We have often written about the seductiveness and delusional effects of “OPM” – Other People’s Money – on our public officials.

At the federal and state levels, the budgets and expenditures are so mind-numbingly large that we suspect it all seems like Monopoly money to the folks in Washington.  The late U.S. Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen (R. Ill.) was reported (although perhaps apocryphally) to have observed, in response to a discussion about federal spending: “A billion here and a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.”

Today, however, a billion dollars barely qualifies as a rounding error at the federal level.  Even at the state level, it’s about 3% of the budget – which might explain why it took the state’s unfunded pension liability to reach $100 billion before our Springfield spendthrifts actually began talking in earnest about – although not acting on – that problem.

Only at the local government level do we still talk about money in understandable amounts that don’t instantly make the eyes glaze over.  Which is why it always pains us to hear and/or read about our local officials apparently succumbing to the Sirens’ spending song and throwing around OPM like confetti, seemingly just because they legally can.

The most common and most consequential example of such profligacy is the way our local officials throw money at our local public employees, almost always without any objectively measurable relationship of the amounts of that money to individual or collective performance, or to a measurable benefit to the taxpayers.

No local governmental bodies do profligacy better than our school districts, perhaps because they have become so adept at talking and acting as if teaching upper-middle class Park Ridge children for roughly 8 months a year is the work of the angels – even if the measurable results of that teaching are less than angelic; e.g.,  according to admittedly two year-old reports, Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District 64 had the 4th highest paid administrators and the 25th highest paid teachers in all of Illinois, but with student performance on standardized ISAT scores coming nowhere near those lofty compensation rankings.

Yet just last month the D-64 Board gave out the latest round of arbitrary, non-merit based pay increases that, over the past decade or so, have made employment there one of the sweetest deals around.

Secretaries and custodial staff got arbitrary, non-merit based 3.5% increases, while an assortment of “exempt” staff members got arbitrary, non-merit based 2.0% raises – for no apparent reason other than Supt. Philip Bender thought it was a good idea and such raises were “within a modest range of 0-4%.”   Actually, had Bender been left to his own devices, he would have saddled the taxpayers with a 2.75% increase for exempt employees, so the School Board did save the taxpayers 0.75%.

But before anybody suggests that those Board members deserve a parade for their frugality, a closer look at how they did what they did suggests they are guilty of the same basic fiscal irresponsibility as their drunken sailor predecessors who gave both our teachers and administrators their lofty compensation rankings.

Why?

Obviously, 2.0% is better than 2.75%.  But that 2.0% appears to be no more objectively justified than the 2.75%, which itself appears to have no more justification than 1.25%, or 5.75%.  And we could find nothing in the public record that indicates even one of the 7 Board members had the insight or the cojones to ask Bender or finance director Rebecca Allard the $64,000 (or more) question: “Why exactly should we be giving out any raises at all to these employees?”  Or the other $64,000 (or more) question: “What specific objective criteria justify these raises?”

That’s because this D-64 compensation process, perhaps even more than the compensation processes of our other local governmental units, is little more than a fun-with-numbers exercise – with raises having become an institutionalized entitlement that require no demonstrable increase in productivity by the employees, no demonstrable increase in performance by the students, and no demonstrable increase in economic benefit to the taxpayers.  And the process of giving them out illustrates one of the most pernicious evils of what the political class and the political media love to extoll as “compromise.”

To see the evils of unprincipled compromise writ large, one need look no further than Springfield – where for 26 of the past 36 years “Let’s make a deal!” horse-trading between a Democratic General Assembly and 3 different Republican governors (“Big Jim” Thompson, “Slim Jim” Edgar and George “No. 16627-424” Ryan) has left our state perilously close to bankruptcy and with a bleak future, despite increasingly higher taxes.  That’s because feckless compromise, unlike principled, policy-driven up-down voting, encourages factions to stake out positions based not on their inherent merit but merely on their bargaining value.

In the case of these recent D-64 raises, Bender and Allard were effectively able to manipulate the Board into approving an arbitrary and boneheaded 2.0% raise for exempt employees by recommending an arbitrary and ridiculous 2.75% raise.  Worse yet, Bender and Allard could also use that compromise process to bamboozle the more simple-minded townsfolk into thinking that their elected School Board members, by driving the proposed 2.75% down to 2.0%, were being tight-fisted defenders of the public purse rather than mere pawns in a Bender/Allard-orchestrated chess game that benefits themselves and their fellow administrators.

Not only did nobody on the Board ask Bender or Allard any $64,000 questions about those raises, but it appears that nobody on the Board cared enough about transparency and accountability to even make public the actual dollar cost of those raises – preferring instead to stick with just the sterile percentages that serve to conceal from taxpayers the actual cost, in hard dollars and cents, of those raises.

Don’t “2% raises” sound so much more innocuous than “$125,000 (or whatever the actual amount turns out to be) of raises”?

Despite this latest spendthrift performance, we still have high hopes that new Board president Tony Borrelli can somehow bring sorely-needed transparency and fiscal responsibility to D-64, notwithstanding that he’s surrounded by a majority of Board members whose carelessness about fiscal matters seems exceeded only by their cluelessness.  Not surprisingly, it was Borrelli who led the push for cutting the exempt staff raises from 2.75% to 2.0%.

And even the 3.5% increase for secretaries and maintenance staff may have a silver lining, thanks to Borrelli: at what we understand was his insistence, it was accompanied by the elimination of arbitrary “step and lane” increases for those employees that guaranty annual raises based on seniority (“step”) and additional training/education (“lane”), mimicking the way teachers are guaranteed their annual raises.

Hopefully the elimination of those step-and-lane increases for secretaries and maintenance workers will begin a serious discussion about eliminating such increases for teachers before it’s time to negotiate the next PREA contract a couple of years from now.

But counting on Borrelli as the only Board member out of seven to be the taxpayers’ champion means that he has to bring his “A game” every single day – and avoid becoming the seventh dwarf on significant issues like these most recent arbitrary, non-merit based employee raises.  Even if he does bring his “A game” every day, however, for the time being he’s likely to be outvoted by those D-64 Board members who, like so many of their predecessors, have happily jumped into bed with the PREA-led teachers and the PREA-sympathetic administrators in a kind of mini-“Combine” to fleece the taxpayers while producing relatively unexceptional results, as objectively measured by things like the ISATs.

All of which causes us to wonder, yet again, whether anybody (other than Borrelli) with autority over the roughly 40% of our property tax dollars that D-64 grabs every year truly comprehends one of the most important facts of government: that the money they so cavalierly toss around isn’t really theirs.

It’s ours.

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One of the more memorable scenes in that iconic 1967 movie, “The Graduate,” involves a brief, profoundly superficial conversation between protagonist Benjamin Braddock and one of his parents’ friends, in which the latter imparts a one-word career revelation to the newly-minted grad:

“Plastics.”

In a life-imitates-art sort of way, the “educators” at Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District 64 have come up with their own one-word revelation for ostensibly improving academic performance of D-64 students:

“Chromebooks.”

That was the watchword at the June 10th D-64 School Board meeting at which that Board voted 6-1 (Board pres. Tony Borrelli dissenting) to purchase 675 Chromebooks for $190,000 as part of a yearlong test of whether D-64 should purchase Chromebooks for every student.  Borrelli wanted to perform this test by purchasing only 157 Chromebooks, which would have replaced that same number of outdated Macbooks.  Borrelli’s more measured test reportedly would have saved the District $145,000.

But anybody who has observed the workings of D-64 over the past several years can read the handwriting on the Smartboards: this “test” stage is just a charade for those taxpaying suckers gullible enough to believe that it’s actually some kind of due diligence evaluation.  In reality, Chromebooks for every student (other than Grades K-2, for which iPads are the device of choice) is virtually a done deal.

Interestingly enough, we could find no mention of any clear, objective metrics by which the D-64 Board and Administration intend to determine the success or failure of this yearlong Chromebook experiment.  Then again, done deals don’t need metrics.

But given the chronic lackluster performance by D-64 students on the ISAT standardized examinations over the past several years, Chromebook-generated improvement measured by higher ISAT scores would have been a welcome, albeit novel, concept.  Or perhaps those two well-paid “tech coaches” D-64 hired a couple of years ago could come up with some other kind of measurement standard.

As “education” continues to be transformed into an alternate universe where customary measures of achievement are being supplanted by a culture of lowered standards, faux self-esteem, and a lack of accountability – by teachers and by the elected and appointed officials charged with directing and managing that process – Chromebooks are seemingly being touted as the latest “silver bullet” cure for whatever may be ailing our kids’ academic performances.

Not surprisingly, the folks at D-64 are carefully maintaining the charade that the Chromebooks are less about the technology and more about the learning.  For example, an April 22, 2013 story in the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“District 64 eyes iPads, Chromebooks for every kid”) describes how D-64 director of technology Terri Bresnahan extolled the Chromebook’s web-based platform, how inappropriate material can be easily filtered out, how it has a full keyboard, and how it is fully integrated with Google educational applications – all without mentioning any academic goals or standards for Chromebook-based learning.

Meanwhile, that same article reported that Board members John Heyde and Scott Zimmerman praised the District – and, by implication, themselves – for focusing on student learning and not technology for technology’s sake, also without mentioning any measurable Chromebook-related performance goals or standards.

Yet according to a more recent article in the Park Ridge Journal (“Dist. 64 Schools Go With Chromebooks,” June 13), Bresnahan proclaimed “the mission of the district is to advance the use of technology.”  And Board member Terry Cameron echoed Bresnahan with: “If we’re truly committed to technology we have to be willing to spend the money to [bring Chromebooks to the classrooms].”

That sure sounds like technology for technology’s sake to us.  Probably because it is.

We’re big fans of technology.  But as best we can tell, technology still hasn’t found a way to transcend GIGO: garbage in = garbage out.  And it doesn’t appear that D-64 has come up with adequate standards or an exacting  protocol for making a sound decision on Chromebooks, much less a persuasive case for such a significant commitment of time and money to such a Chromebook test.

But in the words of the Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland”: “Sentence first – verdict afterwards.”

And for the folks running D-64, that one-word sentence is…“Chromebooks.”

To read or post comments, click on title.

Monday night, the Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District 64 Board did the unimaginable: it elected first-term member Tony Borrelli as its president over the hand-picked choice of immediate past president John Heyde, Scott Zimmerman.

Borrelli, joined by fellow-first termer Dan Collins and newly-elected Vicki Lee and Dathan Paterno, prevailed over Zimmerman, Heyde and newly-elected Terry Cameron, who ran on a “ticket” with Zimmerman.   And, just like that, the prospect of unprecedented transparency and accountability from an historically opaque and irresponsible governing body is in the air.

Borrelli has been the only D-64 Board member in the past two years – or the past twenty years, for that matter – who has dared to vote against the across-the-board, non merit-based pay raises for both D-64’s teachers and administrators.  For those who haven’t been paying attention, or who missed our 06.06.11 post, those pay raises are what helped push D-64’s average teacher and administrator salaries above those in places like Winnetka, Kenilworth, Glencoe, Wilmette, Bannockburn, Lake Forest, Deerfield, Arlington Heights, Northbrook/Glenview, Western Springs and Lake Bluff.

But there’s no guarantee that prospect will become a reality.

First off, the fact that Borrelli could garner four votes for president doesn’t mean he can count on those same votes on other issues.  Collins has spent the past two years hiding from his own shadow, so whether his vote for Borrelli signals his acquisition of a spine remains to be seen.  Lee will have to show she is bringing more to the table than her Carpenter PTO fundraising ability.  And Paterno will have to fend off wackos demanding to know whether he believes that God is a white-bearded heterosexual male who created the world in, literally, seven days.

Moreover, if those four dare do anything to suggest that they don’t believe D-64 exists primarily for the benefit of teachers and administrators, they likely will be assailed and undermined not only by their fellow Board members but by the PREA and the highly-paid administrators.

Nevertheless, at least there’s new hope that business as usual at 164 South Prospect might be coming to a welcome end.

While Borrelli was being elected, however, Park Ridge Mayor Dave Schmidt was being over-ridden.  Or, more accurately, his two vetoes on Monday night’s agenda were being over-ridden as the last official acts of the 2011-13 City Council.

First up was Schmidt’s veto of the new Public Works employees’ contract, which Acting City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton botched by ignoring the express directive from the Mayor and the Council that it be “neutral” – i.e., that any wage increases would be offset with other concessions – and negotiating a deal that will cost $75,000 of fresh cash.  Unfazed by Hamilton’s quasi-insubordination and the new contract’s arbitrary, non merit-based raises that other City employees can now use to justify future increases of their own, on March 25th the Council blithely voted 5-1 (Knight dissenting, Sweeney MIA) to approve that contract.

Monday night, City Atty. Everett “Buzz” Hill responded to a softball question from Ald. Jim Smith (3rd) by indicating that he would not be surprised if the union filed an unfair labor practice (“ULP”) charge should the Council not over-ride Schmidt’s veto and finalize the contract.   Hill did not opine on whether he thought such a charge would be successful, but Knight pointed out that if the City’s disapproval of any contract negotiated by City staff can conceivably be a ULP, then the City will need to change the way it negotiates its labor contracts.

Without further ado, the Council over-rode Schmidt’s veto by a vote of 6-1 (Knight dissenting).  And the spiral of arbitrary, performance-unrelated raises continues.

Then came the Council’s vote on Schmidt’s veto of the $389,500 “Phase II” of the police station renovation/expansion, which it over-rode by another 6-1 vote (Knight dissenting).  Although Schmidt and Knight both spoke against that expenditure, it was left to Ald. Marc Mazzuca (6th) to ask the only Council questions about Phase II – two marshmallows that went like this:

Mazzuca: “First, do you believe that Phase II would be helpful to your department in creating a more efficient and professional police force, that it’s a good investment for your department?”

Kaminski: “Yes I do.”

Mazzuca: “How do you think [Phase I] is going, and are we still on track to get our money’s worth on Phase I.”

Kaminski: “I think so.”

Gee, Marc, did you really think that Chief K was going to say “No”?  And if he had, were you ready with another withering inquiry – something along the lines of: “Chief, are you really sure you want to give that kind of answer?”

Mind you, Mazzuca is the kind of guy who, armed with an MBA from the University of Chicago, can spend an hour drilling down into a potato chip – a trait he demonstrated with his one-man water meter crusade and, later during Monday night’s meeting, what seemed like an eternity questioning Police Pension Board re-nominee Tom Ahlbeck.  So lobbing his Stay Pufts at Kaminski seems like just a feeble attempt to add a sliver of legitimacy to his vote.  He might as well have been sitting on Chief K’s knee, hoping nobody could see the Chief’s lips moving.

And the rest of the aldermen?  Silent as sphinxes.

The tally for the evening: more City employees get arbitrary raises unrelated to performance, and almost $400,000 more will be spent on the cop shop without remedying the allegedly health-threatening mold infestation.

Change?  Not this time around.

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Although he has not yet even been sworn in as a D-64 School Board member, Dathan Paterno has become a subject of intense controversy in some quarters.

He’s been called, referred to, or compared with a “Creationist,” a “Bircher,” “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobic,” “zenophobic” [sic], “reflexively violent” and – perhaps worst of all – “not collegial in work style.”  All anonymously, of course, because folks lobbing those kinds of accusations tend to be reluctant to give their names.

Can you imagine the nerve of that guy, Paterno, running for public office while lacking “collegiality”!

Paterno, an unabashed conservative, and his ticket-mate, Ben Seib, reportedly a Libertarian, apparently inspired such fear and loathing in D-64 Board president John Heyde that, in the last 10 days before the recent election, he launched two e-mails to an unidentified group of recipients in which he not only endorsed his incumbent puppet Scott Zimmerman and challenger Terry Cameron, but also branded Paterno and Seib as having been “slated by the Park Ridge Republican Women’s Club, which circulated their petitions and is helping them raise money to campaign.”

Heyde makes it sound like that slating might be even worse than a lack of “collegiality.”

Not surprisingly, Heyde himself was lacking something a little more important than collegiality – specifically, any factual basis for his claim about Paterno’s and Seib’s backing by the Republican Women of Park Ridge (the “RWOPR”).  That became clear at the D-64 Board meeting on April 22, when RWOPR president Charlene Foss-Eggemann called him out for his false characterization of RWOPR’S activities.

Although Heyde admitted he didn’t really know whether the RWOPR board of directors took any action to authorize, as an official “club” activity, the conduct by a couple of its individual officers which Heyde attributed to the organization, he nevertheless brazenly asserted that he would “stand by the facts” of his e-mails.

“Facts”? 

As a prominent Loop lawyer with a degree from the uber-prestigious University of Chicago Law School, he should know better than to claim what he wrote was factual.  Or maybe he was doing some Clinton-esque parsing; i.e., he was standing by whatever “facts” were in his e-mails, but he wasn’t claiming that every bit of information in those e-mails was a “fact.” 

Whatever he was saying, it has led to the RWOPR issuing a press release identifying all of the ways in which Heyde’s e-mails were flat-out wrong.

While these little tete-a-tetes may be perversely entertaining, they should not be mistaken for anything but the meaningless sideshows they are, promulgated by Heyde and the D-64 usual suspects – i.e., Supt. Phil “Call me ‘Doctor!’” Bender, the PREA, Heyde’s fellow Board members (except Tony Borrelli), etc. – presumably to focus public attention on Paterno and away from D-64’s high-taxing, high-spending, mediocre-performing educational record.

Frankly, any D-64 taxpayer or D-64 parent who falls for that kind of misdirection is as stupid and superficial as Heyde et al. apparently believe him/her to be.

Despite all these years of D-64’s not teaching creationism or encouraging racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, reflexive violence or un-collegiality – and, instead, proudly “teaching the whole child” (Do all the other school districts that consistently out-perform D-64 teach only 11/16ths, or 23/27ths, or some other fractional portion of each of their children?) and being one of the higher-paying elementary/middle school districts in the Chicagoland area – it’s both amazing and disturbing that not even one D-64 school can crack the Chicago Sun-Times’ or Chicago Tribune’s annual ISAT-based “Top 50” rankings of Chicagoland elementary and middle schools.

Meanwhile, schools from Arlington Heights, Barrington, Buffalo Grove, Burr Ridge, Clarendon Hills, Elmhurst, Evanston, Glenview, Highland Park, Hinsdale, La Grange, Lake Forest, Lincolnshire, Long Grove, Naperville, Northbrook, Oak Brook, Palatine, River Forest, Schaumburg, Western Springs, Wheaton and Wilmette regularly place one or more schools in those rankings.  And several of those districts spend less than D-64, pay less than D-64, and have higher pupil-to-teacher ratios.  And they feed their kids into high schools that are increasingly ranked ahead of a declining Maine South.

So what gives, “Dr.” Phil?  What gives, Mr. Heyde?  What gives, PREA?

If you’re a D-64 parent, maybe you should start wondering exactly what kind of education your child is getting for what amounts to a full one-third of your property tax bill.  And if you’re a plain old taxpayer, maybe you should start wondering whether your property value is being eroded by the double whammy of high taxes and mediocre performance – at least as objectively measured by ISAT scores and rankings based on those scores.

Or you can ignore all that troubling stuff and worry instead about whether newly-elected Board member Dathan Paterno believes in God, fluoridated water and collegiality.

Or, for that matter, whether Elvis is still alive and hanging out at Waffle House No. 1277 in Bartlett, Tennessee.

CORRECTION (04.30.13): We hate mistakes, especially our own.  But a reader has pointed out that we completely missed Carpenter School’s No. 28 ranking on the Chicago Tribune’s “Top 50” elementary and middle school list for 2012.   We apologize for that oversight and are delighted to make that correction.

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We’ve already addressed the landslide victory by Mayor Dave Schmidt and the mandate that a 62% – 38% margin of victory suggests.  But what conclusions or inferences, if any, can be drawn from the results of the other races?

Park District Board:  This was billed as the local race where Park Ridge’s senior citizens were going to flex their political muscle and punish incumbent commissioners Rick Biagi, senior Steven Hunst and senior Richard Brandt, the “Top 3” ticket (for their first three ballot positions), for their perceived “anti-senior” attitudes and actions.

All three of them were roundly criticized by their opponents – a ticket calling itself the “Bottom 3” comprised of incumbent senior Steven Vile and two other seniors, Joan Bende and James Phillips – for: (a) their support for the District’s seizing control of the Senior Center from private corporation Park Ridge Senior Services, Inc. (“SSI”); and (b) the District’s litigating with SSI over a $330,000 bequest to the “Park Ridge Senior Center” that former Park District employee Teresa Grodsky unilaterally handed over to SSI before belatedly filing a lawsuit seeking a court declaration as to whom that money legally belonged.

“Seniors” – or at least SSI-sympathetic seniors – do not appear to have been the political force they claimed to be: two of the Top 3 (Brandt and Biagi, the latter of whom was virtually demonized by some SSI members) won, while the only incumbent on the “Bottom 3” ticket (Vile) lost with almost the same number of votes as the other losing incumbent and fellow senior, Hunst.

The only woman running, Joan Bende, got the most votes of any candidate, outpolling runner-up Biagi by 554 votes.  So if this election reveals any kind of political demographic, it’s probably that women are more likely to vote for women – a still controversial theory among political scientists and politicians generally because of the sexism such a theory implies.

If Ms. Bende is going to become anything more than merely the successful “token” woman candidate, we can’t wait to see what she (and Phillips) actually do about their four main campaign issues – especially the second and fourth items on their campaign flyer that address the new Centennial pool/aquatic center/water park boondoggle.

School District 207 Board: 

The good news for taxpayers is that Mary C. Childers led all vote-getters, garnering 515 votes more than runner-up incumbent Margaret McGrath; and that long-time teacher/administrator-advocate, taxpayer-unfriendly Eldon Burk lost.

A bit of unsettling news in this election, however, is the open and notorious intrusion of highly-partisan Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky via her endorsement of successful candidate Jin Lee, whom we opposed because of his embrace of deficit spending and of the Consumer Price Index (“CPI”) as a factor for determining teacher and administrator pay increases – which is ridiculous unless you believe it’s the taxpayers’ duty to ensure that the purchasing power of teacher and administrator salaries is fully hedged against inflation (i.e., increases in the CPI).

Given the way the rest of that Board – except for the departing Ed Mueller – has constantly rolled over when it comes to increases in teacher and administrator compensation despite the overall decline in D-207’s ranking vis-à-vis other Chicago-area public high schools, we don’t see any good coming out of either non-resident Schakowsky’s involvement in a local non-partisan election, or the election of one of her endorsees.

And if the rumor is true that both McGrath and successful quasi-incumbent Carla Owen boycotted the non-partisan candidates’ forum held on March 21 at South Park Fieldhouse because it was sponsored by the Park Ridge Republican Women, that adds further tarnish to the process

On the other hand, D-207 Board president (and former Maine Twp. Regular Republican Organization president) Sean Sullivan has been a dependable rubber-stamp for non merit-based pay increases, so disregard for the taxpayers appears to be truly bi-partisan at D-207.

School District 64 Board:  If you don’t think D-64 Board president John Heyde was extremely interested in the outcome of this election, think again.

Heyde made two e-mail appeals for the re-election of his right-hand man and potential heir apparent, incumbent Scott Zimmerman, and Zimmerman’s informal running mate, Terry Cameron, in the last 10 days of the campaign.

Not surprisingly, Heyde’s appeal on behalf of Zimmerman and Cameron also falsely labeled challengers Ben Seib and Dathan Paterno as “slated by the Park Ridge Republican Women’s Club” – even though that organization “slated” no candidates, and endorsed no candidates, in any non-partisan local election.  The fact that a couple/few members and/or officers of that organization, acting as individuals, supported Seib and Paterno wasn’t lost on Heyde, but just ignored in his efforts to make sure he and his pet superintendent, Phil Bender, wouldn’t have to deal with the only two candidates whose campaigns stressed accountability and fiscal prudence.

Fortunately, Paterno won.  That arguably gives the taxpayers two voices – Paterno’s and first-term Board member Anthony Borrelli’s – on a Board where they previously had only one, Borrelli’s.  Whether those two can develop any traction on a Board dominated by Heyde and Zimmerman will depend on how newbies Cameron and Vicki Lee, and first-term Board member Dan Collins, react to a slightly more balanced Board.

We endorsed Collins two years ago in the belief that he would bring some fresh and independent ideas to the Board.  Up until now, he has been little more than an empty suit and automatic vote for anything Bender, Heyde and Zimmerman want.  And while we hope we’re wrong about Lee, her ultra-lightweight campaign (mom, PTO president, works well in groups, wants positive change) gives every indication that she will be a reliable rubber-stamper in the tradition of the departing Sharon Lawson and the half-term removed Genie Taddeo.

Whether Cameron, now that he’s actually been elected, will be willing and able to climb out of Zimmerman’s shadow and start looking out for the District’s taxpayers – and its students – more than for the District’s teachers and administrators, will be a major point of interest over the next two years.

Park Ridge City Council:  We hope both Nick Milissis (2nd) and Roger Shubert (4th) will earn their Watchdog endorsements right out of the gate.

We also have high hopes that Ald. Marc Mazzuca (6th) will have learned a few lessons from his slender 20-point victory over Vinny LaVecchia – including that there’s more to City government than drilling down to the center of the earth on the issue of water rates, and that rubber-stamping every non merit-based pay increase that comes down the pike is horrible public policy.

And we hope LaVecchia maintains the level of interest and energy he displayed during the campaign, both in keeping an eye on Mazzuca’s performance and in promoting his ideas for improving Park Ridge’s retail base in ways that make sense and produce results.

To read or post comments, click on title.

It didn’t take supporters of mayoral challenger Larry Ryles (or opponents of Park Ridge Mayor Dave Schmidt) even 24 hours to begin trying to diminish the mandate of Schmidt’s landslide victory as consisting of the votes of only 34.8% of the registered voters.

And they have a point…up to a point.  The fact that only 34.8% of all registered voters bothered to show up at the polls for a hotly-contested mayoral race and hotly-contested aldermanic, Park Board and School Board races, and a significant Park District referendum vote, is nothing short of pathetic and shameful.

So all you 65.2% of registered voters who didn’t bother to go to the polls, either on election day or during the two weeks of early voting: you suck at citizenship!  Fortunately, it’s likely that this community and all of its governmental units actually benefitted from being deprived of all your votes cast from ignorant apathy, thereby diluting the votes of people who actually care and who might even be informed about the candidates and the issues.

Notwithstanding that 65.2% of our registered voters were ignorant and apathetic last Tuesday, an article in yesterday’s Park Ridge Journal identifies Park Ridge as having the top turnout among a number of neighboring communities, ahead of Rosemont (24.5%), Niles (23.3%), Des Plaines (22.7%), Arlington Heights (20.9%), Wheeling (15.6%), Glenview (12.6%) and Mt. Prospect (11%).  For the sake of an apples-to-apples comparison, however, it should be noted that Rosemont, Glenview and Mt. Prospect did not have contested mayoral elections this year.

The Journal article also points out that Park Ridge led all those communities except Rosemont in turnout for the 2009 election, with our 2013 turnout even being 1.4 % higher than in 2009.

Generally speaking, the more contested elections any community has, the likelier the turnout will be bigger – especially if the competing candidates actually articulate significantly differing views on important issues.  That’s why throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, turnout was generally dismal as the post-Marty Butler Homeowner’s Party routinely ran unopposed slates of bland candidates for City offices, and similarly bland “shadow” candidates unopposed for the Park Board and the School District 64 Board.

Beginning in 1995, however, that began to change when a three-candidate slate successfully challenged three incumbents for Park Board seats.  That kind of change spread to City government in 2003 when four “independent” candidates successfully challenged the Homeowner’s Party candidates.  Two years ago change finally migrated to D-64 with the election of Tony Borrelli over insider Genie Taddeo, followed by the District’s finally joining those other two governmental bodies in televising/videotaping its meetings after a group of private citizens forced the Board’s hand.

As a result, each local unit of government is now far more transparent and accountable than a decade ago, although we realize that isn’t saying all that much when closed sessions still dominate certain discussions.  And it is still outrageous that labor negotiations – which make up such a large part of each governmental unit’s expenses, especially in connection with teachers contracts – are conducted in secret so that the ridiculous demands by the unions and the spineless responses by our elected and appointed officials remain hidden from scrutiny by the taxpayers who end up paying the freight.

Ironically, many registered Park Ridge voters seem to think that it’s more important to vote in national elections than in local ones, even though an individual voter’s impact on national elections is almost non-existent compared to local elections.  And let’s face it: Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner and the rest of their playmates in Washington don’t give a rat’s derriere what individual Park Ridge residents think about national and international issues; or whether we live or die, for that matter.

That’s why it’s almost impossible to get serious face-time with any of those Washington players unless you can bundle a few hundred thousand bucks in campaign contributions, or deliver a guaranteed 20-30,000 votes for them or their surrogates.  In contrast, you stand a pretty good chance of being able to have a meaningful conversation about community issues with the mayor, your alderman, or your Park Board and School Board members – usually for the bargain price of a cup of coffee.  Your own.

And unlike all the political hoops you generally need to jump through to get an appointment to a federal or state committee or commission, you’ve got a pretty good chance of being appointed to one of the City’s committees or commissions if you really want to serve in a non-elected capacity and have some basic qualifications unrelated to how much you contributed to somebody’s political campaign.

The local level is where real grass-roots government gets done by real people with real jobs and real lives – not the hyper-partisan cynical career politicians and their high-priced political whores (paging David Axelrod, paging Karl Rove) who live in a political fantasyland and who can’t seem to tear themselves away from their costly partisan political games to actually “govern.”

But while over 60% of Park Ridge’s registered voters turned out in November to cast ballots in partisan elections for the Obamas and Romneys whom they don’t know and who don’t know them, apparently only 34.8% of Park Ridge’s registered voters care about grass-roots local government and the issues it deals with.

So the tallest midget in the civic circus remains just a midget.

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Mayor:                                Dave Schmidt

Alderman (2nd Ward):     Nicholas Milissis

Alderman (4th Ward):      Roger Shubert

School Dist. 64:                Dathan Paterno

                                           Benjamin Seib 

School Dist. 207:             Mary C. Childers

                                         Jeff Spero

Park District:                   Richard Biagi

                                         Richard Brandt

                                         Steven Hunst

“Elections belong to the people. It’s their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.”
? Abraham Lincoln

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Although he isn’t publicly admitting it, Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District 64 Supt. Philip Bender is scared.  So are School Board president John Heyde and several other D-64 Board members.  And so is the Park Ridge Education Association, commonly known as the PREA or the teachers union.

Why?

Because last month School Board members Anthony Borrelli and Eric Uhlig did the unthinkable: they voted against the new PREA contract negotiated in secret closed sessions by Heyde and fellow Board member Pat Fioretto, as we discussed in our post “Taxpayers Just Dairy Cattle To D-64 Board, Administration (09.27.12).  Based on memory and the limited research we were able to do, those dissenting votes against the new teachers’ contract appear to have been the first of their kind in at least 20 years.

Dissenting votes scare public officials, who count on unanimity in the decision-making process to maintain the appearance of “consensus” that lulls the public into complacency and apathy.  The bureaucrats, elected officials and union folks know that the taxpayers are far less likely to question the wisdom of a unanimous vote than a vote with even one dissenter, much less two.  Conversely, taxpayers who know and respect dissenters like Borrelli and/or Uhlig are more likely to doubt the wisdom of something those two voted against.

Keeping the public in the dark is the main reason union contracts are negotiated in secret closed sessions that shield the union’s shameless demands and the District’s spineless concessions from public view and comment.  We understand that Heyde and Fioretto made sure that the secrecy requirement contained in the previous contract was included in the new contract – although we haven’t been able to confirm that yet because we can’t seem to find the actual contract posted anywhere on the District’s website. 

Just consider that more of D-64’s hide-in-plain-sight strategy, directed by D-64’s current minister of disinformation, Bernadette Tramm.

The D-64 “leadership” and PREA are so afraid of the independent thought that Borrelli’s and Uhlig’s dissenting votes represent that they took what we believe is the unprecedented step of running a “coffee and informal conversation” at District headquarters this past Thursday (10.11.12) night so that Heyde and friends could stage a dog-and-pony show on the “A-B-C’s of School Board Service” – billed by Supt. Bender as a way for anybody considering running for the Board in April “to hear first-hand about what it’s like to contribute to local public education in this significant way.”

Puh-leeze!  As if any competent person seriously considering a run for the D-64 Board doesn’t already have some idea of what they’re getting into. 

Four full-term (four-year) seats are in play on April 9, 2013 – those of current Board members Fioretto, Uhlig, Sharon Lawson and Scott Zimmerman.  Assuming Borrelli maintains his independent, pro-taxpayer stance, and should Uhlig be re-elected and do likewise, the election of only 2 more like-minded Board members would create a full-blown Nightmare on Prospect Avenue for Bender, Heyde and the PREA.

Hence, the unprecedented “coffee and informal conversation.”  Can the re-awakening of the recently dormant Brigadoon-like General Caucus of School Districts 64 and 207 be far behind?

Because neither of our D-64 “stringers” were able to attend Thursday night’s “coffee and informal conversation,” we don’t have any first-hand report on what actually transpired.  And because it wasn’t an official D-64 meeting, we doubt there will be a video of the session – even though a legitimate “A-B-C’s of School Board Service” would be the kind of informational video that a transparent D-64 could be expected to feature prominently on the District’s website… right next to that new teachers union contract, of course.

But our suspicious nature leads us to speculate that the “informal conversation” was intended to be a preliminary screening process by which Bender, Heyde, et al. could size up any prospective Board candidates in attendance to determine which of them are the kind of go-along-to-get-along folks who traditionally have occupied the big chairs at D-64 and rubber-stamped whatever the PREA and its administration allies cooked up.

In other words: not troublemakers like Tony Borrelli or Eric Uhlig.

CORRECTION (10.16.12): D-64 Board president John Heyde posted a comment earlier today that pointed out an error in this post, specifically that a similar “coffee and informal conversation” was held back in October 2010, preliminary to the 2011 election.  We thank Mr. Heyde for that correction and apologize for the error.

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Monday night in the Franklin School gymnasium, two Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District members stood up for the taxpayers of this District. 

Only two.  Of the seven total Board members charged with looking out for the interests of the entire community – not just the students, not just their parents, not just the teachers, but the entire community – only two were willing to stand up for the people who pay the bills.

Board members Anthony Borrelli and Eric Uhlig courageously voted “no” on the new teachers union contract under the glare of a large number of Park Ridge Education Association (“PREA,” a/k/a the teachers union) members who showed up at that meeting despite knowing before the meeting even started that they had the votes of at least a four Board member majority – Pres. John Heyde, Pat Fioretto, Sharon Lawson and Scott Zimmerman – already locked up; and that the key was in the lock for the vote of a fifth Board member, Dan Collins.  

We can only surmise that the brigade of PREA teachers were deployed there for more than just the lack of something better to do that night, especially since they did nothing but let their presence be felt and their eyes do their talking – except when they broke into loud applause at the end of the remarks of Board member/PREA-lackey Pasquale “Pat” Fioretto.  Fioretto helped Heyde negotiate (hah!) the new contract and couldn’t pass up an opportunity to fluff and stroke the folks whose bidding he so readily and successfully undertook.

The mere presence of the teachers, however, may have been sufficient to keep all but one of the non-teacher attendees from speaking against the new contract that provides average raises characterized by the District and PREA as a “modest 2%” but which, when “step” (seniority) and “lane” (continuing education) increases are added in, reportedly run in the 4%+ range for each of the next 4 years – along with the taxpayer-guaranteed pension benefits substantially better than those enjoyed by the vast majority of the taxpayers who are footing the bill for them.  And did we mention that’s for an 8-9 month work year – with summers off, just like the rest of us had when we were in school.

While the assembled parents sat meekly silent through the contract discussion, they magically began chirping when the topic shifted to the District’s after-school program – or, as we call it, the District’s taxpayer-subsidized babysitting.   Several previously mute parents stood up to voice their concerns about a new plan to de-centralize the after-school program, which now buses approximately 280 children from their neighborhood schools to Jefferson School.  Under the new plan, after-school programs would be conducted at each of the “home” elementary schools.

The parents’ discussion of the after-school program, when compared to their non-discussion of the new PREA contract and teacher salary increases, could be viewed as a demonstration of why the chances for meaningful school and budgetary reform at D-64 are pathetic going on hopeless.

The special interests who dominate D-64’s operation don’t give a rat’s derriere about the taxpayers.

The teachers don’t.  Notwithstanding all their carefully-orchestrated “for the kids” propaganda, it appears that most teachers are in it for the money, just like most other workers in most other fields.  Frankly, that’s fine with us – if only they would just be up-front about it rather than adopting their faux-Mother Teresa personae while trying to improve on their reported 25th highest-paid teachers in the state ranking.  We also wish they’d stop hiding behind such shamelessly illusory and non-measurable “standards” of student performance as “educating the whole child” and developing “emotional intelligence.”  

The administrators don’t.   Almost all of them are former teachers who would rather maintain the status quo than demand better teacher and student performance, or improve cost controls.  They’re already the reportedly 4th highest-paid administrators in the state despite their students’ measurable performance being well south of that ranking.  And constantly-increasing teacher salaries just gives them a better argument for increases in their own compensation.

The parents of D-64 students generally don’t.  They’re kids are getting $12,000/year D-64 educations while they pay, on average, less than $4,000/year in property taxes to D-64. An extra $25, $50 or even $100 a year in taxes to D-64 barely moves the needle on that equation.  And those parents aren’t likely to risk crossing the very teachers who have the ability to subjectively grade their kids’ performance.

And most of our School Board members don’t.  Board members who are PREA sycophants can count on the political support of PREA members.  And those who have kids in the District are under the same influences as regular D-64 parents.   That makes Borrelli’s and Uhlig’s “no” votes even more courageous and commendable, given our understanding that they both have children in D-64 schools.  “Yes”-voting D-64 parents Heyde, Zimmerman and Collins took the easy way out.

Only Borrelli and Uhlig voiced any concerns about the taxpayers, which promptly got Borrelli barbecued  by retired D-64 teacher and PREA activist Fred Klonsky on his blog post.  In Klonsky’s world, teachers will always be underpaid and underappreciated, even as he enjoys (at the ripe old age of 64?) his taxpayer-guaranteed defined-benefit pension after a mere 30 years of service that we understand will pay him 80% of his final years’ salary for the rest of his life.

Oh, to be one of those poor deprived and disrespected teachers! 

But it took Fioretto’s six-minute ode to collective bargaining (from 1:27:44 to 1:33: 55 of Monday night’s meeting video) to really illustrate the abysmally low regard – bordering on contempt(?) – the majority of this D-64 Board and the administration have for the taxpayers.   During that six minute oration in which Fioretto extolled the new contract and its fairness to the teachers, he didn’t utter the word “taxpayers” once.  Not even once. 

That’s because to Board members Fioretto, Heyde, Zimmerman, Lawson and Collins, and to Supt. Phil Bender’s D-64 Administration, taxpayers are just a bunch of dairy cattle whose only purpose is to be milked as often and as much as possible until they run dry and wander off to some other lower-taxing pasture, to be replaced by newer, more productive stock – preferably in time for the next big tax-hike referendum already on the horizon. 

Can you say “Moo?”

UPDATED 09.27.12.  We have been advised that the “80%” pension we described for Mr. Klonsky should be 75% – of the average of his last four years salaries.  We don’t know if that’s accurate, either, because we can’t find any confirmation of the D-64 website (SURPRISE!). 

Using information gained from the Family Taxpayers Foundation website  (http://www.familytaxpayers.org/salary.php) because we couldn’t find such information on the D-64 website (SURPRISE!), however, we discovered that Mr. Klonsky’s reported last four full years’ salaries were: $102,143 in 2011, $96,361 in 2010, $94,505 in 2009, and $91,425 in 2008, which totals $384,434 and averages out to $96,108.50.  For an 8-9 month work year, which annualizes out to a tidy $120,000 – without the risk of the employer moving to another state, or another country; and with virtually no chance of being fired.

75% of that is a shade over $72,000/year, guaranteed by…wait for it…the taxpayers, while our rough calculation of what a private sector worker needs in his/her 401(k) to receive that same $72,000/year retirement benefit is a cool $1 million, so long as it’s generating a 4% minimum annual return. 

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The “Big Game” in town tonight doesn’t involve the Maine South Hawks football team.  Or even another bizarre episode at City Hall involving Ald. Joe Sweeney (1st).

Tonight’s Big Game takes place at Franklin School’s gym (2401 Manor Lane), where the Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District 64 will be voting on the new teachers contract and approving its new budget.  Kick-off is 7:30 p.m.

For those who don’t pay attention to these things, the D-64 budget represents about 1/3 of our property tax bills.  It also is a significant factor for our property values – because the quality and cost of schools is a significant element in assessing the desirability of a community.

We discussed the new teachers contract in our post “Will D-64 Taxpayers Get Sold Out Again?” (09.12.12), so we won’t repeat the points made there.

The central issue, as we see it, is what objectively measurable benefits will both the D-64 students and the taxpayers of this community receive from this new teachers contract and this new budget. 

So far, we haven’t heard any D-64 Board members or administrators promising anything concrete for the extra money that will be extracted from the taxpayers, such as better ISAT scores – one of the primary criteria many people use in determining the quality of education offered by a particular school or an entire school system.  Unfortunately, the vast majority of the D-64 Board members seem to be little more than rubber stamps for both the teachers and the administrators, so objective performance standards are rarely, if ever, demanded.

Which brings us to the 6:30 p.m. Committee of the Whole (“COW”) meeting to discuss a “transition” of the District’s before-and-after-school child care programs (a/k/a taxpayer-funded babysitting services) to the Park Ridge Recreation and Park District, which the Board is expected to vote on at the 7:30 Board meeting.

That sounds like a questionable fast-shuffle by the D-64 Board, as it gives the Board and the public basically no time to understand and think about the wisdom of such a move.  That’s been a hallmark of D-64 decision-making for years; and it seems to have become even more pronounced since Supt. Phil Bender arrived from Indiana.  This move is even more troubling base on our understanding that the Park District administration pushed this “transition” past the Park Board with basically no information and discussion.

When bureaucrats try to push something through with little or no study and debate by our elected representatives and the public, the usual outcome is usually less than optimal.

And District 64 has become far too accomplished at burning money with less than optimal results.

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