This blog doesn’t regularly quote scripture.

And when it does, it’s usually the gospel according to Franklin, Adams, Jefferson and Lincoln instead of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

But in our post of 03.17.11, we used the words of Luke 16:10 to describe how our public officials’ ability to handle important and expensive tasks is often revealed by how they handle the smaller tasks:

“He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much.”

And that principle is at the heart of the article in last week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate about the Park Ridge Library Board’s rejection of a proposal to purchase $19,232 worth of high-density stackable event chairs, primarily for use in the Library’s first-floor meeting/activity room (“Park Ridge Library Board rejects $19,232 chair purchase,” November 10) – even though the article pretty much misses that principle entirely.

First and foremost (although overlooked in the article), NO Trustee objected to the purchase of new chairs. The current ones are reportedly 35 years old and anybody who has seen them knows they are more than showing their age.

Also missing from the article was any reference to the fact that the Library’s purchasing policy, which requires the Library Director to “secure informal written proposals from suppliers…when an expenditure for a single item” – in this case, 125 stackable chairs – “…is expected to be over $5,000.00 but less than $20,000.00,” was totally ignored.

Instead, the Library Director initially came to the Board on August 5, 2015 with ONE proposal for one particular chair: the KI “Opt4.”

Just that one.

Why?

Because, according to her 08.05.15 memo, that’s a chair that is “comfortable, lightweight and can be stacked up to 40 high,” has a “10 year warranty,” weighs “less than 8 pounds each” and are “in use at several area libraries that report they are very satisfied with their performance.”

“Comfortable” based on what objectively measurable standards? The memo doesn’t say.

“Lightweight”? Why does it matter whether they’re 8 lbs., 11 lbs. or 14 lbs.? How much more “lightweight” than comparable chairs? The memo doesn’t say.

“In use at several area libraries”? Which ones? For how long? The memo doesn’t say.

“[Those libraries] report they are very satisfied with their performance” but how do they “report” it? What does “very satisfied” mean”? What “performance” standards are they applying? The memo doesn’t say.

Yet notwithstanding those 8 unanswered – actually, UN-ASKED – questions, the Library Director inexplicably requested the Library Board to blindly approve those $135.72 chairs. In other words, a rubber-stamp approval without ANY comparables. And without ANY specifications from which such comparables might be objectively determined.

None! Zero! Zip! Nada!

Actually, that’s not quite true: the Library Director tried to create the illusion of “comparables” by juxtaposing the $135.72 per chair cost of her preferred KI chairs with the estimated $110.00 “Cost to repair old chairs” – that NO Trustee suggested should be repaired.

An “irrelevant” non-comparable.

Translation: “I want these particular chairs and I don’t have to justify my wants to you Trustees or to the taxpayers you represent.”

Only after the Board balked at rubber-stamping that purchase did the Director come up with four alleged “comparables,” in a memo dated 09.08.15, despite no objective specifications to demonstrate whether and how those other four chairs might actually be “comparable” to the KI chair. Nor did she provide any objective “Consumer Reports”-style test results, evaluations or recommendations concerning quality, durability, or value of the KI chair or any of the four “comparables.”

Without such specs, test results, etc., the Board decided it should actually see and sit on some of those comparables.

So at the Planning & Operations portion of the October 14, 2015 Committee Of the Whole (“COW”) meeting, the Director provided samples of three allegedly comparable chairs while continuing to assert, as she did in the September 8 memo, that there weren’t many other comparables. Consequently, the minutes of that 10.14.15 meeting reflect that 5 of the 8 trustees present voted for the KI chair while 3 voted against it.

But when the KI chair came up for a final vote at the October 29 Board meeting and after further discussion ensued, a 5 (Egan, Dobrilovic, Foss-Eggemann, Reardon and Trizna) to 3 (Lamb, Parisi and Rayborn) majority voted to reject the Director’s chair recommendation for economic and procedural reasons – including that president Egan noted that he was able to find “many chairs” that appeared comparable to the KI simply through a 10-minute Google search.

You can read that discussion in the “draft” minutes of that portion of the meeting, or you can watch the meeting video, starting at the 54:17 mark and concluding at the 1:08:50 mark,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bcR8UJE0bw

during which you can hear the Director admit that her principal “specifications” for the new chairs was simply “high density” – followed by a lot of vague and subjective pseudo-criteria that ignores the fact that both the KI and the Demco Compact are made primarily of polypropylene (“poly”).

Except that the Demco costs only $48 each, or 35% of the cost of the KI. With no objective proof that the KI is better constructed, is more comfortable, or will last longer.

That’s what happens when the Library’s top administrator ignores the Library’s purchasing policy in the first instance – and then compounds that failure with two months of obfuscation and attempts at circumventing that policy; and when the Library Board is not just a rubber-stamp for the Director.

Irrespective of whether the matter is big or small.

Robert J. Trizna

Editor and publisher

Member, Park Ridge Library Board

To read or post comments, click on title.

About ten (10) years ago the government of the City of Park Ridge decided to lock our taxpayers into tens of millions of dollars of 20+ year bonded debt in return for the potential – the mere P-O-T-E-N-T-I-A-L – of approximately $23 million of net revenue. They called it the “Uptown TIF” and “Uptown Redevelopment,” depending on whom they were trying to cajole or bamboozle.

Needless to say, that potential net revenue never materialized. But the City was nevertheless stuck paying off that bonded debt, the cost of which has substantially reduced and even prevented certain infrastructure spending, while also causing property taxes to rise. Meanwhile, that $23 million net revenue has turned into (at last estimate) an approximately $17 million net loss.

And, not surprisingly, not one of those elected or appointed officials responsible for steamrolling the TIF fiasco past the taxpayers – without even giving the taxpayers a referendum vote on it – has ever stepped up to assume accountability for it.

So why are we bringing up the Uptown TIF financing in connection with a post about the City’s water sourcing?

Because, to quote George Santayana: “Those who don’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”

And the City Council seems to be moving toward repeating that past TIF mistake with what we will call the “Evanston Water Option” (or “EWO” for short).

The EWO was devised by Morton Grove and Niles and consists of constructing a water supply line from Evanston, along with the necessary pumping infrastructure. Those two communities are putting the full-court press on Park Ridge to commit to picking up a substantial portion of the EWO’s staggering cost they don’t want to carry all by themselves.

What’s in it for Park Ridge?

If you listen to the Sirens’ song coming from Park Ridge’s would-be municipal partners, cheaper water. And if you listen to some of our town’s chronically under-informed shallow thinkers, the vast long-term savings from buying water from Evanston instead of Chicago will not only pay for all that new water line infrastructure but also can pay for flood control projects. (Yes, Kathy Panattoni Meade, we’re talking about you).

Fortunately for Park Ridge taxpayers, however, they now have elected City officials who are more intelligent, and far less ignorant and gullible, than their predecessors back in 2003-05.

Led by Acting-Mayor Marty Maloney and Finance Chair Ald. Dan Knight, this Council is demanding that City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton, Finance Director Joe Gilmore, and Public Works Director Wayne Zingsheim get their hands around the cost of Park Ridge’s share of the project – which starts at around $60 million and could go as high as almost $100 Million, depending on who’s throwing the numbers around and what day of the week it is. And, as best as we can tell, even that low-end $60 million figure doesn’t include 30 years of debt service – which even at 2% interest could add almost $30 million to the cost.

Call that $90 million, at a bare minimum.

So when you look at Gilmore’s water-cost savings projections using a 3% annual increase in the cost of Chicago water and a 4% discount rate for the net present value of the water-cost savings over 30 years, his $26,285,068 savings will be completely consumed – and then some – by those bond interest costs the City will have to pay just on the lowest-end EWO cost. And that deficit could grow by tens of millions of dollars if the high-end cost becomes reality.

Sound familiar?

We don’t mean to suggest that continuing to do business with those incompetent and corrupt weasels who have run Chicago into the ground over the past 30+ years – a/k/a mayors Richie “the Evil Midget” Daley and Rahm “Tiny Dancer” Emanuel, along with more than a hundred of their sycophantic alderdopes – doesn’t come with a significant risk of future price-gouging as Chicago tries to prevent itself from going the way of Detroit.

But there are scores of variables, some of which (e.g., Chicago’s possible/likely municipal bankruptcy) could salvage Chicago financially and thereby result in a much less pressing need for it to gouge Park Ridge on water prices over the next 30 years. But once the City issues its $60 million (or $100 million) of bonded debt, our variables become pretty darn limited because that money needs to be repaid.

Just like the Uptown TIF bonds. Or just like Paulie Cicero’s loan to Sonny Bunz for the Bamboo Lounge in “Goodfellas.”

This matter is on tonight’s City Council COW agenda. Let’s hope the current Council – unlike its predecessor 10 years ago – figures out that something too good to be true usually isn’t.  Because this project already appears to be fool’s gold in much the same way the Uptown TIF and the City’s multi-million dollar “investment” in Uptown Redevelopment appeared to be, even before then-mayor Mike Marous and then-city manager Tim Schuenke sprinkled it with pixie dust and snake oil.

Otherwise, we might end up stuck with an EWO project so bad it ends up making the Uptown TIF almost look good by comparison.

To read or post comments, click on title.

The Park Ridge City Council is considering requiring criminal background checks for residents appointed to the City’s various boards and commissions.

The simple question to ask when considering this idea is: Are there any advantages to having board and commission members who have criminal records?

We don’t think so.

According to a story in the current edition of the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“Park Ridge exploring background checks for board, commission volunteers,” Sept. 29), more than 100 residents serve on 17 boards and commissions by mayoral appointment.

That means that more than 100 residents are making significant decisions for our community while, unlike the mayor and the aldermen, not having been subjected to direct scrutiny by our community’s 24,000 or so registered voters – even if only 11,000 or so of those voters ever actually bother to show up and cast their votes. Instead, prospective board and commission appointees are vetted by the “Mayor’s Advisory Board” comprised of the chairs of the Council’s four standing committees, serving as the peoples’ representatives.

That vetting and selection process is all well and good by us. But it requires at least four conscientious aldermen who will make the effort to select, if not the “best of the best, sir!” (“MIB”), at least the tallest midgets in the circus – and not a collection of the usual suspects appointed primarily because they are somebody’s buddies who can be counted on to rubber-stamp whatever the mayor, aldermen and/or City bureaucrats, or some developers or business owners, want.

Having conscientious aldermen at all times, however, can’t be guaranteed.

Back when Ron Wietecha (1990-2003) and Howard Frimark (2005-2009) were mayor, a number of aldermen were so dependent on being told how to vote that they probably still bear faint traces of their respective mayor’s thumbprints on their backs or bellies. And we remember at least one alderman regularly taking his seat at The Horseshoe before tearing open his meeting packet for the first time – back in the days before transparency, when the packets were delivered on Saturdays and their contents weren’t available on-line.

So criminal background checks might also compensate, at least a little bit, for a lack of diligence by any phone-it-in aldermen.

Background checks would create reports that most likely would be public documents discoverable through FOIA requests, however, so we agree with new City Attorney Adam Simon that they should be required only for those applicants who actually are recommended to the mayor for appointment AND whom the mayor actually intends to appoint. [NOTE: Under the City Code, the mayor is free to reject such recommendations and, after two such rejections, he/she can appoint whomever he/she chooses.] That way, all those unsuccessful candidates will not have their privacy invaded unnecessarily.

But while such a process makes sense, it will not immunize the City from bad appointments who do stupid things because…well…they are stupid and/or ignorant individuals; or because they are “pleasers” for whom a pat on the back or a rub of the belly can suspend any semblance of good judgment.  Nor will it shield the City from appointees without criminal records who – when given the opportunity – might decide to do somebody a “favor,” either gratuitously or on a quid pro quo basis.

Remember: Dixon, Illinois’ appointed treasurer/comptroller (and quarter horse breeder extraordinaire), Rita Crundwell, didn’t have a criminal record when she ripped off Dixon’s taxpayers for $53.7 million over 22 years.

To read or post comments, click on title.

In our last post we wrote about how the Park Ridge Library Board was enhancing its transparency and accountability by broadcasting its meetings live on WOW and posting the videotape on its website.

Little did we know that the very first televised meeting last Tuesday (09.15.15) would provide such a wonderful teaching moment, compliments of the departing Children’s Dept. Service Mgr., Kelly Durov – whose valedictory address (starting at the 17:35 mark of the meeting video)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF0C1ovvSJk

illustrates a number of the things about the Library and local government generally that need to be changed and corrected if local government facilities and services are going to improve to where they should be.

The main premise of Ms. Durov’s remarks was that she would have preferred to have continued adding to her “longevity” at our Library but that “[t]here are some real issues that made leaving [her] job, a job that [she] loved, a reality.”

Whenever you hear public employees (or their union reps) talk about how much they “love” their jobs, you can be pretty sure they’re talking about the pay, the constitutionally-guaranteed pension that they often take years earlier than Social Security kicks in for the rest of us, the lack of accountability, the virtual inability to be fired, the virtual certainty their employer won’t pack up and move to Indiana or Guadalajara, or various other advantages they have over private employees.

And Ms. Durov didn’t disappoint.

“It would be disingenuous for me to say that salary were not a large part of my decision to leave.“

You’ll note that Ms. Durov didn’t say what her current salary is, how much she will be getting at her new job, or how many more Benjamins in her pay envelope would have persuaded her to stay. That wouldn’t have fit into her anti-Library Board narrative.

Similarly, while she applauded Director Janet Van De Carr’s “strong leadership,” she curiously forgot to mention that it is Ms. Van De Carr – and not the Library Board – who has full authority over all employees’ raises, including Ms. Durov’s. Nor did she mention whether she even asked Ms. Van De Carr for a raise, or whether she was turned down.

That wouldn’t have fit into her anti-Board narrative, either.

Fortunately for anyone looking to understand the true priorities of many public employees, Ms. Durov didn’t stop after having expressed the primacy of her pay check.

“I would urge the Library Board…to respect the management of the Library to set goals for our staff that will better the Library and the community, and to trust us when we deem those goals have been achieved.”

In other words, the Library Board should see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil – but just let “management” (a/k/a, Ms. Van De Carr) continue to do whatever it darn well pleases, at whatever cost and to whatever effect. And then the Board should let Staff decide for itself how good a job it’s doing.

Yes, folks, that IS the inmates running the asylum.

In Ms. Durov’s bureaucrats-gone-wild world, that means rejecting “squishy numbers such as circulation and door count” and embracing whatever un-measurable warm-and-fuzzies make Staff less accountable while also boosting its self-esteem – even as a metric like “circulation” (how many books and other items are checked out, so how “squishy” can that number be?) is at its lowest level since FY2007-08, down more than 112,000 items from its FY2012-13 high; and a metric like “door count”(how many patrons physically visit the Library, which IS a “squishy” number because management and Staff want it that way) is at its lowest level in at least a decade, down almost 115,000 from its FY2009-10 high.

But, bless her, Ms. Durov didn’t stop there, either.

“My integrity as a librarian has been compromised as we have implemented user fees, stopped supporting Food for Fines, and now are examining charging people to use Library space.”

Ironically, each of those three things Ms. Durov criticized was intended to make more non-tax dollars available for Library use, and they have done so – two facts that also didn’t fit into her narrative. More importantly, none of those three things implicates her actual “librarian” duties, although we confess to having no knowledge of any code of librarian “integrity” and couldn’t find one with a quick Google search.

If there is such a thing as librarian “integrity,” however, we would have expected it to have been severely “compromised” when Ms. Durov’s favorite director and a previous library board of bobbleheaded rubber-stampers decided to close the Library on Sundays during summer 2014 as a political stunt to embarrass the City Council and enrage the citizenry into coercing the Council into giving the Library more money, thereby avoiding the referendum that the Council nevertheless thrust upon a reluctant and unappreciative director, Staff and board.

But neither Ms. Durov nor ANY of her fellow Library Staffers showed up at any Board meeting to voice even the slightest complaint or objection to locking out all those patrons who regularly made Sundays the Library ‘s single busiest day of the week, based on average per-hour attendance.

That’s because when one cuts through all the bogus rhetoric, the Library’s “patrons” are little more than props that employees like Ms. Durov use for their own purposes, like arguing for more money in their pockets. So invoking the welfare of the Library’s patrons is just empty lip service designed to sucker those patrons into thinking that many/most(?) Staff members aren’t just mercenaries.

And thanks to a small-but-vocal minority of easily-bamboozled patrons and a complicit local press, that tactic usually works…until someone like Ms. Durov shows her true colors, captured on video, before selling herself to a higher bidder.

As the fictional Vincent “Vinny” Gambini might say: “Thank you, Ms. Durov. You’ve been a lovely, lovely witness.”

Robert J. Trizna

Editor and publisher

Member, Park Ridge Library Board

To read or post comments, click on title.

Our 4th president, James Madison, wrote:

A popular Government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both.  Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

A similar note was sounded by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in his 1932 article “What Publicity Can Do”: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” 

So it’s time that “light” – along with “camera” and “action” – is finally coming to the Park Ridge Library Board, starting tomorrow (Sept. 15) night at 7:00 p.m. when it holds its first-ever meeting in the City Council chambers at 505 Butler Place. 

One reason for moving the Library Board meetings to the Council chambers is that a television-quality camera and sound system already is in place. So not only can those Board meetings be videotaped and archived on the Library’s web page, but they also can be broadcast live on the Wide Open West cable network. 

Nobody’s expecting a 30 share and a 20 Nielsen rating for these meeting videos. But some people – reportedly including former 2nd Ward ald. Rich DiPietro, until he moved to a WOW-less part of town – do watch the live WOW feeds of City Council meetings, so they might occasionally watch a Library Board meeting. And the ability to view an archived video to see and hear exactly who said what about a particular issue should also be a valuable asset for anybody who shares the wisdom of Monroe and Brandeis.

That televising and videotaping meetings is finally coming to the Library Board also speaks volumes about the current Library Board members’ commitment to transparency and accountability.

Although the Library Board is late to the video party, expect it to act more like the City Council – which didn’t start videotaping meetings until the late Mayor Dave Schmidt bought a camera with part of his first-year’s (2009’s) mayoral stipend and had friends run that camera and upload the videos to a YouTube site – than like the School Boards of Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 and the Maine Township H.S. District 207, whose not-ready-for-prime-time-players look for every possible excuse to run and hide in secretive closed sessions whenever anything even remotely controversial is on the agenda.

Like giving their superintendents contract extensions and spending ever-greater sums of tax dollars on teacher and administrator salaries while academic performance and rankings remain stagnant or even decline.

But broadcasting and videotaping meetings is not the only thing that distinguishes the current Library Board from its predecessors.

The current Library Board majority, under the leadership of president Joe Egan, conducted a first-ever legitimate review of the Library’s director which actually took into consideration such objectively measurable performance factors as circulation (which last year dropped to its lowest level since FY2009), patron visits (which dropped to their lowest levels in at least a decade) and program attendance (ditto).

And those patron visits declined even with the Library giving at least 20 (and likely more) for-profit tutors thousands of hours of free “office space” that generate thousands of additional patron visits by students and their parents who might not otherwise use the Library.

No wonder the director and Staff are so indulgent with such tutors and their customers.

Under previous boards – who treated regular deficit spending almost as an art form – that kind of performance consistently drew “excellent” or “outstanding” ratings that were used to justify raises not only for the director but for staff members. And such deficit spending, the raises it funded, and the declining performance metrics easily flew under the radar of a disinterested local press which rarely even bothered to show up at Library Board meetings.

These days reporters from both the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate and the Park Ridge Journal are regulars at Library Board meetings. And they’ve also started taking in the occasional Committee Of the Whole meeting.

What a difference a couple of years and a competent, diligent Board make.

A majority of the current Board also proved to be the only adults in the room when they promptly reversed the previous board majority’s irresponsible decision – recommended by the director and tacitly endorsed by Staff despite their incessant faux-altruism, naturally – to close the Library on Sundays during Summer 2014 rather than defer $20,000 of raises to about 40 Staff members.

That’s right, folks: when the choice came down to the personal economic interests of the Library’s director and Staff versus keeping the doors open for the Library’s patrons on what often was the Library’s single busiest day of the week (based on visits-per-hour), the director and Staff gave those patrons the Rahm Emanuel finger.

And while the 2013 board majority members consistently deficit spent to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars and then attempted to badmouth the City Council – whom they derisively referred to as “the guys across the street” who didn’t use and didn’t care about the Library – into making up the difference out of the City’s already-tight budget, the current Board majority enthusiastically endorsed the Council’s decision to let the taxpayers vote on a referendum to raise their taxes for the Library.

Finally, this Library Board understands that our taxpayers have given the Library a 4-year and approximately $4 million window to get the Library’s finances in order and start turning a complacent institution into one ready, willing and able to successfully face the financial realities and operational challenges of becoming a self-sustainable, 21st Century library.

Which is no mean feat when you’re adjacent to a borderline-bankrupt city in a borderline-bankrupt county in a borderline-bankrupt state.

Robert J. Trizna

Editor and publisher

Member, Park Ridge Library Board

From time to time we’ve expressed the sentiment that the public officials who run our local government units often make things a lot harder than they need to be – whether because they don’t think clearly, they are cowed by special interests, or they allow themselves to be bamboozled by so-called (and self-proclaimed) “experts” both within and without those units of government.

Those mistakes often multiply the problems.

A new problem recently has sprung up, however, that local government has not created but which it will need to confront: parking.

The commuters who have been parking in the lot at 36 S. Fairview the City has been leasing from AT&T for years will become nomads on October 1. That’s because AT&T is expanding its Park Ridge operations by about 100 employees and is reclaiming that lot from the City. That loss of parking spaces comes on the heels of the loss of another S. Fairview lot on which a new multi-family residential structure is being built.

One hundred new AT&T employees here is a small boon for Uptown merchants, especially those who expect to serve food and drink to those new employees. Similarly, the conversion of surface parking lots to developed property should substantially increase the real estate taxes the properties generate.

That comes with the loss of public parking spaces, primarily all-day commuter spaces. And as we have frequently pointed out in the past, more residential units may very well mean more school-aged children, which will substantially increase the burden on those taxpayers without schoolchildren who already subsidize more than 50% of the approximately $14,000 per D-64 student, and approximately $17,000 per D-207 student.

But back to the parking problem.

Actually, it’s two problems: a commuter parking shortage and a business parking shortage. The former requires spaces primarily between 6:30 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. Monday through Friday, while the latter requires more/most of its spaces evenings and weekends.

Evening and weekend parking demands will hopefully increase even more with the addition of the new “Pick” restaurant on the old Pickwick Restaurant site, the new “Holt’s” restaurant on the former Pines site, and the new Irish pub on the former Scharringhausen pharmacy site. And perhaps by a new sushi restaurant on S. Prospect in the former Pioneer Press office building near Hay Caramba.

Those staggered needs suggest that a solution may not be all that complicated. But that solution is looking more and more like a properly-sized parking garage.

Although we’ve already heard calls for a new “parking study,” the City Council and City Staff shouldn’t need yet another “parking study” to figure out that there are two prime sites in Uptown for such a garage that the City already owns: the surface parking lot at Summit and Euclid, and the Library lot. And from what we understand, either site can accommodate a 3-4 story deck that could hold about 125 vehicles per floor.

The main “devil” in the details of such a project is who will pay for it, especially if Public Works guru Wayne Zingsheim’s SWAG of 20,000 – $25,000 per space is in the ballpark.

As we wrote in our post of 06.25.15, if Park Ridge has real parking needs, they should generate interest from private developers who might be willing to pony up the construction costs in return for something like a low-cost, long-term ground lease from the City and the lion’s share of the parking fees.

Failing that, however, the City Council will have to give serious consideration to whether a parking garage is the kind of project, and provides the kind of service, that City government owes its residents and its merchants.

Meanwhile, the Council will need a plan for dealing with the near-term commuter parking shortage. That will likely require some on-street parking in the residential areas near the Uptown METRA station that will likely inconvenience commuters and almost certainly annoy residents in those affected neighborhoods.

That inconvenience and annoyance, however, might be substantially reduced by the City’s setting up – and scrupulously enforcing – marked commuter parking spaces that take up no more than half the available curb space on any given block. Or the City might consider some variation of alternate-side parking for commuters and residents; i.e., commuters will park on the north/east sides of those streets on the first and third weeks of the month, and the south/west sides of those streets on the second and fourth weeks.

The City might even consider pre-paid commuter permit parking in marked spaces on those residential streets.

The short-term fix, however, is the easy part. The tougher, and more important, piece of the parking problem is finding the private developer willing to build the garage.

But not repeating the ankle-grabbing Uptown TIF-style giveaways that will continue to screw our taxpayers for another 12 years.

To read or post comments, click on title.

What do the Park Ridge Park District and the Park Ridge Library have in common?

Freeloaders. That’s the shorthand term this blog has adopted to describe Park Ridge residents who look to take unfair economic advantage of their fellow taxpayers.

Most folks don’t remember that back about 10 years ago the Park Ridge Park District’s “Community Center” (n/k/a the “Fitness Center”) had a “freeloader” problem: private personal trainers were running their for-profit training businesses out of that facility on the taxpayers’ dime.

The Park District’s solution was simple: personal trainers had to register with the Park District, book training sessions through the District, and have their customers pay the District, which would deduct a fee and remit the balance to the trainer.

And when too many of those trainers became adept at gaming that system, the Park District banned private trainers altogether and started running its own training program from which it – and its taxpayers – have modestly “profited”: the District’s 2014 profit on those trainers is currently estimated (pending the final audit) at approximately $15,000, on gross revenues of approximately $50,000.

That’s $15,000 of Park District expenses that its taxpayers don’t have to cover out of their own pockets.

That may not matter to those folks who view “government” as some sort of bottomless wellspring of money to be spent on whatever suits their fancies, but it matters to us. And we believe it matters to the vast majority of Park Ridge taxpayers who keep getting squeezed tighter and tighter every year for the disproportionate benefit of certain special interests, including the freeloaders.

Now the Park Ridge Public Library has a freeloader problem similar to the Park District’s: private tutors are running their for-profit tutoring businesses out of the Library. And at its August 18 meeting, the Library Board listened to several of those freeloaders, along with one non-freeloader tutor, speak to that issue.

Not surprisingly, the freeloaders defended their free “offices” with a collection of warm-and-fuzzies that repeatedly invoked some variation on the “for the children” theme. Their comments and anecdotes got so gooey and cloying at times that, if you closed your eyes, you might have sworn you were at a D-64 School Board meeting – like the one and only public discussion of Supt. Laurie Heinz’s recent $250,000-plus contract extension and $10,000(?) raise that Board president Tony Borrelli couldn’t steer into his beloved secretive closed sessions because the Illinois Open Meetings Act wouldn’t allow it.

Not one of those freeloaders attempted to explain exactly why they should be entitled to free “office” space to conduct their for-profit businesses at the taxpayers’ expense. Nor did any of them attempt to justify the competitive advantage and additional income they were enjoying from having their “overhead” covered by Park Ridge taxpayers, thereby letting a larger portion of their tutoring fees fall down to their personal bottom lines.

They also didn’t want to discuss how the Library might have trouble accommodating tutoring if ALL of our local tutors decided to become freeloaders and effectively turn the Library into one big Huntington Learning Center – only with the profits privatized (i.e., going into the tutors’ pockets) and the expenses socialized (i.e., pulled out of the taxpayers’ pockets).

Those kinds of reality checks were left to non-freeloader Jim Giovannini of Academic Tutoring Center, which has been in business for 25 years and occupies office space at 120 Main Street, a mere block from the Library. That means that, unlike the freeloaders, ATC pays rent to a building owner who, in turn, not only pays taxes to the City but also to School Districts 64 and 207, and to the Park District.

ATC employs approximately 300 tutors, roughly 50 of which regularly work in Park Ridge. So besides questioning the fairness of the Library giving his competitors what amounts to free rent, Giovannini also pointed out that “[t]here simply would be no room at the inn for anyone else” – a/k/a ordinary citizen patrons – if his firm and the other non-freeloader tutoring businesses that serve Park Ridge students were to join the freeloaders and make the Library their base of operations.

Only one of the current freeloaders – Laura Denver – said that she would be willing to pay a fee for the use of the Library. That deserves a Watchdog tail wag, both because it’s the right thing to say/do and because she was unique in that regard.

The others tap-danced their way around that question, babbling predictable nonsense like tutors attracting students and their family members who generate sales tax by spending money in Uptown (totally unverifiable and, at best, likely to be insignificant); tutors could make voluntary donations in lieu of being charged for use (as if the Library already has been inundated with voluntary donations from tutors); the old reliable “I’m a taxpayer so I already pay for the Library” (not unlike all those taxpayers who don’t leech free “office” space off their fellow taxpayers); and our personal favorite, from a tutor named Karen, who employed the “There goes Elvis!” gambit by comparing tutors to those “nannies” who bring their charges to the Library and its programs and thereby earn their income off the Library.

Tutors are like nannies? Seriously?

Nice try, Karen, but nannies on duty are caregivers/babysitters who effectively stand in loco parentis – which doesn’t mean “crazy parents” but, instead, “in place of the parents” – and bring kids to the Library, or to Panera, or to Oberweis, as if the parents were bringing them there.

As the Library trustee who first raised this issue, my only goals were to stop the freeloaders from exploiting a limited-size taxpayer-funded facility, and to level the playing field so that all local tutors can compete on as equal a cost footing as possible.

There may be more than two ways to achieve those goals, and I’d love to hear them. Meanwhile, however, I think either of the following could do the job:

1.  The Library can take the Park District approach and require each tutor to register, book his/her tutoring sessions through the Library, and pay an hourly fee for the use of the Library; or

2. The Library can adopt the Winnetka-Northfield policy and prohibit the “[c]onducting [of] for-profit business between two or more persons (including, but not limited to, sales, interviews, and tutoring).” Because if the Library is going to ban for-profit tutoring it should also ban any freeloading attorneys, accountants, insurance agents, etc. who want to conduct their for-profit businesses on the taxpayers’ dime.

That howling you may already be hearing is likely coming from the freeloading tutors, while the wailing is likely coming from the parents of the kids being tutored by the freeloaders – in anticipation of any hourly fee under Alternative 1 being passed down to them.

In an indirect and limited way, that might make those parents “freeloaders,” too.

Robert J. Trizna

Editor and publisher

Member, Park Ridge Library Board

To read or post comments, click on title.

We want to offer a big Watchdog bark-out to the Park Ridge City Council, which took a major step – actually a leap – toward full transparency and accountability in its labor relations at its August 3 meeting when it voted 4 (Alds. Milissis, Knight, Mazzuca and Maloney) to 2 (Alds. Moran and Shubert) against going into closed session to discuss the terms of contracts with the police sergeants union (the Federation of Police) and the patrol officers union (the Teamsters).

The seven sergeants are represented by the Fraternal Order of Police, while forty patrol officers and support personnel are represented by the Teamsters.

We applaud the Council for taking this action, which is one part of a more comprehensive plan we advocated in our 06.08.15 post, “Time For A Better Way To Negotiate Public Sector Union Contracts.”

For decades, public sector unions in Illinois have manipulated closed-session negotiations to hide their sometimes/often outrageous demands, as well as their bargaining postures and tactics, from the very taxpayers from whom they are looking for more money without providing additional or better quality services. And for decades they generally got their way with clueless and spineless public officials who, truth be told, were just as happy to keep their cluelessness and spinelessness hidden from their constituents.

The result?

Multi-year contracts locking in annual raises unrelated to measurable improvement in performance or greater economic efficiencies. As reported in a Park Ridge Herald-Advocate story, “City Council skips closed session over for [sic] police contract negotiations” (08.11.15), the proposed four-year contract with the Teamsters provides for pay raises of 2% in years 1 and 2, and 1.5% in the final two years.

Although our local “mainstream” media didn’t report it, the Teamsters contract will have a “net impact” (i.e., increase) on the City’s budget of $153,239, or 1.16% of their annual payroll, while the net increase proposed for the seven sergeants is $116,387, or 6.06% of their annual payroll.

And because this is Illinois where the fleecing of the taxpayers has been institutionalized for at least the past 30 years, City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton pointed out that awards from “interest arbitration” – where an often union-friendly arbitrator decides contract terms when negotiations of police and fire contracts reach impasse, due to the police and firemen being legally prohibited from striking – are around 2.25%. Hamilton’s implication was clear: the City can save money by voluntarily grabbing its ankles rather than hanging tough and risking that a pro-union arbitrator will ram home a bigger increase, on top of whatever legal fees and other costs the City will have incurred in connection with such an arbitration.

As best as we can tell from the materials Hamilton presented to the Council on August 3, by the last year of the proposed sergeants contract (2017) a newly-minted sergeant will make $100K, and over $105K with 4 years’ experience – while by the last year of the Teamsters contract (FY 2018) newly-minted patrol officers will be making $61K-plus, with a top-end of $88,500.

Oh, yeah…one other thing: 37 0f the 41 patrol officers currently on the force are already at the maximum base salary under the existing contract, which is $82,164.

To put these salaries in perspective, a patrol officer currently makes over 87% of the median Park Ridge household income. Yes, that’s right: 37 of 41 patrol officers are already making over 87% of what half of entire households of Park Ridge taxpayers currently earn.

And if we understand the pension deal, both the sergeants and the patrolmen will be able to retire at 75% of their final salary, and 3% annual COLAs, by around age 50, assuming sufficient years of service.  Under the proposed new salary schedules, that calculates out to over $75K/year for the sergeants, and more than $66K/year for the patrolmen.

Should they live to age 85, each of those pensions will likely be worth upwards of $2 million!

Can you say “Suh-weeet”?

And just in case the public employee unions haven’t beaten it into you sufficiently by now, remember that most public employees here in Illinois don’t get Social Security. That means they don’t get that whopping $45K/year of S.S. benefits those of us in the private sector will be raking in…assuming we can keep working until age 70 and max out our contributions and benefits before we start drawing on them.

Just because the Council is willing to conduct its discussions about what it can afford to offer the unions, and why, however, doesn’t mean the unions have to reciprocate.

Don’t expect them to try to justify their demands for higher pay for no additional, or better, work when they can simply chant “inflation” and throw around “comparables” from other communities that really aren’t all that comparable to Park Ridge when you actually look at each community’s unique facts and figures beyond what they pay their police and firemen.

But by taking the transparency high-ground, the City Council stands in stark contrast to the secretive unions. And as Ald. Milissis pointed out, there doesn’t appear to be any true benefit to the City’s contriving secret negotiating strategies when those strategies never seem to work – as demonstrated by the unions always walking away with some kind of non-merit based raise.

The bottom line is that secrecy has NEVER worked for the taxpayers of Park Ridge, just like it hasn’t worked for any other Illinois taxpayers. So there’s no need to keep doing it and expecting different results.

Unless, of course, you are the D-64 and D-207 school board members who act as if they are owned – lock, stock and barrel – by the teachers’ unions and the school administrators.  Then you run into closed sessions and give away the store.

To be clear: these arguments are not intended to be anti-police or anti-firemen.  Nor are they anti-teacher or administrator.

They are pro-taxpayer.

By being transparent and accountable to the taxpayers concerning these labor relations matters, the City Council will now be able to enlist those taxpayers’ support for what it offers the employees and how the City bargains with the unions representing those employees.  And the taxpayers can judge for themselves whether their representatives are treating the City’s employees fairly.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote in September of 1820:

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their controul with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is, not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.

Like with more open-session discussions and fewer closed ones.

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Four years ago we published a post about a barbecue the late mayor Dave Schmidt and Ald. Dan Knight (5th), with the help of a handful of “civilian” volunteers, threw to raise funds for the Park Ridge Fine Arts Society after Schmidt and the Council cut funding to the FAS and various other community groups as part of an effort to get the City’s financial house in order.

They raised over $1,200 that first year.

Over the next two years the entire City Council became involved, along with an additional handful of civilians. And the donations grew as well – aided considerably by our local Whole Foods Market which this year is donating all the food for what is being billed as “Mayor Dave Schmidt’s 4th Annual Grilling for the Arts” that kicks off at 6:00 p.m. tonight in front of City Hall.

For the first time in the brief history of this event, however, Mayor Dave won’t be manning a grill dressed in his standard-issue cargo shorts and Hawaiian shirt, topped off by a chef’s toque or a Detroit Tigers cap. But he will be there in spirit, watching over the aldermen as they briefly increase City Hall’s carbon footprint by incinerating 300 hamburgers and 100 hot dogs.

In honor of Mayor Dave’s penchant for Hawaiian shirts, we understand that Acting Mayor Marty Maloney has declared today Park Ridge Hawaiian Garb Day, and is encouraging residents to show up tonight dressed in Hawaiian style.

WARNING: This isn’t a Jimmy Buffett concert. Males arriving in grass skirts and coconut-shell bras will be prosecuted.

As has been the custom for this event, the food is free but donations are very welcome – all of which will go to the Fine Arts Society to help defray the costs of putting on its summer concerts in the park.  Last year the barbecue raised over $2,000 for the FAS, so the Council is hoping to bump that up a good bit this year.

And at 8:00 p.m. the renowned Brian Patti Orchestra will present a musical “Tribute to Frank Sinatra” in celebration of Old Blue Eyes’ 100th birthday year.

It should be a great night and a great event for a great cause in memory of a great mayor.

In the immortal words of Det. Steve McGarrett: “Be there. Aloha!”

To read or post comment, click on title.

Sometimes it’s easy to become jaded about what a wonderful community we live in.

So wonderful, in fact, that at last week’s (July 13) Park Ridge City Council COW meeting newly-minted First Ward Ald. John Moran evoked images of the fictional Bedford Falls in Frank Capra’s classic movie “It’s A Wonderful Life” to support his and Fourth Ward Ald. Roger Shubert’s plea for the City to reinstate its holiday lights program that was suspended back in 2009 for financial reasons.

We are suckers for several of the movies some critics have dubbed “Capra-corn,” including classics like “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “Meet John Doe.” And, frankly, we can’t imagine a Christmas season without at least one (or preferably two) viewings of “It’s A Wonderful Life.”

Similarly, we can’t imagine anybody not appreciating the joyous quality those holiday lights used to bring to the Uptown area each year.

Back when the lighting program was suspended, the City was spending around $50,000 annually. As The Recession took a toll on property values and residents’ incomes, however, the City Council wisely adopted a number of austerity measures to keep property tax increases in the 3-5% range – including the elimination of the City’s donations to private corporations like the Center of Concern, the Maine Center for Mental Health, the Park Ridge Fine Arts Society and Brickton Art Center.

And, back then, nobody seemed inclined to argue for spending tens of thousands of City dollars on holiday lights instead of on those community groups – a continuing budgetary and policy nuance that seems to have escaped the lights advocates’ attention.

For a few years thereafter various local groups tried to fill the gap with donated lights and volunteer efforts. But even at its best, the effect didn’t come close to what the professional decorators provided. And with each passing year, the volunteer effort diminished to the point where the results became more pathetic than joyous.

So Moran, joined by Shubert, proposed that the Council revisit its decision of earlier this year not to include holiday lighting in the FY2015-16 budget.

That proposal didn’t sway a majority of the Council, even at the bargain-basement – and, it would appear, the totally unrealistic – price of $5,000-7,000 for lights and another $5,000 for City employee overtime to help a group of volunteers install them. And, frankly, we can’t believe that such a paltry sum will create anything remotely close to the Bedford Falls effect about which Moran reminisced.

If Park Ridge is going to do this, let’s do it right. That means a price tag of closer to $50K than $15K. And professional light hangers rather than 9-year olds and their parents on tippy-toes.

But Moran is definitely onto something, even if he seems to have missed the central theme of Capra’s “wonderful life” message that the private charity and good works of the people, not government, make the difference.

Many of those less well-off Bedford Falls residents were able to buy their homes not because of some Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac loan program or government handout but because of the privately-run Bailey Bros. Building & Loan. In fact, we don’t recall any mayor, alderman, or city official having a role in the movie; and the only “government” folks of any significance are the bank examiners looking to throw George in jail.

In the climactic scene when George and the Building & Loan are saved from prison and financial ruin, it’s the people – common folks like Bert, Ernie and Violet; local business owners like Mr. Gower and Mr. Martini; and the affluent Sam Wainwright – who transcend any class warfare and, instead, together dig into their own pockets to bail out their neighbor and his business.

So instead of expecting an already-strapped City government to fund the holiday lights, we think the better way to go is for a civic organization to lead and coordinate the fundraising needed to hire a professional lighting company to do the job right, like Ald. Moran and the rest of us remember.

That should be the Park Ridge Chamber of Commerce.

After all, nobody benefits more from an attractively-lit Uptown or South Park than the merchants, business owners and building owners in those areas. And nobody’s in a better position to tap into the financial support of those folks than the Chamber.

Just think if the roughly 350 Chamber members each donated a mere $100…that’s $35,000 right there with no real effort to speak of. And if the ones with storefront presences on Prospect, Northwest Hwy., Main, Summit, Fairview and Devon tossed in an additional $100 for the extra ambience they’ll get from the lights, the total would be at $40-45,000.

That’s without even counting any community group and individual donations that should come in, especially if an individual, family or community group wants to “sponsor” a tree.

C’mon, Chamber, step up and lead the way instead of looking for excuses to pawn this off on the City.

That way, by Christmas Day 2015, you will have earned your wings. And the whole community can echo George Bailey with a heartfelt:

“Attaboy, Chamber!”

UPDATED (07.31.15)  Chamber of Commerce member (and Park District commissioner) Rick Biagi has offered to chair a Chamber holiday lights committee – and pledged $500 from his law firm, which promptly brought a matching pledge from Ald. John Moran’s company.  That’s exactly the kind of CIVIC-MINDED LEADERSHIP we would expect from a local institution like the Chamber.

Biagi reportedly is still waiting on official authorization from the Chamber hierarchy, so we can’t yet say “Attaboy, Chamber!”

But we can say “Attaboys, Rick and John!”

And put us down for $200…to cover the City’s “share” as a Chamber member, plus a bit more.

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