will be ways to avoid competitive bidding or an RFP process.  Such avoidance likely will involve Chief Z arguing that only the Zoll is small enough to fit in the current ambulances without any significant retro-fitting – an argument he previewed Monday night when he announced that the “size of the units will be a big factor” and we already know just by looking at the specs that the Zoll is notably smaller than either the LifePak or the HeartStart.

How convenient that no set of criteria was established BEFORE the field-testing was conducted.  Without such pre-established criteria, Chief Z and his Committee members have a clean slate on which to write any bidding/RFP criteria needed to favor the Zoll defibrillator, especially if the City Attorney gives any weight to Chief Z’s insistence that size really does matter.

But look on the bright side.

It’s always possible that the Zoll is the better unit of the three field tested.  And it’s always possible that the junior-high quality field-testing protocol Chief Z came up with is simply the best he can do, and not evidence of a kinked-up deal.  And it’s always possible that the Committee’s evaluation process is straight-up objective rather than subjectively steered.

Then again, almost everything is “possible.”

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One agenda item for tonight’s Park Ridge City Council meeting is the Fire Department’s defibrillator replacement plan.   That’s the one we criticized in our post “Is It Fraud, Or Is It Negligence (03.04.13).

Just looking at Fire Chief Mike Zywanski’s Agenda Cover Memorandum, however, suggests that this replacement project is still a Chief Z goat rodeo, only with a few more goats.

Back in March the Council correctly nuked his first attempt to ignore the City’s competitive bidding process – behavior recently trending upward at City Hall – and give away a $150,000 replacement defibrillator contract to the current defibrillator vendor (Zoll Medical Corporation) under the guise of needing “emergency” replacement of the current units.  After Chief Z was forced to admit under Council questioning that the “emergency” was bogus, the Council (by a 6-0 vote – Ald. Maloney absent) ordered him to perform some actual due diligence before coming back to the Council with a recommendation on this purchase.

But even a cursory look at Chief Z’s “due diligence” reveals what appears to be, at best, a grudgingly superficial attempt at placating the Council.  And if you’re looking for an actual recommendation or any evaluation data in that memo or its attachments, you won’t find it – because it’s being saved for the November Public Safety Committee of the Whole meeting.

Public Safety chair Ald. Nick Milissis better plan on packing a gyros (with extra tzatziki) for that meeting.

It looks to us like Chief Z is employing one of many tactics used by government types to bamboozle the public and/or the public’s decision-makers (in this case, our aldermen) into making uninformed/under-informed decisions: withholding detailed information until the last possible moment so that the decision-makers don’t have enough time to study it and ask the tough questions bureaucrats hate to answer.

Like questions about the protocol for the “field tests” of the three competing brands of defibrillators that ostensibly were conducted by certain members of the Fire Dept. in response to the Council’s demand.

Seeing as how Chief Z seemingly has been trying to steer this contract to Zoll from Day One, we frankly expected the Fire Dept.’s “Cardiac Monitor Committee” (the “Committee”) to conduct the field testing without any identification or ranking of product criteria and features against which to benchmark each product’s performance in the field tests.  That’s because such benchmarking makes it a lot tougher to cook the test results and the recommendation.

But according to the Minutes of the Committee’s March 13 meeting, Batallion Chief Tim Norton DID prepare “a handout that detailed the criteria that would be evaluated on the cardiac monitors” – which supposedly was attached to the Minutes.  But guess what?  No such “handout” is included with Chief Z’s memo to the Council, so we can’t even comment on how good or lame the handout was; or whether the “criteria” were ranked in order of importance.

And while the memo indicates that the “field tests” of the three competing brands of defibrillators were completed by July 31st…SURPRISE!…none of that data or the specific results of those field tests are included with Chief Z’s memo.  Instead, he includes a separate blank “Monitor/Defibrillator Evaluation Form” for each of the three devices tested – perhaps to add some physical thickness and heft to what might otherwise look to be a lightweight effort at rubber-stamping a foreordained decision.

“Foreordained”?  You bet!

Despite the fact that Chief Z’s memo doesn’t contain the pre-test criteria handout, or any data compilations, or any actual filled-out evaluation forms, the Minutes of the Committee’s August 28 meeting identify the best-performing unit as…wait for it…drum roll please…THE ZOLL!  The one Chief Z tried to stampede the Council into purchasing on a fake “emergency” basis back in February-March.

And that Zoll recommendation comes notwithstanding the Committee’s bemoaning “so little feedback” from the Department personnel who allegedly answered a total of 220 advanced life support calls (at least 70 with each brand of monitor) during the field test periods, but apparently didn’t care enough to provide their evaluations of the respective machines for the vast majority of those calls.

So…the Committee reached its recommendation of the Zoll more than 6 weeks ago, but Chief Z is neither making a formal recommendation nor providing the Council with all the documentation allegedly supporting the Committee’s recommendation so that the aldermen can study and analyze that data between now and the November Public Safety meeting.

Sadly, we can’t say this kind of shell game surprises us.

We lost a ton of confidence in Chief Z when he proposed a ridiculous set of “Ground Rules” for the firefighters union contract negotiations, then sat stonily silent during a Council meeting while Mayor Dave Schmidt repeatedly asked who locked the City into such rules.  Since that display of cowardly dishonesty, his fingerprints have covered the rejected faux-emergency no-bid defibrillator purchase and then on the rejected giveaway of the $3,000+ used SUV to MTEMP.

But his latest defibrillator memo and its attachments (or lack thereof) suggest that either he is intentionally screwing with the Mayor and the Council over the due diligence they demanded he perform, or he lacks the basic competence to do it properly.  Either way, don’t the taxpayers of Park Ridge deserve better from their fire chief?

Similarly, is City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton asleep at the wheel in letting Chief Z get away with this kind of nonsense?  As the City’s CEO, he should be riding herd on his department heads and making sure the Council’s time and effort isn’t wasted on half-baked memos that invite deferrals of Council action.  Unless, of course, this is the way Hamilton likes to do business, too.

All in all, this defibrillator deal sounded kinked back in March; and it sounds no less kinked six months later.

The question is whether the Council will let Chief Z get away with it.

To read or post comments, click on title.

We’ve previously published posts (on 08.12.13 and 09.18.13) about how government can be bad in principle, even if the financial consequences are relatively modest – echoing the Biblical teaching (Luke 19:17) that people who cannot handle little matters should not be trusted with bigger matters.

That’s why a story in this week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate’s on-line version caught our attention.  It’s about the Park Ridge Library, for which this blog’s owner/editor has been a trustee since his appointment in 2011 – over former mayor Howard Frimark’s vehement objections, and despite Frimark’s insistence that the City assess a $500,000 fine against that owner/editor for displaying a stylized version of the City flag on the blog’s banner.

Titled “Park Ridge Library Board vote saves Food for Fines – this year,” the H-A article provided little worthwhile information beyond the title, the vote totals on the Food for Fines (“FFF”) resolution (4 to continue, 4 to stop; tie goes to continuing), and the identities of who voted how (to continue: Benka, Ebling, Harrison & Schmidt; to stop: Foss-Eggeman, Hynous, Trizna & White).  Then again, the reporter wasn’t at the meeting to hear the discussion, so it’s no surprise that the core issues that fueled the discussion and informed the vote are basically ignored.

Issues such as how and why the Library ever started such a program that effectively has been stealing money from the Library (and, therefore, Park Ridge taxpayers) for years?  No real explanation of how and why has been given to the Board members, which suggests the program probably originated as one of those sounded-good-at-the-time ideas for spending OPM (“Other People’s Money”) on somebody’s favorite charity, which a past Library Board just mindlessly rubber-stamped.

Kind of like how, for many years, the City Council mindlessly rubber-stamped arbitrary donations of hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money to private “community group” corporations to spend however they chose, without any transparency or accountability to the taxpayers.

The H-A article also ignores how much the FFF program costs the Library and, therefore, the taxpayers.  No hard numbers were presented to the Board on that point, either.  But considering that the Library collects roughly $80,000 in fines annually, the one-month holiday-season Food for Fines program probably costs the Library/taxpayers around $7,000 in cancelled fines; and the 2-week program this past Spring cost around $3,500.

Those aren’t boxcar numbers, to be sure.  But it’s disingenuous, at best, to make charitable donations with public monies when Library staff and certain Board members whine and moan about how the City Council isn’t giving the Library enough money.

The H-A story also fails to give the reasons why four Library Board members insisted on keeping FFF going for at least another year, which included: (a) it’s been done for all these years; (b) the Maine Twp. food pantry (part of Maine Twp. government, like the MTEMP that wanted a free used SUV from the City) is counting on the FFF money; and (c) there’s too little time before the upcoming holiday season FFF to let Library patrons know that they can’t discharge each dollar of fines with one “food item.”

Had the H-A reporter attended the meeting, or even listened to the audio recording of it, perhaps she might have understood (and, therefore, reported) that the main objections to the FFF program were far less about the money going to a food pantry “that does not exclusively assist Park Ridge taxpayers” than they were about the Library not being legally authorized to “donate” funds that should be devoted to Library purposes; and that such donations are so far afield from legitimate Library purposes that they breach the public trust attaching to those public funds given away.

What may be the most interesting omission from the H-A story, however, is its failure to report that: (a) the Board members who voted to stop the FFF program proposed that the Library nevertheless collect food and monetary contributions for the Maine Twp. food pantry (albeit without credit against fines owed) during the scheduled FFF period; and (b) that those Board members who wanted to continue throwing taxpayer money into the food pantry basket did not support the alternative proposal.

We understand how spending OPM can be fun.  But as we consistently have argued, local public officials and employees breach their public trust when they give away the taxpayers’ money for reasons unrelated to the essential purpose of the governmental unit they manage or serve.

And in so doing, they demean the voluntarism, generosity and public spiritedness of the very taxpayers whose money they are giving away.

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