Can Park Ridge ever become a “retail” or commercial mecca…or even a mini-mecca?

Yet another attempt at answering that question may be taking shape, as the Park Ridge City Council contemplates the creation of an Economic Development Advisory Task Force – made up of volunteers from the community – to develop ideas for enhancing the City’s economic base.  According to Deputy City Manager Julianna Maller, the City’s recent economic development efforts in cooperation with the Chamber of Commerce just haven’t gotten enough traction.

The history of economic development in Park Ridge over the past decade or so has been generally uninspiring. 

For several years prior to 2010, the City paid an in-house economic development director over $100,000 annually for the most modest of results.  And for several more years before that, the City provided most of the financing for something called the Economic Development Corporation (“EDC”) – a public/private partnership of local business people with a paid part-time executive director (realtor Sharon Curcio) that cost the City almost $80,000/yr until the EDC disbanded rather abruptly in 2004, shortly (and merely coincidentally?) after the City decided that the EDC’s members would be required to sign economic disclosure statements like every other public official and City committee/commission member.

While Alds. Joe Sweeney (1st) and Jim Smith (3rd) have voiced their preference for a paid economic development “professional,” Alds. Sal Raspanti (4th) and Dan Knight (5th) favor the volunteer task force concept.  The creation of such a task force, however, does not need Council approval, as it is legally within the discretion of Mayor Dave Schmidt. 

Having followed the activities of both the EDC and of the in-house development director, we didn’t see a whole lot of “production” by either.  As best as we can tell, neither of them were given (or established for themselves) any benchmarks for measuring their success or failure.  Without any performance standards, they mistook activity for achievement (to paraphrase a quote by the late, legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden) – a mistake that also seems to have been shared by the Chamber of Commerce.

That’s why an all-volunteer economic development task force is worth a try.  At the very least, the price is right: given recent history, we certainly can’t get any less than we previously paid for.

But we think the first “task” for any such task force – before it runs off hither and yon with every half-baked idea somebody thinks could/might improve economic development or retail (see, e.g., façade improvement program) – should be to think long and hard about whether Park Ridge realistically can become any sort of a retail or commercial destination for anybody besides its residents, at least without making significant changes to the character of the community.

Ten years ago we were told by a group of well-meaning but somewhat naïve volunteers on the Uptown Advisory Task Force (“UATF”), aided by some hired-gun consultants happy to tell the UATF and the City Administration anything they wanted to hear, that if we built new retail space with parking, the retailers and their customers would come.  So we did, with visions of Crate and Barrel, Barnes & Noble, the Gap, and Ann Taylor dancing in our heads.

Unfortunately, all we have to show for that effort so far is tens of millions of dollars of bonded debt…and $6 million or so of red ink, representing the tax dollars that have been pulled out of the City’s General Fund to pay the debt service on the City-owned parking garage and other Uptown Redevelopment improvements that the City has not otherwise been able to pay because that project hasn’t generated the revenues all its proponents fearlessly predicted.

But, hey, we’re still guardedly optimistic that if/when the country climbs out of this recession, that Uptown project might finally become a cash cow – assuming that what we were told by all those UATF folks, our public officials, and the hired-gun consultants back then wasn’t just a bunch of bull.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Last Monday (July 18) the City got its first glimpse of the long-awaited “Citywide Sewer Study” by Christopher B. Burke Engineering, Ltd.  We trust that should be the next big step toward coming up with ways to attack the flooding problems that have long bedeviled this community, reducing property values and the quality of life. 

To its credit, the City’s Flood Control Task Force wasted no time in scheduling a meeting two nights later to begin digging into the study’s details.  Those folks – chair Gail Fabisch and members Joe Saccomanno, Bob Mack, Lou Arrigoni, Kim Jones, Daniel Carroll, John Humm, Patricia Lofthouse and Steve Tolan – have their work cut out for them.  We wish them the genius of Einstein, the persistence of Edison, and the wisdom of Solomon. 

That’s because, frankly, whatever solution(s) they come up with cannot be expected to completely “solve” all our flooding problems: when you can get 6.86 inches of rain in one day, with 6.85 of it coming in less than 6 hours, nothing short of our own “Deep Tunnel” can be expected to hold all that water.  But we don’t see the City’s taxpayers ponying up the $1-2-3 hundred million our own DT would cost – nor should they, given how such an expense would put the City’s finances in a straitjacket for decades.

Nevertheless, multi-millions of dollars will be needed to make any kind of significant dent in the flooding problems that jeopardize basements in significant portions of Park Ridge after those 100-year rains we seem to be getting every 2-3 years.  If we leave these problems completely untreated, property values already battered by the recession will not come back with the vigor this community’s tax base needs, and its residents deserve.

Unless, of course, anybody thinks that piles of soggy carpeting and furniture piled on the parkways semi-regularly increases the EAV or is a sophisticated marketing ploy.  

If we read it correctly, the Burke “Summary Report” projects the “hard” remediation costs at between $11.65 million and $17.38 million for 11 targeted areas, not including engineering costs and the additional millions of dollars of debt service costs if these projects are funded with municipal bonds, as will likely be necessary. Notably, those figures also don’t include the costs for addressing such extreme and chronic flooding areas as Mayfield Estates, which were identified in Burke’s 2008 flooding assessment and the Task Force’s April 2010 Report, which we understand the Task Force will incorporate in its analysis and upcoming recommendations.

Whether that’s an expense the people of this community are willing to undertake remains to be seen.  But at least for the time being – and for the first time in memory – the City now has some legitimate, tangible alternatives that can be investigated, debated, and hopefully put to the voters in the form of one or more “advisory”/non-binding referenda on the March 20, 2012, primary ballot.  And assuming that the necessary preliminary “spade work” has been done prior to that election, should the voters approve the referendum(s) we would hope that one or more of these sewer projects could be “shovel ready” in time for the summer 2012 construction season. 

Mayor Dave Schmidt (who created the Task Force shortly after taking office in 2009), the City Council and the Task Force itself already seem to be headed in that direction, having set some fairly aggressive target dates for moving this process forward.  The Task Force and City Staff are working towards announcing their prioritization recommendations of the various remediation projects identified in the Burke report by September 7; and the City Council is likely to take up those prioritization recommendations at its September 12 meeting. 

Meanwhile, we think it’s time the City Council began seriously discussing the wisdom of further residential development (especially multi-family residential) that, for the past decade-plus, has consisted primarily of building the biggest structure a lot will hold, then covering up much of the remaining green space with oversized patios and driveways that minimize the lot’s water-absorbent surface area while often diverting run-off onto neighboring property – the kind of thing Vine Avenue residents Cliff Kowalski and Jeff Getz have been complaining about to no avail.

Unless Park Ridge aspires to becoming a real-life “Waterworld” (avec ou sans Kevin Costner), we need to start solving the current flooding problems sooner rather than later.

But we also need to stop adding to them.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Since he grudgingly turned over the gavel to Mayor Dave Schmidt in May, 2009, former mayor Howard P. Frimark has been – to use a dated colloquialism – about as scarce as hens’ teeth when it comes to local government. 

He was spotted months ago at a Park Ridge Park District board meeting offering support for the private “club” known as Park Ridge Senior Center, Inc. (“Seniors Inc.”), of which Frimark reportedly is a member, getting another sweetheart contract from the Park District for Seniors Inc.’s use of the Park Ridge Senior Center “clubhouse” – the facility which the District’s taxpayers keep subsidizing year after year to the tune of approx. $160,000 while Seniors Inc’s approx. 1,000 members (out of approx. 7,000 total Park Ridge “seniors”) pay a miniscule $45 (resident) for “membership dues” despite Seniors Inc.’s sitting on over $215,000.

But that was about the extent of Frimark’s “civic” activity until last Thursday night, when he showed up at City Hall for the special City Council meeting on ComEd and the City’s storm response and laid into Schmidt for “dereliction of duty” and being “AWOL” – because Schmidt happened to be in South Carolina on business when the June 21st storm hit and didn’t immediately return home.  Frimark’s remarks can be viewed on the meeting video at the City’s website (starting at approx. the 40:00 minute mark), although you will need to dial up the sound because the podium microphone may not have been turned on.

Judging from Frimark’s comments, Schmidt should have anticipated the storm and power outage and stayed home to wait for it; or, at the very least, he should have cancelled his remaining depositions and high-tailed it back to Park Ridge, where he could have engaged in Frimark-style “management by photo op.”

But Thursday night was merely a tune-up for Frimark’s return to City Hall this past Monday night, where he took to the podium to denounce the appointment of the owner, publisher, editor and principal author of this blog, Robert Trizna, to the Park Ridge Public Library Board. 

Once again, Frimark’s remarks, and the responses thereto, can best be appreciated by watching the meeting video on the City’s website (from the 4:00 minute mark to 28:50),  although his objections centered on the substance of this blog’s posts and its use of a stylized version of the City flag on its nameplate.  Frimark called Trizna “one of the many unqualified cronies of the mayor who has been placed on board and commissions that last 27 months.”

Frimark, as a former mayor, well knows that all such appointees submit their applications to City staff, not to the Mayor; and those applicants are recommended to the mayor by the Mayor’s Advisory Board, comprised of the four aldermen who chair the City Council’s four committees.  For the first 24 of Schmidt’s 27 months in office, that Advisory Board was comprised of Ald. Rich DiPietro and then-Alds. Jim Allegretti, Don Bach and Frank Wsol – the first three of whom endorsed Frimark over Schmidt, contributed approx. $2,500 to Frimark’s campaign, and signed onto Frimark’s legally null-and-petty “condemnation” of then-Ald. Schmidt’s whistle-blowing about the secret land deal Frimark was cooking up in closed session meetings. 

So the idea that those four Advisory Board members would recommend Schmidt “cronies” for board and commission appointments is totally over-the-top, even for someone as adept as Frimark at telling whoppers.

Notwithstanding Frimark’s strenuous objections, however, Trizna’s appointment to the Library Board was approved by a 6 (Sweeney, DiPietro, Smith, Raspanti, Knight & Maloney) to 1 (Bernick) vote – following his unanimous recommendation to Schmidt by the current Mayor’s Advisory Board (Alds. DiPietro, Knight, Maloney & Raspanti) after their reviewing his application and interviewing him about both this blog and his role in the 2002 new Library referendum.

Whether Frimark’s public re-emergence is merely the product of his dislike for the two subjects of his invective, or is a prelude to yet another run for the mayor’s office, remains to be seen, in part because Frimark coyly told reporters that he is keeping his options open for 2013.

But during his six years in City government, Frimark proved to be a proponent and practitioner of the “Chicago Way” style of government that has dominated Illinois for so long that the legendary Mike Royko coined its unofficial motto “Ubi est mea” (“Where’s mine?”) way back in 1971, albeit in describing the corruption of the Daley Machine. That was before Illinois Democrats and certain Illinois Republicans decided that public corruption could be more profitable and less prosecutable if it was bi-partisan and statewide, leading to what Tribune columnist John Kass dubbed “The Combine” that has provided a target-rich environment for U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.

In just four short-but-still-too-long years as mayor, Frimark’s most notable achievements were primarily dubious ones, which we wrote about in “Every Week Needs To Be ‘Sunshine’ Week'” (03.16.09) and other posts during his tenure, two of the more dubious ones being an attempted $2.4 million giveaway of City funds to his campaign contributor, Napleton Cadillac; and his attempted purchase of 720 Garden from a friend of his for $200,000 more than the City’s own appraisal.

And let’s not forget his referendum to cut the Council in half to save the cost of those 7 “extra” aldermen.  How well did that work?  In the first full fiscal year of that cut-down Council, the City posted a $1.7 million deficit.  And in the second full fiscal year, it posted a $2.3+ million deficit.

But hey, we did save $16,800 on aldermanic compensation!

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: we believe opportunists like Howard Frimark are the embodiment of what is wrong with politics and government in the State of Illinois, in the County of Crook, and in our own fair City of Park Ridge.  If City government were a Frank Capra movie, Frimark could be “Sen. Joe Paine“ (of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) and “D.B. Norton” (of Meet John Doe) rolled into one. 

During his appearance Monday night, Frimark criticized this blog as one “that provides untruthful…comments.”  In typical Frimark fashion, however, his accusations were totally lacking in facts or examples. 

So we hereby challenge him to identify any post – not reader comments, but actual Watchdog posts – that contains “untruthful” information, and to specify the allegedly untrue information and explain exactly how it is false.

Time to put up or shut up, Howard.

To read or post comments, click on title.

For those of you who want and expect dependable electrical power from that monopoly supplier known as ComEd, there will be a special City Council meeting tonight at City Hall beginning at 6:00 p.m. to discuss the recent power outages that have afflicted most of Park Ridge.

Although that meeting was originally called by Mayor Dave Schmidt to address the June 21st power outages, we understand that this week’s outage has also been added to the agenda as a topic of discussion – along with Com Ed’s overall performance and chronic problems that seem to manifest themselves with almost every warm-weather storm.  Hopefully, the ComEd representative assigned to Park Ridge will explain exactly what we got for the $570,000 of “capital investments” he claims ComEd has made in the Park Ridge power grid over the past 3 years, and why we keep on losing power on such a widespread basis despite those improvements.

More than three years have passed since we wrote, in Does ComEd Dream Of Electric Sheep (01.16.08),  about ComEd’s public dog-and-pony shows with no demonstrable follow-up.  Since that time, the mayor and six members of the City Council have changed. 

Now we’ll get to see whether the City’s dealings with ComEd will change.

To read or post comments, click on title.

It looks like another good weather weekend for Taste of Park Ridge (“TOPR”), our community’s premier annual bread-and-circuses event.  That’s a good thing…and we really mean it.

Even though we have been highly critical of the way TOPR has been run by TOPR’s private owner, Taste of Park Ridge NFP (“Taste Inc.”), we still want it to be successful – especially this year, now that Taste Inc. has promised the City a share of the profits for the first time since Taste Inc. was given the event on a no-bid basis in June 2005 and started pocketing the profits that were originally intended for the City treasury. 

Don’t expect the City’s 3% share of TOPR revenues to balance the City budget.  In the first place (as we understand it), the City won’t be receiving any piece of beer-tent revenues, which some people have speculated may actually exceed the food revenues.  Why those were carved out of the deal isn’t clear, and the guys who run Taste Inc. weren’t saying.

But we’ll still be happy if the City’s share of the food revenues simply covers the event’s costs to the City – both the “direct” costs (e.g., overtime for police, fire, public works, etc.) and the “indirect” costs (e.g., TOPR-related work done by City employees on City time).  Two years ago the City valued those combined costs at approx. $23,000, before mysteriously changing its accounting last year to include only the “direct” costs.  As best we can tell, that was all City Mgr. Jim Hock’s doing, and we’re not aware of his giving any explanation for that change.

We’re hoping, however, that the City’s getting even a 3% share of the food revenues will cause this new City Council to abandon the “see-hear-speak no evil” monkey-shine attitude toward TOPR and Taste Inc. that has been the norm since then-mayor Howard Frimark and the City’s last 14-member Council handed TOPR to Taste Inc.  Maybe the new Council finally will demand some real transparency and accountability from Taste Inc. – which has been so secretive about its operations one might wonder if it’s a CIA “front” for black-ops assignments in Afghanistan.

One example is its lack of tax returns.  If Taste Inc. truly had been a not-for-profit for the past six years, where are the five IRS Form 990 tax returns to go with the one it filed (in March 2010) for 2009 that is currently displayed on GuideStar, and which appears to show a $65,000 profit from just last year’s event alone.  Why those returns aren’t posted on Taste Inc.’s own nifty website is a puzzlement in its own right, as is the fact that its 2010 Form 990 isn’t on GuideStar even though it was to have been filed by May 15, 2011.

From past experience we know that TOPR can be a lot of fun.  But if you want to ratchet up that fun another notch or two, we suggest that patrons start asking a few questions of all those uniformed members of Team Tastee bopping around the event, such as: 

Where’s the proof Taste Inc. really was a not-for-profit corporation from 2005 to 2009? 

How much money did Taste Inc. take in during those years? 

What did Taste Inc. do with all that money it took in during those years? 

Where’s Taste Inc.’s 2010 IRS Form 990, that should have been filed by May 15th? 

Why not open up Taste Inc.’s books to the public?  

If you guys really are just “volunteers” why don’t you operate TOPR as a committee of the City starting next year, like the City Council originally intended when it turned TOPR over to you back in June 2005? 

Or come up with your own questions.  And if you get any answers, please send them to us because we’ve never been able to get much in the way of information from the Tastees – although we don’t take it personally, because the City Council has faired no better.

Meanwhile, get out there and enjoy the food, the drink, and the entertainment of TOPR…because, for the first time, you’ll be helping put some TOPR profits in the City’s pockets instead of only in Taste Inc’s.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Yesterday the jury handed down its verdict in the long-running, sordid saga of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich: guilty on 17 of 20 counts, almost all of which involve some form of selling out the public interest for somebody’s private, personal benefit.

Selling out the public interest has been Play No. 1 in the unofficial playbook of Illinois government and politics as practiced for at least the past 30 years, primarily by the Democrats who have controlled one or both chambers of the General Assembly for all but 2 of those years – but with the willing and shameless assistance of Republican governors like “Big Jim” Thompson, “Big George” Ryan and, to a lesser degree, “Slim Jim” Edgar.

While “trickle down” economics may be a suspect theory, “trickle down” government corruption is hard reality in our state.  Watching two of our last three governors get convicted of multiple public corruption charges in which they were aided and abetted by some of their closest advisors – also public officials who owed the people of this state honest services – sends the message, at least subliminally, that government corruption is unremarkable standard operating procedure.

But corruption can, and does, take many shapes and forms, some of which seem almost benign to a populace numbed by a steady stream of “Safe Road”s, “Silver Shovel”s, “Gambat”s, “Hired Truck”s, “Crooked Code”s, and too many other assorted scams and frauds to deserve their own catchy nicknames.

Sometimes it’s public “funding” that magically appears after somebody puts the arm on a pliant or outright sleazy politician. Other times it might be a zoning variance that gets pushed through without rhyme or reason. Maybe it’s a summer job that leap-frogs earlier applicants with equal or better credentials to land in the lap of the fortunate son of a public official’s buddy.  Or maybe it’s some other similar “favor” to one special interest or another that inexplicably trumps more important public interests.

As a state with more units of government than any of the other 49, Illinois is effectively a petri dish of government-bred pathogens infecting us at every level. Which means that we can’t realistically rely on the U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI to protect us from even a fraction of them, including in our own community.

What can we do with our local governments here in Park Ridge?

We can start by paying attention and questioning everything our public officials do.  Asking questions, and demanding substantive and meaningful answers rather than hot air, is a great screening device for detecting wrongheaded or kinky dealings. Public officials owe each of us an explanation of what they are doing when they act on our behalf with our money, and why they are doing it: if they can’t explain it understandably, or if it doesn’t make sense, or if it sounds too good to be true, chances are we’re getting fleeced.

And that questioning shouldn’t just be at the City level. The two least-scrutinized and least-transparent branches of local government are School Districts 64 and 207, which do not televise or videotape their meetings and which have become quite comfortable cultivating the sense that the business of education can be understood only by “the educators.” To make matters worse, those two branches of local government account for about 2/3 of our property tax bills.

The bottom line is that every time a public official “put’s his thumb on the scale” – for either his own benefit or for that of some special interest – the rest of us are being cheated out of good government. Even if that doesn’t technically qualify as “corruption,” it most definitely is not “good government.”

And it’s “effing” wrong.

UPDATE (07.01.11):  Sometimes you need to laugh to keep from crying: our new Illinois license plate and Jon Stewart “Blago” bit.

To read or post comments, click on title.

In a comment to Tuesday’s post submitted yesterday evening, Mr./Ms. “Dark on Belle Plaine” wrote:

This is all so nice and I hate to change the topic, but now that my power is back on I turned on my computer and watched the [Monday night City Council] meeting.  I get to the part where the Com-Ed mouthpiece gives a report which outlines all the “improvements” they have done and [how] “short” the repair times are.  I kid you not.  If you haven’t watched it you should.  Then he asks if there are any questions?  Guess what?  Not one.  They all sit there.  All seven of them and the Mayor just sit there.  No one asks what specific improvements have occurred since the last power outage or the one before that or the one before that.  They should have asked because evidenced by what took place over the last twenty-four hours is clear evidence it was not enough.

The semi-Faulknerian length of that paragraph notwithstanding, Mr./Ms. DOBP makes a good point, especially in light of at least 80% of Park Ridge losing electrical power barely 24 hours after Monday night’s public relations presentation by Park Ridge’s very own ComEd rep/troubleshooter, Eric Duray – with 50% of Park Ridge still out of power as of 7:00 a.m. today (06/23/11).

On June 30, 2008, we published a post titled “A Powerless Mayor” in which we wrote:

After large portions of Park Ridge lost power for as much as four days last August, [then-mayor Howard] Frimark made a grand gesture of bringing in ComEd public relations people to explain why we continue to have regular outages and what it was doing to alleviate them.  The report from residents who attended those meetings: “Same stuff, different day.”

Three years later, we have to ask if anything has changed…besides the names of the mayor and six of the seven aldermen, that is?

Mr./Ms. DOBP is spot-on with the observation about how the mayor and the Council – along with City Mgr. Jim Hock, all the other City officials arrayed around The Horseshoe, and a gallery chock-full of residents – sat silent and un-questioning during what turned into a canned public relations pitch for the newest piece of pro-ComEd legislation working its way through a usually-complicit state legislature in Springfield: the “Smart Grid” and “Smart Meters,” which appear designed primarily to ensure a steady stream of ComEd profits for the next decade or so.

According to Duray, the “average” Park Ridge customer had only 1.27 power interruptions during 2010, making last year our most reliable for electrical power since 2006.  He attributed that result to ComEd’s having invested approximately $570,000 in Park Ridge-related capital projects during the past three years (2008-10) – although he didn’t say, and nobody asked, how that $570,000 compares to the total revenue Park Ridge users generated for ComEd during those same three years.

We’re guessing the fraction would be tiny.

Maybe the silence from our public officials Monday night was from the shock of hearing such palaver spewed so directly and earnestly by Duray.  Watch the new WOW-broadcast meeting video on the City’s website and you’ll hear a spiel as good as any delivered by those legendary patent medicine peddlers from the backs of horse-drawn wagons in the Old West: we half-expected Mr. Duray to promise that the new Smart Grid would even cure the croup, lumbago and the grip!

But, unfortunately, Duray has never given us any reason to think that he might be able to solve any of Park Ridge’s electric power problems – not in 24 hours or even 24 months.

Back in June 2008, we suggested then-mayor Frimark and that Council explore the City’s options in dealing with ComEd, including the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of a lawsuit such as several other communities had filed against ComEd for its failure to adequately maintain and improve its power grid to provide more reliable power.  As best as we can tell, that crew did absolutely nothing.

In December 2009, Mayor Schmidt, in response to another Duray dog-and-pony show, challenged ComEd to invest more that the $470,000 in capital improvements Duray was then reporting in order to make electrical power in Park Ridge more reliable: “It would be fair and wise for you to put more money into Park Ridge than the amount of money you have so far.”  But another 18 months have gone by, and we aren’t aware of the City’s getting anything more out of ComEd than another $100,000 of purported but unspecified capital improvements.

We’re not advocating a lawsuit as the only way to get ComEd to provide us with dependable power – at least not until we can get a better sense of what the costs and likelihood of success will be.

In 2005 the City of Darien filed suit against ComEd after a substation fire left 12,000 residents without power for 2-3 days.  ComEd conceded that Darien’s outages were twice those of other areas, and that case was settled by bringing in a consultant who identified the various infrastructure problems which ComEd worked to fix.  According to Duray, however, Park Ridge’s outages last year were slightly better than ComEd’s system-wide average.

The Village of Deerfield has been involved in a suit with ComEd since April 2008, alleging 82,347 individual customer power outages during 1,377 separate electric failures since 2000 related to four circuits which ComEd admitted were among the 1% worst performing circuits in the entire ComEd system.  

That case already has cost Deerfield in excess of $250,000, and that was  before its recent hiring of utility lawyers from a national law firm (DLA Piper) to handle some elements of the case that may now need to proceed before the Illinois Commerce Commission (“ICC”) – according to Pages 15-19 of last Thursday’s (June 16) Illinois Supreme Court decision, where the Court held that complaints about ComEd’s infrastructure and services that seek relief for systemic defects in the provision or remediation of services when a power outage occurs, constitute claims for “reparations” that must be heard by the ICC.

So if litigation isn’t the way to go, what is?

Some residents have mentioned burying the power lines as is done in most newer areas, although that sounds like a pretty darn expensive retrofitting project that ComEd is unlikely to undertake solely on its own dime.  Nevertheless, the City should look into it.  It should also put the arm on Park Ridge resident and state Sen. Dan Kotowski, and Rep. Rosemary Mulligan – both of whom have either been MIA or simply ineffective in helping with our flooding and our power problems up to now – to go to bat for us.

Meanwhile, if you want to share your thoughts about ComEd’s performance with Mr. Duray, we understand that his e-mail address is [email protected].  If you do so, we suggest that you copy the mayor, the city manager, and at least your own alderman (using the e-mail addresses for them on the City’s website); and Sen. Kotowski ([email protected]) and Rep. Mulligan ([email protected]).

Oh, yeah…and don’t forget to copy us here at [email protected].

UPDATE (06.24.11): In responding to one of the comments to this post, we re-visited the City’s website and discovered that while a “ComEd – Annual Report and Presentation” item was stuck in the Mayor’s report section of the agenda – after 3 proclamations  and one presentation – there were no relevant ComEd materials in the Council “packet”; and we understand that the only ComEd materials the Mayor and the aldermen received were at their desks when they arrived Monday night.

That raises the question of whether ComEd was trying to snooker the City with an eleventh-hour handout so that nobody would have time to prepare for Mr. Duray’s medicine show. 

Consequently, we would hope that the City invites Mr. Duray back real soon – so that he can explain to a better-prepared Council and citizenry why that whopping $570,000 3-year capital improvement effort didn’t do more to protect 80% of Park Ridge from the next evening’s power outage.

To read or post comments, click on title.

One of the many self-improvement aphorisms goes something like: “If you want to become something you’re not, you have to stop being what you are.” 

That’s a lesson that still hasn’t been learned by our City government which, despite the occasional declarations of devotion to fiscal responsibility, can’t quite seem to translate those words into deeds.   

Last night the Council voted 6 (Alds. Sweeney, DiPietro, Smith, Raspanti, Bernick & Maloney) to 1 (Ald. Knight) to over-ride Mayor Dave Schmidt’s veto of the budget line item giving an across-the-board 3% pay increase to the City’s non-union employees.  The principal argument for those raises: those employees haven’t had a raise in 3 years.

No discussion of improved performance or greater efficiencies from those non-union employees generally.  No attempt to differentiate performance or productivity among them.  Just a blanket, everybody-gets-one, 3% raise that added $185,766 to the 2011-12 budget.

How many Park Ridge residents paying the taxes to fund those raises haven’t had a raise themselves in the past 3 years unless they could prove they earned it with increased productivity – and their employer could afford to pay it from increased profits?  How many Park Ridge residents paying the taxes to fund those raises have lost their jobs altogether, or have become substantially under-employed in the past 3 years with a commensurate decrease in pay and benefits?

But that didn’t seem to factor into the equation for our newest guardians of the public purse, who will also soon be making decisions about the City’s unionized employees seeking multi-year contracts that lock wage and/or benefit increases into the uncertain future when they should be getting only one-year deals that more accurately reflect existing economic reality.  And don’t expect those union deals to come with any guarantees of increased productivity.

Similarly, the Council voted 5 (DiPietro, Smith, Raspanti, Bernick & Maloney) to 2 (Sweeney & Knight) to over-ride Schmidt’s veto of the budget line item providing for a total of $65,776 in no-strings-attached donations of our tax dollars to four private community groups.  Not surprisingly, the lion’s share ($49,500) of those donations went to the uber politically-connected Center of Concern, whose board of directors and advisory board sport 19 current or former public officials, at least 10 of whom have sat around The Horseshoe at 505 Butler Place.

No attempt to ascertain what specific services the residents are getting in return.  No attempt to require a specific dollars-for-services contract from those private recipients of the taxpayers’ involuntary largesse.  Not even any attempt to comply with the City Council’s Policy No. 6.  Just four arbitrary amounts added to the budget as proponents of those organizations showed up just long enough to make sure the vote went the way they wanted it and their organizations’ places at the public trough were ensured.

How many Park Ridge taxpayers consciously have chosen to directly donate their hard-earned money to local charities other than the four favored by the City Council?  How many of those taxpayers consciously have chosen not to make donations to those organizations, for whatever reasons or for no reason at all?  Do those residents really need City officials making these kinds of spending decisions for them, using their own tax dollars?

Let’s be clear here: the quarter-of-a-million dollars being budgeted for the pay raises and private community groups is only .44% of the City’s 2011-12 budget.  And it’s also only a small fraction of the millions of dollars of deficit spending by the previous City Council over the past 3 budget years – which not only depleted the City’s reserves to dangerous levels but also caused the City to lay off police and public works employees, and to suspend or reduce several City services.  

But a quarter of a million bucks still buys a lot of the essential things that City government is obligated to provide its residents, most of which – like paved streets, well-maintained sewers, emerald ash borer control, tc. – are not of the warm-and-fuzzy, feel-good variety that Park Ridge politicians love.

One resident, in speaking against such donations last evening, asked when the people of Park Ridge gave the Council the right to make charitable donations for them? 

A good question, to be sure, but one that ignores our City’s fiscal history that has been shaped too often by the egos of public officials who seem to assume the public’s position on every spending request favored by those officials is “yes” whenever they don’t hear a deafening “no.”

Correction (06.23.11): The Youth Commission is not a “private” corporation/organization but a commission of the City.  As such (and unlike the other three private organizations), it is not subject to City Council Policy No. 6; and it is lawfully entitled to whatever funding the City Council chooses to provide. 

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A few of our “regular” commentators enjoy criticizing certain of our posts for what they deem as our making mountains out of molehills – when we gnaw on those comparatively smaller examples of local government inefficiency and mismanagement. 

But we do that because we believe that small stuff often can make big differences: big, seemingly intractable, problems can become solvable when broken down into smaller, more manageable components.  That’s why observing how public officials, or our community organizations,  deal with the “small stuff” also can provide keen insight into how they can be expected to deal with the “big stuff.” 

Take the Park Ridge Mural Restoration Committee, led by Tony Borrelli, which is committed to raising $38,000 to restore the “Indians Cede the Land” mural that was salvaged from the former Park Ridge Post Office building when it was converted into the current School District 64 headquarters in 1970.  Some might consider a $38,000 project as “small stuff,” even if the mural’s historical significance to the community makes its restoration worthwhile. 

We find it noteworthy how this committee already has been able to raise $10,000 towards its goal – without looking for handouts from City Hall like certain other private community organizations we have criticized, and notwithstanding that the mural’s restoration is not one of those “human needs” causes that seem to provoke knee-jerk budgeting and appropriations from certain public officials without regard for the requirements of City Council Policy No. 6 concerning City funding of private organizations.   

Similarly noteworthy is how quickly $20,000 was raised for the community’s July 3rd fireworks display after the sponsor of the past two years’ displays (Americaneagle.com) elected not to donate another $18,000 of fireworks – in protest of private corporation Taste of Park Ridge NFP’s years of free-loading as to the many thousands of dollars of City services provided to the Taste of Park Ridge event, free of charge, since 2005. 

According to a story in this week’s edition of the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“Community contributions ensure fireworks for Fourth in Park Ridge,” June 14), the Park Ridge Indian Scouts raised $10,000 for that purpose, with four commercial sponsors providing the rest of the funding – with no handouts from the City.

Larger-scale private fundraising is being done by the Kalo Foundation, which already has collected approximately $160,000 in private donations towards acquiring and rehabilitating the former Iannelli Studios, also without feeding at the public trough.

What this small stuff teaches is that the people of Park Ridge are not cheap or uncaring.  They are willing to get behind the causes and projects they believe in – such as these, where both the c0mmunity purpose and the goal are clearly stated and/or apparent; and where the folks running them are motivated in their fundraising efforts.  Park Ridge people don’t need their public officials, or anybody else, acting as Big Brother in making such decisions for them.

Isn’t it about time our City Council – and those private community organizations that would rather feed at the City Hall trough than bust their butts obtaining voluntary private donations – learned that lesson?

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At last Monday’s (June 6) City Council meeting, local businessman Albert Galus, vice president of the private corporation Taste of Park Ridge NFP (“Taste Inc.”) that runs the annual event known as “Taste of Park Ridge” (“TOPR”), made a brief appearance to speak about the financial proposal contained in a “Memorandum of understanding” – and then hustled out the Council chambers door before any questions could be asked of him. 

Given that Taste Inc. has spent the last several years steadfastly refusing to reimburse the City for the tens of thousands of dollars in City services TOPR has utilized since Taste Inc. took over TOPR in 2005, had Mr. Galus stuck around to field a few questions about the “gift” of “3% (three percent) of the amount of Food Vendor Payout,” he might have heard one or more of the following: 

Question 1: Does “Food Vendor Payout” include beer sales?

Question 1a: If not, why not include beer sales in the 3% figure?

Question 2: Will that 3% come off the amount that the food vendors otherwise would get?

Question 3: Why “3%” instead of 2%, 4%, 5%, 10%, etc.?

Question 4: Why now, after all these years of stiffing the City?

Question 5: Why is it being offered only for the City’s “2011/2012 fiscal year”?

Anyone who reads this blog knows that we’ve never been shy in expressing our concerns and suspicions about Taste Inc., which was formed in June 2005 by Galus, Dave Iglow, and several other local businessmen recommended by then-mayor Howard Frimark as “volunteers” for a City TOPR committee that would run TOPR for the City’s benefit.

According to the minutes of the June 6, 2005 Council meeting at which Frimark proposed this new version of TOPR, the City gave that “committee” $23,000 of “seed money” and was going to receive all of TOPR’S profits:

“Mayor Frimark answered [that]…if there is a surplus of funds, it will come back to the City.”

And because that “committee” was going to be an arm of the City, its meetings and its operations would be subject to the Illinois Open Meetings Act:

“Ald. Cox asked if the City created an Ad Hoc Committee is it then subject to the Open Meetings Act.

City Attorney Hill answered if we create the committee it is.”

But according to the minutes of the September 27, 2005 City Council Finance & Budget Committee meeting, then-F&B chairman Ald. Don Crampton and then-F&B committee member Alds. Mark Anderson, Joe Baldi, Andrea Bateman, Jim Radermacher and Frank Wsol, after being advised that the private Taste Inc. had been formed instead of the City committee that Frimark promised and the Council approved in June, voted unanimously to hand over to Taste Inc. what should have been the City’s $20,058.36 in profits.  

Ever since that bait-and-switch was completed, Taste Inc. apparently has been pocketing all the TOPR profits.

How much have those profits been?  We can’t tell you, because it seems like “not for profit” Taste Inc. never filed IRS Form 990 (or Form 990-EZ) tax returns – the form of return legitimate not-for-profit entities file, and that GuideStar.org posts online for all to see – for 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008.  Which causes us to wonder whether Taste Inc. was a genuine not-for-profit during those four years.

But if Taste Inc.’s first-time IRS Form 990-EZ for 2009 – which it filed after it voluntarily dissolved itself in February 2009 and then reorganzied as a 501(c)(6) private corporation a few weeks later – is any indication, those first four years of profits may have totaled in excess of $200,000, even factoring in unexplained discrepancies between the $266,652 of “gross receipts” Taste Inc. disclosed for the 2009 TOPR on its “Recipe for Success” informational piece and the $163,391 of “total revenue” (and the $98,170 of “total expenses”) reported on that 2009 return.

Where did that estimated $200,000 go? 

Once again, we don’t know because Iglow, Galus and the rest of the Taste Inc. crew – who never miss an opportunity to toot their own horns about what they do for this community as “unpaid volunteers” running TOPR – mysteriously clam up whenever talk turns to those four years of profits and what happened to that money

Is Taste Inc.’s running of TOPR kinked-up?  We sure hope not. 

But the simplest and best way for Taste Inc. to prove it is not with this odd “Memorandum of understanding” and its one-time 3% solution, accompanied by a misguided and arrogant-sounding claim that Taste Inc. “has sole proprietorship” of TOPR.  Instead, Taste Inc. should produce its tax returns and underlying documentation for 2005-2008, along with the 2010 tax return that for some reason still does not appear on GuideStar.

And if Galus, Iglow and the rest of the Taste Inc. operators truly “possess affection for the community and seek to be of further assistance to the City” – as they claim in their Memorandum of understanding – they could prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt by closing down their private and secretive Taste Inc. corporation, turning Taste Inc.’s funds over to the City, and devoting all those same “volunteer” hours towards running TOPR exclusively for the City’s benefit, the way it was originally proposed by Frimark and approved by the City Council back in June, 2005: as an ad hoc committee of the City, subject to the Illinois Open Meetings Act?

After all, if they really are committed to volunteering rather than profiteering, shouldn’t they be able to derive the same (or even greater) satisfaction from by putting all their efforts into running the event exclusively for the City instead of for Taste Inc.?

Galus?  Iglow?  Bueller?

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