On Wednesday (Feb. 11) Mayor Howard “Let’s Make A Deal” Frimark for the first time graced a hearing of the Illinois Gaming Board with his presence, during which he made Park Ridge’s initial argument to the Board to move the proposed Des Plaines casino from the planned Devon/River Road site.

As Frimark was told by the Gaming Board’s top attorney at the City Council meeting on January 26, the Des Plaines casino and its location have already been given final approval, subject only to the Board’s completing its due diligence investigation of the casino’s corporate owner and its investors.  The time for Frimark to have given Wednesday’s speech was months ago, at the meetings which occurred before Des Plaines was named as one of three finalists in October, 2008; or at the Board’s public hearing on December 22nd, before the license was awarded.

But Frimark was MIA for all those meetings and hearings, just like he was MIA for all those ONCC meetings over the past 3-1/2 years leading up to the new O’Hare runway’s opening in November.  At least he can claim that he’s consistent.

Besides his guest appearance at the Gaming Board being way too late to matter, Frimark’s reasons for a new casino site were weak, at best:

(a) the new runway is bombarding Park Ridge residents in the south/southwest end of town with airplane noise (as if that’s supposed to be a concern of the Gaming Board’s);

(b) the “quagmire” of traffic that the new casino will bring to that end of Park Ridge; and

(c) Maine South High School is installing football lights (another non-issue for casino licensing that the Gaming Board couldn’t give two hoots about). 

Really…those were the reasons he gave, which you can hear for yourself by clicking here.  You also can hear him tell the Gaming Board members – as if they cared – that he’s going to be asking Des Plaines for cash reimbursements for the extra expenses the casino will cost Park Ridge. 

So why wasn’t he asking for dough from Des Plaines before the casino license was awarded, when our neighbor to the west and the private casino developer may have had an actual incentive for trying to garner Park Ridge’s support?  Why did he wait until after the casino became a done-deal at Devon and River to put on his show for the Gaming Board?

It looks to us like he was too busy with other things, like working on sweetheart deals for Frimark campaign contributors Norwood Builders and Napleton Cadillac.  And let’s not forget all the time and effort he expended trying to find the right piece of private land to take off the tax rolls as the site for the big new cop shop he wants built ASAP.

Whether Park Ridge could have influenced the choice of Des Plaines as the casino site, or of the casino location in Des Plaines, is speculative-to-problematic.  But by not even showing up for the meetings and hearings leading up to the Gaming Board’s December 22, 2008, decision, and not even sending a letter voicing the City’s concerns, our Park Ridge City government – under the “leadership” of Mayor Frimark – made it a moot point.

This wasn’t just Frimark’s snafu, however.  The City Manager and the entire City Council – including First Ward Alderman/mayoral candidate Dave Schmidt and every one of Frimark’s Alderpuppets – were all asleep at the wheel on this casino issue, just as they were asleep at the wheel on the new runway.  And each and every one of them should be called to account for why they weren’t paying attention to projects (the runway and the casino) that may have such significant, long-term impact on the quality of life in Park Ridge.

But at the end of the day, Frimark is the guy in the big chair making the $1,000/month (v. the aldermen’s $100/month) to do something more than cut deals with cronies and cut ribbons at store openings.  So that’s why the buck stops there.

It took the signatures of more than 2,800 Park Ridge voters to get one honest, straightforward and understandable police station referendum question on the April ballot, but it took the votes of only five Park Ridge aldermen to put an ambiguous (and, arguably, dishonest) referendum question on the same topic – penned by Ald. Frank Wsol (7th Ward) – on that same ballot.

So why doesn’t it surprise us to hear that the Council voted 6-1 at Monday night’s Committee of the Whole meeting, with Alderman/mayoral candidate Dave Schmidt as the sole dissenter, to spend $3,500 of taxpayer money to send a mailing to 14,500 homes for the purpose of “educating” the voters residing in those homes about…wait for it…the Wsol referendum question?

Admittedly, $3,500 is chump change compared to the much bigger bucks the City regularly squanders on questionable things like consultants and “studies” designed to tell our elected and appointed officials exactly what they want to hear.  Example: The City paid a lot more than $3,500 to architect/consultant Fred “Bigger is always better” Moyer, and then architects Sente Rubel Bosman Lee, to tell us that we “need” a new cop shop four times the size of the current one. 

Of course, figuring out things like how Park Ridge taxpayers are going to pay for such a “Taj Mahal” never seems to be part of those consultants’ job descriptions, although the Sente Rubel website advertises that Carol Sente “often assists in projects…such as…referendum campaign planning.” For the uninitiated, “referendum campaign planning” is the equivalent of “referendum propaganda mongering,” although we must concede that it sounds so much nicer the way Sente Rubel spins it.

We here at PublicWatchdog think it’s just plain wrong for any branch of local government to do anything about a referendum question other than put it on the ballot, or stay out of the way of any citizens who are trying to put one on the ballot.  We also think that it’s an insult to the voters to assume that they need “educating,” especially by their local governmental bodies who seem to spend more time concealing useful information than providing it.

If the voters want “educating” on the referendum issues, however, we think they are more than capable of educating themselves – by reading the newspapers and the blogs, by talking to their neighbors, and simply by reading and thinking about the referendum issues.  Or maybe private citizens or interest groups will form to advocate for or against a particular referendum question.  

But apparently that’s not good enough for Mayor Howard “the Coward” Frimark and his Alderpuppets, who surely can’t be looking forward to the possibility that the voters will soundly reject both cop shop referendum questions. 

That result would require the Alderpuppets to effectively thumb their noses at the voters if they nevertheless choose to move forward with the new cop shop.  So spending a few thousand easy-come, easy-go tax dollars to persuade the voters – in the name of “educating” them – to see things the Alderpuppets’ way probably makes sense to anybody that favors government by stealth and deception.

And, after all, to the Alderpuppets it’s just $3,500 of OPM: Other People’s Money.

An article in last week’s Herald-Advocate lamented the fact that an advisory referendum question – proposed by Ald. Don “Air Marshall” Bach (3rd Ward) – about whether Park Ridge should spend up to $150,000 a year to address O’Hare expansion problems, was kept off the April ballot because three referendum questions were already on it.

We can’t tell for sure whether Illinois election law permits only three total referendum questions on any ballot, or no more than three from any one governmental body.  But it looks like that’s a moot point because the time for putting any more referendum questions on the April ballot has now passed.

Frankly, we would have preferred the voters getting a crack at the O’Hare issue rather than seeing a ballot slot wasted on Ald. Frank Wsol’s 11th-hour mutation of the more direct police station referendum question that the signatures of over 2,800 Park Ridge voters already had put on the ballot, or the purely political Maine Township referendum asking about the Cook County sales tax.

Just because Bach’s referendum question didn’t make the April ballot, however, does not mean that the question cannot still be publicly debated – especially because the Advocate article reports that Bach “believes Park Ridge needs to resume its fight against O’Hare Airport expansion” that the City abandoned five years ago by resigning its membership in the Suburban O’Hare Commission (“SOC”).  And when Bach talks you usually can see Mayor Howard Frimark’s lips moving, which suggests that Frimark has some political interest in this topic after having slept through the construction of the new runway.

We previously wrote about the Air Marshall’s flip-flopping on whether Park Ridge should resurrect its SOC membership ( “Bach On SOC,” Dec. 12, 2008), but we don’t see how that idea has grown any more attractive in the intervening two months.  Quite to the contrary, SOC could serve as an object lesson in why litigating with Chicago, the FAA and/or the airlines would appear to be a losing proposition.

We weren’t able to find the total cost of SOC’s legal battles with O’Hare since they commenced in 1985, but we did stumble across a Chicago Sun-Times article (“Is Airport Fight Worth Cost?” July 16, 2001) that reported SOC attorney Joe Karaganis and his firm were paid more than $240,000 in legal fees for representing SOC during the period between December 1, 1999, and April 30, 2001.  Based on that information, we have to think that SOC has spent millions on its anti-O’Hare crusade over the years, with darn little to show for it.

So before Air Marshall Bach and his newest best friends in the O’Hare Residents for Environmental Safety and Trust (“ORD-REST”) talk about re-joining SOC or about spending bundles of our scarce tax dollars on lawsuits related to noise and pollution from the new runway, we think Park Ridge taxpayers deserve to know: (1) what legal claims, if any, does Park Ridge have that are different and better than those SOC has been litigating up until now; and/or (2) if Park Ridge’s claims are basically the same as the claims SOC has been litigating, how can Park Ridge be expected to fare any better than SOC?

Such questions need to be answered because, having paid $65,000 in annual SOC membership “dues” for a number of years and having made one very bad $650,000 SOC-related “investment,” Park Ridge needs to be reminded of Einstein’s definition of insanity: “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”  

As we’ve written before (“The Culture Of Secrecy,” 12/17/07), secrecy is the tool of choice for politicians and bureaucrats who want to cover up the inefficiency, waste and corruption in the governmental bodies they run.  That’s why we favor that antidote to secrecy: transparency.

Unfortunately, all our local governmental bodies have a long way to go to achieve the kind of transparency that would make them an open book to the taxpayers and voters of our community, although the Park Ridge Park District deserves a round of polite applause for putting video recordings of its meetings on its website – at what we understand to be a tiny fraction of the box-car numbers the City Hall bureaucrats came up with for televising City Council meetings.

But just this past Tuesday (Feb. 3), the Culture of Secrecy engulfed two meetings that were held in the Mayor’s Conference Room at City Hall – by something called the “Intergovernmental Joint Review Board” – which purported to be the “Annual Meeting” for the “Dempster/Greenwood TIF” (the “new” Bredemann auto dealership property) and for the “Uptown TIF,” respectively.

We scoured the City’s website and could find nothing that identified what this review board does, or who is on it; and we fared no better when Googling it.  To a suspicious Watchdog, that’s the first sign that something may be amiss.

The second sign that something is amiss is that there were no posted background materials to accompany either the Dempster/Greenwood TIF agenda (pdf) or the Uptown TIF agenda (pdf), even though those agendas make reference to an “Annual TIF Report” for each TIF and to an “Update on TIF Status” for each.

And the third sign that something is amiss is that these meetings were scheduled for 1:30 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. on a Tuesday.  How many citizens could be expected to attend such a meeting in the middle of the work day…or could have attended previous ones on Tuesday, January 9, 2007, at 9:00 and 9:30 a.m.; or on Thursday, December 13, 2007, at 9:00 and 9:30 a.m.?

The City has sunk a ton of our tax dollars – and no small amount of debt, as we understand it – into the TIFs.  A detailed and easily understandable current accounting of the performance of those TIFs should be readily available on the City’s website for anybody who wants to check it.  But instead, not only can’t we find the “Annual TIF Report” for either of those TIFs, but we can’t even tell who is on the Intergovernmental Joint Review Commitee.

That’s just bad government, folks.  And, in a bad economy, it causes us to wonder even more about the state of City finances and what kind of decisions are being made based on information not readily available to the average citizen.  

Two items in today’s Park Ridge Journal could be Exhibits A and A-1 for why Park Ridge voters deserve at least the 8 mayoral debates Ald. Dave Schmidt (1st Ward) proposed, instead of the maximum 4 that Mayor Howard “The Coward” Frimark prefers. 

Exhibit A is a Page 5 article about the candidates’ views on all things O’Hare, including its expansion, new runway 9L27R, the O’Hare Residents for Environmental Safety & Trust (“ORD-REST”), the O’Hare Noise Compatibility Commission (“ONCC”), and whether either or both of them could have done more to help address the problems posed by the new runway. (“Mayor Shoots Back After Schmidt Allegations”) 

You should read the article and judge for yourself who makes the most honest, reasoned and plausible arguments – and whether Schmidt is unfairly casting blame or Frimark is merely shirking responsibility.  We note, however, that Frimark does not dispute Schmidt’s contention that he (Frimark) didn’t attend but one ONCC meeting from the time he became mayor until after the new runway opened in November.  And Frimark’s excuse that he “was not allowed to be on that group [the ONCC]” by the former City Council rings hollow in light of the fact that, after the Council was cut in half by the Frimark-initiated referendum that put the Council in the hands of a majority of Frimark alderpuppets in May 2007, he appointed Don “Air Marshall” Bach as ONCC liaison instead of going to any of those meetings himself. 

One thing that article makes clear, however, is that the issue of how Park Ridge should have dealt with O’Hare Airport, and how it should deal with O’Hare going forward, could and should be the topic of an entire mayoral debate all by itself.  But don’t expect that to happen with no more than four debates on the horizon. 

Exhibit A-1 is a close to full-page letter to the editor from Alderpuppet Jim “Chicken Little” Allegretti, which reads like a paid political advertisement for Mayor Frimark.  That’s not surprising given the fact that Allegretti contributed $300 to Frimark’s campaign fund a few months before Frimark appointed him as his replacement 4th Ward alderman back in June 2005 – without either of them bothering to mention such an interesting and relevant fact at his Council confirmation hearing, before that contribution had been publicly reported and could have been discovered by the Council members.  Curiously, Allegretti tossed another $200 contribution into Frimark’s fund about a month after his appointment.  

Already this election cycle Allegretti has upped the ante with a $1,000 contribution to the Frimark campaign, so it’s no surprise Allegretti is one of Frimark’s attack dogs (a Chihuahua?) nipping at Schmidt’s ankles. So with his and “Air Marshall” Bach’s letters already having been published, we can assume that Alderpuppets Carey’s, DiPietro’s and Ryan’s can’t be far behind – all of them raising questions about Schmidt’s character and candidacy. And we’re sure a number of “ordinary” citizens will write letters questioning Frimark’s character and candidacy.  

But the voters and taxpayers of Park Ridge would be far better served by the candidates’ debating their qualifications and their positions on the issues in person, face to face, instead of in print via dueling press releases and letters from surrogates.  Unfortunately, Howard “The Coward” Frimark has already shown that he’s not about to let that happen any more than he absolutely has to, and then only in “structured” formats. 

Our December 8, 2008, post, “While Park Ridge Slept,” criticized Mayor Frimark and the rest of our City officials for being asleep at the wheel for the past several years while the City of Chicago, the FAA, and the airlines moved forward with the construction of $500 million-plus runway 9L/27R. 

Today we address another example of City government sleep-walking past another issue that could have a significant impact on our community: The casino that likely will be built at the northwest corner of River Road and Devon, in Des Plaines but on the Park Ridge border near Maine South High School.

When the State of Illinois announced in late December that Midwest Gaming had won the State’s 10th license for a casino in Des Plaines, Frimark gave a basic ho-hum.  “I don’t see it having a real negative effect,” he stated.  Back then, he even sounded like the casino might be a good thing, talking about how it might create jobs and help the local economy. 

To the extent that a few residents had expressed concerns about the planned casino’s proximity to Maine South and its potential for increasing traffic congestion and criminal activity, however, Frimark casually indicated that he would sit down with both the Illinois Gaming Board and Des Plaines Mayor Tony Arredia to discuss those concerns, making it sound like Park Ridge could still have some effect on the project.

Wrong!

As Sleeping Howard and the City Council somnambulists discovered last Monday night (Jan. 26), the Des Plaines casino for all intents and purposes is a done deal.  And, according to Illinois Gaming Board Chief Legal Counsel Michael Fries, it became a done deal on December 22, following a series of at least 11 public meetings and hearings since December 2007 at which Des Plaines’ pursuit of the last casino license was discussed.  Fries also reported that the City of Park Ridge was not represented at any Gaming Board meetings, nor did the City or any of its residents even submit any correspondence to the Gaming Board raising questions or objections to the casino.    

What was our City government doing during that time?

It appears that Frimark and 1st Ward Ald. Dave Schmidt were in the process of commencing their campaigns for mayor during the tail end of that time period.  And, as well chronicled on this site, Frimark was preoccupied with: trying to cut sweetheart deals for campaign contributors; trying to buy up private land for a $16.5 million-and-counting new police station that he was hoping to build without an advisory referendum; struggling to help the Park Ridge Ministerial Association open a PADS homeless shelter free from City regulation; and dodging responsibility for being MIA on the new O’Hare runway.  

As for the rest of our City Council members?  To hear Frimark Alderpuppet (and Frimark nominating petition signature gatherer and Frimark campaign contributor [pdf]) Don “Air Marshall” Bach tell it, they never saw the casino coming. 

The Air Marshall seemed to be caught as unaware of the casino as he previously seemed to be of the possibility that the airlines might actually start flying a lot of planes in and out of O’Hare on the newly-completed $500 million-plus runway, despite his having spent the past year or so going to the monthly meetings of the O’Hare Noise Compatibility Commission as the City’s designated alternate (to Frimark) ONCC representative:

“Even though this was discussed, there was no inkling for citizens in Park Ridge to know that it would end up in Des Plaines until October,” Bach complained about the casino to Fries last Monday night.

Frankly, folks, we’re more than a little tired of how City government under Mayor Frimark and the Alderpuppets ignores things that could greatly affect our property values and our quality of life while paying rapt attention to much smaller matters where some “special interest” or another is involved. 

Since the number of Park Ridge residents expressing reservations about the casino has increased, however, Frimark has been busy trying to close the barn door after the horse has departed – telling the Park Ridge Journal in pseudo-Biblical terms that he had “convey[ed] unto” Mayor Arredia that “the casino really has no benefit to us,” even as Frimark began lowering citizen expectations of any kind of quick deal with Des Plaines over financial concessions by pointing out that Arredia is leaving office in May and that he (Frimark) doesn’t know whether the new mayor is “going to be pro casino or against it.”

Hey, Howard…we’ll give you 10 to 1 odds and take “pro.”  How much can we put you down for?

If you spend any time around Mayor Howard “the Coward” Frimark, you are likely to hear him rail against “the evil blogs,” which for him means PublicWatchdog and Park Ridge Underground.  Not surprisingly, several of Frimark’s Alderpuppets on the City Council share his opinion.

That’s fine with us.  We believe that everyone is entitled to his/her own opinion.  Everyone, however, is not entitled to his/her own set of facts.  And as no less an authority than John Adams noted, “facts are stubborn things,” which explains why politicians have such difficulties with them.

But we do, and should, expect more from our news media than we do our politicians. Which is why the editorial in yesterday’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate – “Wanted: leadership from City Council” (January 29) – is troubling. 

Forget for a moment how that editorial schizophrenically jumps from one bald assertion to the next, without making any real point – unless the point is to insult the intelligence of Park Ridge voters by suggesting they are too dumb to understand the referendums on which they cast their votes.  That’s the media’s equivalent of the politician’s “you elect us to make those decisions” rationalization for opposing referendums when they fear the voters don’t agree with what the politicians want to do.

But what we find more problematic than the editorial’s viewpoint is the simply incorrect presentation of some of the facts that form at least one of the premises for that viewpoint.

Let’s start with: “Consider the four conflicting library questions a few years back.”  Okay, but can we start with something as basic as getting the number of questions right – as in only “three” library questions on the November 2002 ballot.  C’mon, H-A…if you don’t have anybody on staff who remembers back to 2002, at least check the Cook County Clerk’s “elections” web page for the basic election info.

As for those three referendum questions being “conflicting,” that’s not factually accurate, either.  The first question was about money (whether to spend $20 million on a new library); the second was a “use” question (whether retail structures should be constructed on the “library block”); and the third was a “location” question (whether, if a new library is built, it should be built someplace other than the “library block”).
 
Conflicting?  Only if apples, oranges and bananas are “conflicting.”

But the editorial’s misinformation doesn’t stop with library referendum questions.  It goes on to criticize “the series of questions over several elections from the Park Ridge Recreation and Park Board” without even attempting to distinguish between those questions which were “binding” – i.e., if approved, they would have mandated the appropriation of funds (and the issuance of bonded debt to provide those funds) – and those which were merely advisory.   

But apparently because those referendums were voted down, the H-A editorialists seem to suggest that the voters must have been bewitched, bothered and bewildered by the questions.  Of course, that’s yet another clever politician’s trick to explain away an unappetizing referendum result.

We wonder whether it ever occurred to the editors over at the H-A that maybe, just maybe, the taxpaying voters are fed up with our politicians and bureaucrats spending and borrowing far too much money – mortgaging our community’s future, as it were – for things we don’t really need, and that many don’t even want?  Might it even be that the best sign the voters truly have been bamboozled is when they actually vote for one of those tax, borrow and spend referendums?

If the H-A editorial board wanted to point out an abuse of the referendum process, however, it should have checked out its own story about Alderpuppet Don “Air Marshall” Bach, who had hoped to have the Council, by resolution, adopt his advisory referendum question about spending up to $150,000 a year on the problems caused by O’Hare expansion (“No room for O’Hare question on crowded Park Ridge ballot,” updated 1/29).  At the very least, the H-A editorialists could have opined on the common sense of putting a $150,000 question to referendum but not a $16.5 million one.

So while the H-A editorial board may be looking for some leadership from the City Council, we’d be content if we could count on factually accurate journalism from the H-A. 

If any university’s MBA program ever decides to offer a course on “Management by Fear and Aversion,” Park Ridge Mayor Howard “The Coward” Frimark could offer a guest lecture or two on the topic.

After earning the “Coward” moniker for his fear and loathing of Ald. Dave Schmidt’s police station referendum resolution, and his subsequent efforts to frustrate the citizen-initiated referendum that more than 2,800 Park Ridge residents ultimately stuck in his kazoo, Frimark is once again displaying his political cowardice by turning down an invitation to the candidate’s forum sponsored by Citizens United to Retain Residential Balance (“CURRB”).

That CURRB forum has become a regular election-year event for at least the past 8 years.  Frimark himself happily participated in it when he ran for alderman in 2003, and again when he ran for mayor in 2005.

Frimark’s rejection of the CURRB debate comes after his rejection of Schmidt’s offer of 8 debates, with one to be held in each ward for the purpose of addressing primarily each ward’s special issues, and a grand finale city-wide debate to be held a week or two before the election.

So why is Howard “The Coward” kicking CURRB to the curb?  As reported in today’s Park Ridge Journal (“Frimark Declines Forum Participation,” Jan. 28), he has suddenly become disenchanted with CURRB’s format: “I’m only going to debate in structured forums” where “[a]ll the questions will be asked from the moderator.”

Frimark may be a coward, but he (or his political brain, Linda Ski) is no dummy when it comes to politics.  He realizes that our local “structured forums” tend to be much easier for the weak-record or issue-challenged candidate than more free-wheeling debate formats where regular citizens can ask their pointed questions directly, or where opponents can question each other. 

That’s because local “structured forums” tend to have genteel, under-informed moderators asking questions that usually are picked and chosen by the debate sponsor – with complete and total discretion – from among those sent up from the audience on index cards.  And those “structured forums” rarely permit follow-up questions that can highlight and poke holes in a wily politician’s glib and self-serving non-answers.

As further reported in today’s Journal article, Mayor Howard the Coward’s rejection of the CURRB invitation sure has gotten the nose of CURRB’s Judy Barclay out of joint.  She noted that no candidate had ever before turned down a CURRB invitation, and she issued the following challenge in response to Frimark’s slap: “Stand up and be counted like a man.  Answer the questions the residents have.”

Ms. Barclay, we couldn’t have said it any better ourselves.

We’ve got plenty of bones to pick with apprentice Alderpuppet Frank Wsol (7th Ward), not the least of which is his flagrant, eleventh-hour attempt to undercut the citizens’ cop shop referendum with his own compound version that obscures rather than clarifies the issue.

But Monday night he was right on target when, in response to a motion to go into closed session to discuss the acquisition of land that may have been for a new police station, he stated: “This is a classic example of why the public doesn’t trust elected officials.” 

That is definitely one of many examples, Mr. Wsol, even if your pique seems to have been directed more toward defending your just-passed referendum resolution, which provided that the new cop shop would be built on land already owned by the City, than toward the interest of open government.  But we’ll still give you credit, along with regular Alderpuppets Rich DiPietro (2nd Ward) and Don Bach (3rd Ward), and open meeting advocate Ald. Dave Schmidt (1st Ward), in shutting down that closed session over the “yes” votes of Alderpuppets Jim Allegretti (4th Ward), Robert Ryan (5th Ward) and Tom Carey (6th Ward).

But leave it to Allegretti, Mayor Howard “The Coward” Frimark’s most dependable lapdog, to not only shamelessly vote for yet another closed session to discuss the City’s purchase of private land, but to blast the whole concept of advisory referendums that let our elected officials know in the most direct way and measurable way what the citizens think of a particular issue like the new cop shop.

Instead of considering the results of an advisory referendum as helpful advice from the voters to be used in making big-ticket decisions like the cop shop, Allegretti spoke of such advice as an excuse for elected officials to shirk their responsibility as the People’s representatives and simply do what the people tell them to do:

“It’s not binding anyway and we don’t have to follow it.  But it gives us a reason to not do what we’re supposed to do.”

If Allegretti is right (and, given his track record, we always hesitate when confronting that possibility), that’s not an indictment of the referendum process but of his fellow alderpuppets.  Because if our elected officials are worthy of the trust we have placed in them (another questionable proposition, to be sure), then they should be courageous enough to invite and welcome the voter advice that comes from referendums; and then, if they don’t agree with that advice, they should vote their consciences – and be willing to take whatever political fallout comes their way from doing so.

But Allegretti’s comments show that he subscribes to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” doctrine of shameless politics: don’t ask the voters what they think because they just might tell you shomething you don’t want to know – like that they don’t want to spend $16.5 million (which balloons up to $28 million when the bonded debt is figured in) on a new cop shop when our basements continue to flood, our streets are crumbling, and the City budget is already sporting million dollar-plus holes.

The “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach is a cowardly doctrine.  But what else should we expect from Howard the Coward’s lapdog?

At tonight’s City Council meeting, Mayor Howard “The Coward” Frimark’s apprentice Alderpuppet, Frank Wsol (7th Ward), is scheduled to present two advisory referendum questions, one of which ostensibly involves the proposed new police station that Wsol desperately wants – and on which he himself placed the $16.5 million price tag (which becomes $28 million when the bond interest is added in) that was the basis for Ald. Dave Schmidt’s proposed Council referendum resolution and now Joe Egan’s citizens’ referendum petition, both of which Wsol opposes.  

Wsol’s referendum proposals reek of rank political gamesmanship.  He has been talking up the big new cop shop project since his re-election campaign two years ago without once expressing any interest in giving the voters a chance to vote on it via referendum.  And when Schmidt, on two occasions, proposed a referendum resolution by the Council, Wsol wouldn’t even offer a second so that the referendum’s merits could be discussed. 

But more offensive than Wsol’s obvious gamesmanship is the intellectual dishonesty of his referendum questions themselves, which – like both Schmidt’s and Egan’s questions – are advisory only, meaning that even if they are approved by the voters in April the City Council can nevertheless ignore them if it so chooses.  And from the way Wsol’s questions read, a bet on the Council’s ignoring them looks to be a sure thing.

One of Wsol’s questions – “Shall the City of Park Ridge adopt a policy that all non-emergency debt and all non-emergency budget increases above the CPI-U (CPI-U decreases will not apply) shall require voter approval by referendum vote?” – is so ridiculous and impractical that, if enacted and applied literally to the City’s operations, it could require a virtually incessant stream of referendum questions that might even require the City to hold special elections for even some minor spending or borrowing decisions that, while not technically “emergency” ones, might not be able to wait for the next regularly-scheduled election.

But while Wsol’s CPI-U question is just ridiculous, his other question may be the single most poorly-worded and intellectually dishonest referendum question we have ever seen – appearing to have been written first to confuse, then to confound, and finally to frustrate any voter who actually tries to make sense of it.  It actually causes us to wonder whether Wsol is proposing it in the hope that it gets a ballot position ahead of Egan’s question, so that many voters throw in the towel in disgust before even getting to Egan’s.

In the interest of political science and provoking thought among the electorate, however, we will try to deconstruct and analyze that referendum question, with our comments in bracketed bold for your convenience:

“In adopting a capital project to improve the administrative/public and police facilities at 505 Butler Place [Wait a minute! By adding “administrative/public” into the equation, it looks like Wsol is setting the table to go beyond the “police facilities” to include other parts of City Hall. Why is it, then, that the new cop shop project – which Wsol originally supported at more than four-times the size of the current 9,000 square foot facility and without any cost cap, before scaling back the cost to $16.5 million – is now morphing into an overall City Hall project?], shall the City of Park Ridge require as conditions of issuing any bonds for such improvements that: the annual bond payment will not cause an increase in City taxes/fees or service reductions as of 2008 levels (adjusted for inflation) [Who at City Hall can we trust to tell us the truth on that point? Didn’t Wsol vote for last year’s budget and (we believe) all of the costs and expenses that pushed it $1.7 million into the red, and didn’t he do the same for the current year’s budget that was already $1.2 million in the red a the half-way point?]; the total spent, absent interest [which, according to figures obtained by the City, will push the total cost of a $16.5 million project to $28 million] and operational costs [which can be expected to more than double, based on the additional size, while Wsol et al. are already presiding over consecutive years of budget deficits] will not exceed $16.5 million; the facility improvement will not require new land purchases [Did you clear this with Mayor Howard, Bill Napleton and all the other Friends of Frimark who are trying to sell their land to the City, Mr. Wsol? And if you’re thinking about using the Courtland property that the City bought a few years ago for around $650,000, you need to include that cost as well.] and the facility improvements will, where economically appropriate, include “green engineering” for the purpose of lowering on-going operational costs?” [Given the current mayor’s and Council’s fiscal buffoonery, “where economically appropriate” can be expected to mean “don’t count on it.”]

Now, compare that with the Egan version that Wsol and the other alderpuppets have criticized: “Shall the City of Park Ridge replace its current police facility with a new, larger structure at a cost of at least $16.5 million plus additional, but currently unknown, costs for the land on which it will be situated and bond interest?”  

We think that language is exponentially clearer than Wsol’s.  But, predictably, Alderpuppet and Frimark lapdog Jim “Chicken Little” Allegretti (4th Ward) was unhappy about it: “It’s biased, it’s prejudiced, it’s one-sided, and it doesn’t really tell us anything.” Funny, but that’s one of the ways we could describe Allegretti and his Council service over the past three-plus years.

As reported in last week’s Herald-Advocate (“Wsol suggests different ballot questions about police station,” Jan. 14), Wsol – in full dissembling politician mode – said he is proposing these questions “in an effort to resolve the issue of Park Ridge City Council spending and its right to incur long-term debt.”  

Gee, Mr. Wsol, instead of proposing one referendum question that looks to dump a steady stream of the City’s big and small financial decisions on the voters when you don’t want to give them the vote on this one big cop shop expenditure, and another question that is borderline-unintelligible, why don’t you start by doing one of the jobs you were elected to do…like balancing the City budget?  And if you really want to start getting a handle on the City’s debt problems, why not reinstate the City’s voluntary debt cap that was eliminated back in 2003-04?

Or aren’t those suggestions complicated and confusing enough for you?

Update 1/19/09
They did it!  This morning Joe Egan filed petitions containing over 2,800 signatures, or approximately 600 above the minimum required.  Mr. Egan reported a “huge number” of signatures turned in yesterday, which suggests a repudiation by the citizens of Park Ridge of both the Oberweis hi-jinks of Mayor Howard (“The Coward/The Bully”) Frimark and the political maneuvering of Frank Wsol and the rest of Frimark’s alderpuppets.

Way to go, Mr. Egan and all you petition circulators!  And way to go, Park Ridge voters!  On to April 7th!