In 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to Edward Carrington in which Jefferson reminded him that:

“We have the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen, as long as we remain honest – which will be as long as we can keep the attention of our people alive. If they once become inattentive to public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors, would all become wolves.”

If a giant like Jefferson could be concerned about becoming a wolf due to his constituents’ inattention, our local public officials should be downright terrified.

Unfortunately, at least some of them seem to be so delighted by that prospect that they go out of their way to keep their constituents in the dark on anything important – at least until after it becomes a done-deal.

So when it comes to making and keeping the public inattentive, no local unit of government does it “better” than the Board of Park Ridge-Niles School District 64. And one of its principal techniques for putting the taxpayers and local media to sleep is holding numerous “closed session” meetings where the public and the press are excluded, no minutes or recordings are made available to the public and, consequently, the average taxpayer can’t make heads or tails out of what is actually going on over there.

By our unofficial count, the D-64 Board holds more closed session meetings than the Park Ridge City Council and the Park Ridge Park District Board combined. For a governmental unit that consumes a full third of our property taxes (versus the City’s roughly 10% and the Park District’s 5%), that’s far too much secrecy and far too little accountability that’s been going on for far too long.

But last week’s (June 22) D-64 Board meeting provided a rarity worth noting: for the first time in memory a D-64 Board actually voted not to go into a scheduled closed session.

Before you leap to the conclusion that this is a harbinger of some real winds of change blowing through the historically-opaque D-64, however, we strongly encourage you to watch at least a couple of segments of the meeting video, starting with the first 8 minutes 12 seconds. If you do, you very well may conclude – as we have – that the one vote against a closed session was but the faintest of breezes that barely even rippled D-64’s curtain of secrecy.

It also may have been a one-off aberration.

Start watching around the one-minute mark and you’ll see Board president Tony Borrelli announce that “we’re going to do something a little different tonight.” The little difference? Dividing the scheduled three-in-one combination motion of three closed-session action items into three individual motions for separate votes.

So far, so good.

But Borrelli immediately falls (jumps?) off the transparency wagon when he makes the motion for a closed session to discuss potential or pending litigation.

He stays pretty much on script by reading the particular section of the Illinois Open Meetings Act (“IOMA”) that permits a “litigation” exception to IOMA’s open meeting requirements – although he does let slip that the pending or threatened litigation is about “residency.”

SIDEBAR: IOMA requires that all meetings be “open” to the public, but it permits closed meetings for discussions of certain limited topics or matters. However, closed sessions are not required for any of those topics or matters. And, even more significantly, IOMA does not require that the public officials participating in closed session meetings keep those discussions secret. An official could come out of one of those meetings and recount in minute detail everything that went on in the meeting, without any legal consequences under IOMA.

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If “transparency” actually meant anything to Borrelli, he could have proved it by immediately placing on the public record – legally and properly under IOMA – some basic information about that litigation, including: (1) the identity of the person(s) who have filed or are threatening the litigation; (2) the name(s) of any attorney(s) representing the person(s); (3) the names of any individuals (besides the District itself) who are or are threatened with being defendants; and (4) the reason(s) why the suit has been filed or threatened.

But that kind of transparency is to Borrelli what castor oil was to “Spanky” McFarland in those old-time “Little Rascals” short films: totally distasteful. And it’s no more palatable to Board members Bob Johnson, Vickie Lee, Dathan Paterno and Scott Zimmerman.

The meeting video shows the “litigation” closed-session motion quickly passing by a vote of 3 (Borrelli, Johnson and newcomer Tom Sotos) to 1 (newcomer Mark Eggemann), with Lee, Paterno and Zimmerman MIA at that point in the festivities.

Next comes Borrelli’s motion to go into closed session to discuss Supt. Laurie Heinz’s contract extension and raise, which he tries to justify as being “purely for getting our thoughts together.”

Yes, folks, he actually said that!

That’s because, in Borrelli’s faux-transparent, faux-accountable parallel civic universe, the process by which our elected officials get their thoughts together on things like extending, after only one year, the multi-year contract for the District’s top (and highest paid) bureaucrat – and throwing in a raise to boot – is so far beyond the ken of us simple-minded taxpayers that it cannot be shared with us. For our own good, of course.

We can almost hear Borrelli channeling Jack Nicholson’s “Col. Jessup”:

“The truth. You taxpayers can’t handle the truth!”

So, not surprisingly, Borrelli and Johnson quickly vote “yes” and Eggemann just as quickly votes “no,” dropping what could be the decisive vote in Sotos’ lap at the 2:35 mark of the video. And what we get for the next 2 minutes is Sotos Agonistes, grappling with the dilemma of running yet again into another closed-session discussion of Heinz’s performance and the reason(s) for rewarding it.

At one point Sotos actually suggests, mirabile dictu, deferring the vote to another meeting so that the Board could publish – sufficiently in advance of that next meeting– the basic terms of Heinz’s extension and raise, thereby giving the public a chance to learn those terms and perhaps comment on them before the vote is taken.

But Borrelli was having none of that. He promptly repels Sotos’ suggestion by insisting (with Heinz nodding her agreement) that “the stuff we’re going to be discussing has already been presented in open session” – without giving chapter and verse about when and where that was done, or where the taxpayers might find that information, or any video of it, or any written account of it.

SPOILER ALERT: From the videos we’ve watched and all the Board packets we’ve reviewed, Borrelli’s statement appears to have been nothing short of a complete lie – although we would love to be proved  wrong on this point.

Which may have been why Sotos wasn’t convinced and voted “no,” thereby creating a 2-2 tie that would have nuked the closed session – if not for the arrival of Lee (“at the right time,” according to Borrelli at approx. 5:25 of the video) who promptly broke the tie with her “yes” vote for the closed session.

That evil deed being done, the Board moves on to the last of those closed-session motions: a discussion of the new deals being given to the District’s secretaries, custodians, maintenance, exempt and administrative employees. Borrelli gives his assurances that, following the closed session, he has “every reason and every intent on providing as much documentation in summary as possible before we take that vote.” Meaning that they would come out of that closed-session discussion, put a smattering of information about the new deal on the record, and then vote on the deal seconds later.

Can you say: “The taxpayers be damned”?

But after Sotos and Eggemann announced they would be voting “no,” Borrelli apparently decided he could afford to look a bit magnanimous after having already locked in closed sessions on the two most important of the three closed-session motions. So he announced that Eggemann had persuaded him to change his mind, and he voted “no.”

Johnson, his moistened finger detecting Borrelli’s breeze, took his cue and joined what by then was clearly a majority – leaving the clueless Lee to cast the sole “yes” vote on the basis that no “consensus” (that’s what they call an unofficial “vote” taken in closed session to ensure they’ve got the necessary votes to do whatever it is they want before coming out into the sunlight and staging the official vote) had been reached in previous closed sessions, thereby requiring further discussions out of the taxpayers’ earshot.

Because at D-64, the curtain of secrecy barely ever ripples.

And in our next post, we’ll be addressing in greater detail the Board’s charade surrounding Heinz’s new deal.

To read or post comments, click on title

Only a few weeks ago we wrote a post about how it sounded like the School Board of Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 was cooking up a contract extension and raise for rookie superintendent Laurie Heinz (“D-64 Supt. Contract Extension Just Another Non-Transparent Charade?”, May 31), all while hiding from the taxpayers their discussions of Heinz’s first year’s performance and whatever justification there might be for these additional financial perks.

Since then, however, the Board has held two more meetings and two more closed sessions – in each instance using generic language (“specific employees”) in the closed-session motion that did not even identify Heinz or mention that they would be discussing her contract extension and/or compensation.

So it should come as no surprise – even as it should infuriate every D-64 taxpayer – that two agenda items for tonight’s (June 22) D-64 Board meeting are “Action Item 15-06-15” to extend Heinz’s contract for some unspecified period, and “Action Item 15-06-16” to approve some unspecified new compensation for her.  Nor could we find any description of the extension, the compensation, or the reason(s) for them on the District’s website.

In other words, not only has the D-64 Board conducted all its discussions of Heinz’s contract extension and compensation in “closed sessions” from which the taxpayers and the media are banned, but those Board members are now effectively spitting in the collective eye (the most polite metaphor we can think of) of those same taxpayers by not even revealing the details of both Action Items in advance of tonight’s meeting – the better to avoid any pre-meeting, pre-vote scrutiny, questions and/or complaints by the taxpayers who will, as always, be picking up the tab for this Board’s largesse.

At this juncture we should note a few important facts as context for the Board’s continuing insults: (1) D-64 spends about the same amount of money educating less than 5,000 students as the City of Park Ridge spends on all of the services it provides to over 37,000 residents; (2) Heinz already makes close to $250,000/year, all in, despite her having had no previous superintendent experience; and (3) as best as we can tell, Heinz has failed to move the needle of student/District achievement or rankings even one click upward during her first year on the job, unlike some professional sports rookie-of-the-year whose stellar performance earns a contract renegotiation.

So why is she getting new (presumably better) compensation and a contract extension beyond her original 3-year term?

If you guessed “for no reason that would pass the wink test, the smirk test, the LOL test or the LMAO test,” you’d be right. Which is why D-64 Board president Tony Borrelli has orchestrated this whole evaluation/extension/raise process in numerous closed sessions, rather than in open ones. And why perennial Board bobbleheads Scott Zimmerman, Dathan Paterno, Vicki Lee and Bob Johnson have served as Borrelli’s “Amen!” chorus for that effort.

To say that Borrelli’s and the Bobbleheads’ conduct in this regard is disappointing would be a gross understatement. Frankly, such secretive conduct about the District’s top administrator is reprehensible, as is such secretive conduct by every elected official who purports to represent the taxpayers of his/her respective governmental unit.  Unfortunately, these D-64 folks are adept (via the well-paid propaganda minister/spinmeistrix, Bernadette Tramm) at manipulating and bamboozling our sleepwalking local press, so the public rarely hears about the many ways it is being played by their “representatives.”

Borrelli’s got almost four full years remaining on his current term so, unless he has a St. Paul-style epiphany about the many errors of his ways very soon, we can expect more deals like this one for Heinz being cooked up outside the public’s view. And because all four of the Bobbleheads will be on the Board in 2016, there’s no telling what kind of damage they can do when it’s time to negotiate (a/k/a, ankle-grab) a new teachers union contract – especially with a  contractually-secure Heinz whispering sweet nothings in Borrelli’s and the Bobbleheads’ ears about how well the District is performing, and how a teacher strike would be nothing short of a nuclear disaster for the District, the community and, most of all, for its vulnerable children.

After all, Heinz has been laying the groundwork for that argument since she took over and began “signing” every piece of parent-directed correspondence: “For your children.”  Not just “for the children,” but “for your children.”

And you wonder why Tramm makes the big bucks?

The only sliver of good news is that newly-elected Board member Mark Eggemann has consistently voted against those closed sessions. And newly-elected Board member Tom Sotos has voted against most of them. While that’s better than monolithic 7-0 no-questions-asked votes for closed-door meetings, voting “no” isn’t such a profile in courage when you’re certain to be outvoted by more than 2-1.

Which is why it would appear that Eggemann’s and Sotos’ “Rubicon” moment has arrived.  As in “crossing the Rubicon”; i.e., taking a step that commits a person to a specific course of action, usually with significant risk and consequences.

Or to give it some local flavor, it could be called a “720 Garden” moment, in recognition of when the late Mayor Dave Schmidt – back in early 2008, when he was still just first-year Ald. Dave – exercised his legal rights under the Illinois Open Meetings Act (“IOMA”) to publicly disclose then-mayor Howard Frimark’s closed-door attempts to enlist the then-City Council majority in finagling the City’s purchase of the 720 Garden property for a new police station.

That 720 Garden moment earned Schmidt a purely-political, non-binding public “condemnation” from Frimark, five of the seven sitting aldermen, and City Clerk Betty Henneman. But it showed the voting public that Schmidt stood for those principles that would become his “HITA” mayoral campaign platform less than a year later: Honesty, Integrity, Transparency and Accountability.

And it showed how Frimark and his Council lackeys didn’t.

Although Eggemann and Sotos are even newer to their offices than Schmidt was to his when he faced his Rubicon moment, Borrelli and the Bobbleheads appear to be providing such a Rubicon opportunity now.

Is it too late for Eggemann and Sotos to stand up at tonight’s meeting and demand a deferral of the votes on both Heinz’s contract extension and her new compensation until the details of both can be published on the District’s website so the taxpayers can reasonably be informed about them at least a week before any vote?  Are Borrelli and the Bobbleheads so far gone that they can’t even feel any shame for their HITA-bereft secretive dealings and their affronts to those taxpayers?

We should find out in about eight more hours.

UPDATED (06.25.15) The video from Monday night’s meeting can be found at http://www.d64.org/boe/BOE-Video-6-22-15.cfm, and it’s truly a revelation of what the addition of two new Board members (Mark Eggemann and Tom Sotos) and the departure of one old Board member (John Heyde) can do to add Honesty, Integrity, Transparency and Accountability to even an intransigent institution like D-64.

But after taking in the discussion about Heinz’s contract extension and raise, starting at 3:59:45 and continuing to 4:21:30, we’ve got to wonder why they didn’t vote to give her a THREE YEAR EXTENSION! Seriously, we haven’t heard that much gushing about any individual local public employee in at least 20 years – even though it all appears to have been based on those closed-session discussions and on reports that do not seem to have been made public (and clearly weren’t in Monday night’s meeting materials).

And for pure entertainment value, make sure you catch the tap-dancing about going into closed session that starts at the beginning of the video and continues to approximately the 0:08:15 point of the video. They actually severed the three closed-session matters (that they always used to vote on together) and conducted separate votes on them.

Gee, we wonder where they got THAT idea?

To read or post comments, click on title.

A recent article in the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“District 64 postpones action on superintendent contract extension,” May 19, 2015) reports that a proposal to extend D-64 Supt. Laurie Heinz’s contract and compensation package was “deferred.”

Board president Tony Borrelli is quoted as saying that the D-64 Board “is not done deliberating” over the “factors to consider for administrators in general and the superintendent in specific.”

Hey, D-64 taxpayers! When you read something like that, reach for your wallets because there’s a good chance you’re being sold down the river by the elected representatives who are supposed to be protecting those wallets.

Why do we say that? Let’s review.

In February 2014 Heinz, who had NEVER been a superintendent before, was given a three-year contract to head D-64. You can read about all the secrecy surrounding that sweetheart deal in our 02.07.14 post.

According to the H-A article, Heinz this year received $201K in base salary, plus up to 9.4% of her pension contributions (in addition to D-64’s required pension contributions), medical, dental, life insurance coverage, travel reimbursement, 20 vacation days, and $1,320 toward her personal cell phone charges. And those terms apparently are guaranteed irrespective of how well she personally, or the entire District, performs.

Now the D-64 Board is planning on extending that deal after only one year of service.

What has she accomplished in that first year that has earned her the extension the D-64 Board appears intent on giving her? The H-A article doesn’t say, and we can’t find any record of it – even though Borrelli positively gushed about Heinz’s “evaluations” at Page 4 of the Minutes of the May 4, 2015 meeting:

Board President Borrelli announced that the current Board had conducted an evaluation of Dr. Heinz’s first year as superintendent, including mid-term and year-end evaluations. He noted that she unanimously has hit her evaluations and benchmarks out of the park. Board President Borrelli stated that he could not say enough about how much the current Board appreciates her efforts and the sterling evaluations this Board can provide. He further stated that the current Board’s recommendation to the new Board is that her contract be rolled over and considerations be given for raises in benefits and salaries. He noted that the new Board would now have that conversation and make this decision.

Apparently, even allegedly “out of the park” achievements have to be kept under wraps – at least until Heinz’s new deal is finalized in yet another closed session and then approved perfunctorily in open session before D-64’s taxpayers have the information necessary to figure out whether and how they’re being bamboozled.

That kind of conduct makes a mockery of the Board’s “Operating Principles” at Pages 44-46 of the May 18, 2015 Board Report, assuming those principles were anything more than a public relations Tramm sham when approved in August 2013:

Operating Principle 6: Board and Committee Meetings

We choose to conduct our meetings in an open and orderly fashion and in a manner consistent with our operating principles.

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Operating Principle 8: Accountability

The Board recognizes that it is accountable to the community and other stakeholders.

• We will communicate the State of the District on an annual basis.
• We will conduct open, transparent and frequent communications with the community.
• We will encourage public engagement.

And if you believe the D-64 Board actually subscribes to these principles, there’s some swamp land in Florida with your name on it.

To read or make comments, click on title.

Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 is in near the end of the first go-round on its new proof-of-residency registration process. This process is intended to reduce, if not eliminate, the non-resident parasites who enroll and keep their kids in D-64 schools even though they don’t live in the District and pay taxes for its schools.

The process seems pretty straightforward and understandable, as demonstrated by the form employed.

Which may explain why we have yet to hear any of the wailing and gnashing of teeth about how such a process would be “too burdensome” and a “pain in the neck” for parents/guardians to prove the D-64 residency of their students. That was what former (Hallelujah!) Board member John Heyde and Scott (Mini-Heyde) Zimmerman predicted when arguing against the District’s implementing the residency check several months ago.

But while complaints about the residency checks seem to be missing, we are hearing the annoying call of that not-rare-enough species of D-64 resident whose scientific name is cheapskatias Park Ridgianis, which for shorthand purposes we have nicknamed “freeloader.”

The freeloader’s call is a piercing screech which it emits whenever it is charged for anything related to the “free” $14,000/year education to which it believes each of its kids is entitled by virtue of the payment of $3-4-5-6,000 a year in property taxes to D-64. And it is being heard earlier than usual because, as part of the new registration process, D-64 is requiring the payment of next year’s student fees by June 1 instead of by the customary July 31.

According to the District’s website and fee schedule, the fees “[f]or the 7th consecutive year…will remain unchanged” at $84 for Pre-K/K, $227 for Grades 1-5, and $315 for Grades 6, although for some undisclosed reason they will cover only about 52% of the District’s annual costs for instructional resources and technology – with the balance presumably being hung on the taxpayers. If you’re financially strapped, however, you can apply for a Student Fee Waiver by filling out this form, although the District’s legal counsel either wasn’t consulted or was asleep at the switch for not requiring it to be sworn and notarized like most commercial financial statements.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: only shameless freeloaders would beef about having to pay those relatively nominal fees for educations costing $14,000 per student per year.

As best as we can tell, even the owner of the most expensive house in town doesn’t pay $14,000 a year in property taxes to D-64, so he/she is money ahead even with only 1 kid in D-64 schools. And those residents who run multiple kids through the schools and pay considerably less than $14,000 a year in taxes to D-64 – anybody whose total tax bill is less than $21,000, of which less than $7,000 goes to D-64 – might be able to game the system for tens of thousands of dollars of subsidized education, especially if they pack up and move out of the District once they’ve used up all the free schooling.

Hence the term “freeloaders.”

But just because they’re freeloaders doesn’t mean they aren’t right about D-64 being tone deaf, inept, or just plain arrogant for continuing to ignore the freeloaders’ call for a “line item” description of the components of those fee amounts.

We can think of no justification whatsoever for the District’s continuing failure to provide such detailed information. Nor can we, frankly, think of any justification for the District’s charging parents only 52% of the total cost of whatever expenses those fees are supposed to cover, especially if the taxpayers are picking up 48% of those expenses.

So it’s time (actually, it’s well past the time) for Board president Tony Borrelli and a majority of the D-64 Board to demand that grossly-overpaid Finance czarina Becky Allard put together a line-item listing of exactly what charges comprise those annual student fees.  And once that mystery is solved, Borrelli and the Board should explain what particular public policy considerations demand that only 52% – and not 100%, or 90%, or even 20% – of those charges are assessed to the parents.

We’re confident that won’t shut up the most vocal freeloaders, but it’s still the right thing to do.

And the Board has put off doing it long enough.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Last year the City of Park Ridge suffered a bit of a national black-eye when a video of a middle-aged Park Ridge man being beaten by a few young thugs in the midst of a gathering of local (?) youths at Hinkley Park went viral.

News outlets around the county got to watch and listen to our callow youth triumphantly chant “U-S-A!” as the father, searching for his son in the crowd after Taste of Park Ridge (“TOPR”) had closed down for the night, was verbally abused and physically tuned up.

As we wrote about in our 07.25.14 and 07.31.14 posts, our local police did a pretty horsebleep job of dealing with that Lord Of The Flies scenario and its group psychosis, despite being called out on two separate occasions within a couple/three hours of the incident. And that policing charade was followed by what could best be described as pathetic hand-wringing and buck-passing that we wrote about in our 08.12.14 post.

Almost a year later, the criminal charges against the four local darlings who assaulted and/or battered the dad are still wending their way through the Cook County justice system, with two of the “young men” scheduled to appear in court on May 26.

But as Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel once was famously quoted: “You never let a serious crisis go to waste.”

So this year the Maine Community Youth Assistance Foundation (“MCYAF”) – in conjunction with the TOPR promoters, the Park Ridge Park District, the Police Departments, Maine South High School and Lincoln Middle School – is organizing even more events to…wait for it…“draw a bigger crowd” of youths to the Park Ridge Library lawn and the TOPR/Uptown area, according to a May 12, 2015 article in the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“Group planning new activities aimed at teens during Taste of Park Ridge”)

That’s right, campers: The same Police Department and Park District that, together, couldn’t handle the reported 40+, 75+ and then 100+ youths who ended up at Hinkley Park, including the contingent of about 50 who migrated there from the Library lawn after TOPR closed for the evening at 10:00 p.m. last July 12, are part of an effort to encourage an even “bigger crowd” of youths to show up for activities at and around the TOPR this year.  But only until TOPR closes at 10:00 p.m.

Brilliant!

And the outgoing Park District president Mel Thillens, who also wears the TOPR chairman’s chapeau, is looking to get the Park District to have an “open swim” at Hinkley, just in case there are some aquatic-oriented youths whom might otherwise not be drawn to the area and miss out on the mob action…er, we mean fun.

To quote MCYAF’s (and newly-elected Maine Twp. H.S. Dist. 207 Board member) Teri Collins: “We think part of the problem is that kids don’t have things to do that are age appropriate.”

Sure they do, Teri: What’s more “age appropriate” for teenage kids than hanging out with friends, preferably somewhere their parents and other responsible adults can’t keep an eye on them?

And occasionally beating the tar out of some parent who foolishly invades their turf after TOPR closes at 10:00 p.m., two full hours before the City’s curfew goes into effect?

Given last year’s apres-TOPR fiasco, however, this year the Police Department is promising to deploy more troops to Hinkley. And maybe, unlike last year, the gendarmerie that shows up might actually stick around for awhile instead of stopping by, smiling, and leaving the growing crowd to its own devices despite two separate telephone complaints about repeated incidents of fireworks discharge, vandalism and aggravated mopery with intent to gawk.

Doing things to bring even more teenagers into Uptown on the Friday and Saturday evenings of TOPR makes us wonder what exactly are these folks thinking – besides the obvious special-interest benefits of more traffic and revenue for TOPR, and a higher public profile (and more donations?) for MCYAF.

It also makes us ask: Hey, Mel and Teri…are TOPR and MCYAF going to be footing the extra cop costs, or will the taxpayers get stuck with those while your organizations just reap the benefits?

To read or post comments, click on title.

Since 2009 the City of Park Ridge has had the most transparent operations of any local governmental unit, by far. That’s because the late Mayor Dave Schmidt fought tooth and nail to make it so. And because the voters wisely elected a majority of aldermen who joined Mayor Dave in that fight.

One of the fruits of that transparency was on display – naturally, given that “on display” is what transparency’s all about – at the City Council COW (Committee Of the Whole) meeting last Monday (April 27) night when the Council conducted its open-session review of City Manager Shawn Hamilton.

Hamilton is the top City employee and its highest paid one. He’s also, as we understand it, the only City employee whom the Council is legally empowered to directly hire, fire, review and compensate.  And as it has done for the past few years, the Council once again conducted his review in open session, with the press present and the videocamera running.

That’s the way government should work: out in the open, in the bright light of day.

According to the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate story about the process (“City manager receives ‘below average’ performance review,” 04.29.15), Hamilton received less than a ringing endorsement of his past year’s performance.  In the pre-Schmidt, pre-transparency years, there would have been no such H-A story because the process would have been hidden from view in closed session, leaving the taxpayers scratching their heads and wondering why the then-city managers were getting their regular raises and benefit increases.

Not only does the transparency of the City’s process give the ordinary taxpayer an up-close-and-personal appreciation for how their top employee performed over the past year, but it also gives them some insight into how their aldermen came up with Hamilton’s rating – because the aldermen’s actual rating sheets were part of the meeting materials posted on the City’s website.  That way, taxpayers can see for themselves what factors went into that rating.

Unfortunately, at its March 5 meeting the Park Ridge Park District Board took a big step backward from last year’s more transparent process for evaluating the District’s top employee, Executive Director Gayle Mountcastle.  Instead of an open-session discussion like last year, the Park Board waited until the end of its lengthy meeting before running into closed session for its 40-minute evaluation of Mountcastle.  The result: another 4% salary boost (from $149,000 to $155,000) after a 4% bump last year and a 7% bump in 2013.

Not surprisingly, the individual Park Board members’ reviews of Mountcastle were not posted on the District’s website, nor does it sound like any Board members except president Mel Thillens actually saw all the written reviews prior to the Board adjourning, lemming-like, into the closed session.

Call it a cowardly retreat from the promise of last year’s more-open process.

That probably shouldn’t have come as a total surprise, however, given that Board president Thillens and several other Board members have consistently displayed no natural instinct for transparency and accountability – other than when they are on the campaign trail, or when they believe they have no other alternative.

But when it comes to treating the taxpayers like mushrooms, nobody does it any better/worse than both of our local school boards. When they review their respective superintendents – Park Ridge-Niles School District 64’s $240,000+ Laurie Heinz, and Maine Twp. H.S. District 207’s $250,000+ Ken Wallace – those boards are so secretive that Edward Snowden would be challenged to sneak a peek.

We’ve heard all the secrecy arguments, most of which are some variation on the “closed sessions let elected officials speak candidly” theme.

Elected officials who need the secrecy of a closed session to speak candidly about the performance of their government unit’s top executive have no business holding public office.

Too bad so many of them still do.

To read or post comments, click on title.

We recently published a post about that night’s Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 “preview” of its new “2020 Vision Strategic Plan.”

“2020 Vision”…get it?

Because a “We’re Finally Going To Try To Get It Right Strategic Plan” just doesn’t have the proper ring to it. Especially when you need a snazzy moniker with which to bamboozle the parents and taxpayers aout what’s supposed to be the guidelines for D-64’s priorities and goals over the next five years.

Besides, when you’re paying consultants based in New Orleans (JJ and Associates) to put together a dog-and-pony show for the locals, “shrimp etouffée” sounds a whole lot better than “smothered shrimp.”

According to the April 21 Park Ridge Herald-Advocate report about that April 15th event (“District 64 previews new strategic plans”), something that passed for a “draft” of the strategic plan was “presented” during the two one-hour meetings. But we haven’t come across anyone who got a copy of that draft, or who even knows anybody who got a copy.

And try as we might, we can’t find a copy on the D-64 website going on two weeks after the event.

As we’ve noted in previous posts, the bureaucrats and School Board members that run D-64 don’t want the average taxpayer to know what they’re up to. That could create difficulties in their herding all those taxpayers whom they see as merely a bag of money to be emptied without annoying questions or complaints.

The H-A article doesn’t report how many residents actually showed up at either session of last week’s dog-and-pony show.  And given those pre-7:00 p.m. time slots and D-64’s penchant for secrecy, it’s also no surprise we can’t find any video of either performance on the District’s website, or a roster of attendees. Based on what the H-A reported, the only two attendees were former D-64 Board member Herb Zuegel and Board member-elect Tom Sotos.

Zuegel’s contributions were half-baked observations like: “If parents don’t want kids to learn, they are not going to learn.” In other words, if kids aren’t learning it’s the parents’ fault, not the District’s. That’s such a convenient excuse for a District that never accepts responsibility or accountability for anything, that we wonder whether Zuegel was the District’s designated shill.

Zuegel’s other most significant observation was how achieving a strategic plan is threatened “[w]hen the adults are squabbling over political views and financial views…[and] when their needs become more important that the children’s needs….” Translation: taxpayers who dare to question what D-64 is doing with all their tax dollars should just shut up and let the professional educators do whatever they please.

Fortunately, Sotos’ comments showed real merit and suggest that he could become something other than the PREA’s Plan B candidate he appeared to be during the just-concluded campaign.

He rightly challenged the new five year plan’s lack of any District commitment to raise its academic ranking among districts in comparable communities – which is the only objectively-measurable way for residents and non-residents alike to compare school districts, such as when considering Park Ridge or some other north/northwest suburb for their future residence.

And when hired-gun consultant Robert Ewy tried to give Sotos the bum’s rush by saying the District’s survey results didn’t place improved rankings among major concerns, Sotos called out Ewy by not only expressing skepticism about those survey results but, also, by noting all the residents who told him about their rating concerns.

Had D-64 done the right and honorably thing by releasing those survey results prior to that event, Sotos would have had the ammunition he needed to brand Ewy an outright liar – assuming Sotos actually has what it takes to call a spade a spade.

That’s because those survey results reveal – in the only survey question which even attempts to inquire about the importance of “[c]omparisons to the results of other high achieving school districts, locally and nationally” (Question No. 4) – that those comparisons came in a razor-thin second behind “Measures of student growth over time as students’ [sic] progress through grade levels,” 56.01% to 56.62%, as the evidence most often used to evaluate the quality of D-64 education.

So much for Ewy’s credibility…and the credibility of the D-64 Board and Administration that cooked up this whole charade of a strategic plan process.

Ewy clearlly was brought in solely to create an aura of legitimacy for those strategic plan conclusions which we are pretty darn sure the D-64 administration already had locked and loaded well before the survey was issued and the committee formed.  Because when Supt. Heinz says that D-64 is “doing outreach all the time” and is “talking to parents and community members,” she means it is reaching out to only those certain parents and community members from whom it expects to hear what it wants to hear.

As “Inspector Renault” in the movie Casablanca would say: “Round up the usual suspects!”

And then spoon feed them a bowl of Survey Monkey chow.

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In our 01.25.15 post we wrote about Park Ridge-Niles School District 64’s announcement of the formation of a 30-35 member “Strategic Planning Steering Committee” to create a new, “community-driven” five-year strategic plan by involving our community’s “stakeholders.”

TONIGHT (04.15.15) D-64 is offering all of us “stakeholders” a preview of its “working draft” of that strategic plan’s “2020 vision” for D-64. Those previews will be held in two one-hour sessions – 4:30 to 5:30 p.m., or 6:00 to 7:00 p.m. – at Emerson Middle School’s Learning Resource Center.

For all you “stakeholders” who regularly commute home to Park Ridge on the 5:47 or 6:30 p.m. METRA trains, don’t worry: D-64 doesn’t really mind that you won’t be attending. When it comes to community involvement, D-64 has operated under a version of the old Chicago Way creed of: “We don’t want nobody nobody sent.”

Those of you “stakeholders” who know how these dog-and-pony shows tend to be run won’t be surprised to learn that these preview sessions will be “led” by the District’s strategic planning consultant, Bob Ewy, formerly the director of planning and quality programs for Palatine District 15 and now a “performance coach…[who] most often works with senior leaders to develop or refine strategic plans, deploy plans, align organizational systems, develop process management and improvement methodology, develop assessment metrics, build district-level scorecards, and apply continuous process improvement principles and practices.”

And, apparently, with a sub-specialty of drafting-creative-and-self-promoting-job-descriptions-and-resume-inserts.

This draft strategic plan reportedly incorporates feedback from “more than 830 surveys” submitted in March, although after looking at the survey form we would love to see the raw data provided by the answers to those questions. A mere 830 surveys sure doesn’t sound like any kind of representative sampling of the views of over 37,000 “stakeholders” in more than 14,000 households, especially if (as we understand it) the “Surveymonkey” process did not prevent one or more people from “stuffing the ballot box” and skewing the data through multiple responses.

And, true to form for the anti-transparency crew running D-64, the “draft” strategic plan cannot be found on the District’s website so that interested “stakeholders” might read it before tonight’s festivities and show up at the preview sessions with at least some familiarity with the subject matter so that they might ask some informed questions.

Heck, we scoured the D-64 website and weren’t even able to find the names of the 40 “stakeholders” who were selected for the strategic planning committee by what seems to have been secret deliberations by the D-64 Board and/or administration until…wait for it…earlier today – when even the shameless D-64 Board and administration couldn’t justify keeping it a secret any longer, and the List was released.

Heaven forbid that the identities of those members might become known – they might suddenly be inundated with unsolicited input from their relatives, friends, neighbors and acquaintances. And THAT, dear readers, could make it a lot harder for Mr. Ewy to herd those committee members in the direction the D-64 administration desires.

Or maybe D-64 didn’t want to reveal those names any earlier than it had to so as to conceal the fact that, in typical D-64 style, the most grossly under-represented group on that Committee is the “Community” –comprised of only 7 of the 39 (18%) members. Ideally, “community” members would be just plain ol’ ordinary taxpayers with no current direct personal or economic ties to D-64 or to the local public education “establishment” – like, maybe, young married DINKs, or parochial school parents, or even a single person or two who did not grow up here.

But, not surprisingly, that’s not the case.

Of those 7 “community” members, one is current D-64 CFC member (and former D-64 board member – 2007-11) Genie Taddeo; another is retired D-207 assistant supt. John Benka; two more are D-64 parents Paul Lisowski and current D-207 Board member Paula Besler. That leaves only Jackie McNeilly, Len Stoga and Police Chief Frank Kaminski to truly represent the “community” – although Stoga appears to be the designated “community” member for every D-64 strategic plan, as demonstrated by the roster from the 2010 strategic planning committee.

Not surprisingly, we also can’t find any trace on the D-64 website of the agendas, committee packets or minutes of the meetings this committee held in order to come up with this draft strategic plan.

Because that’s what passes for “transparency” and “involving the community’s stakeholders” with the current D-64 Board and administration.

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

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Guest Post by Steve Schildwachter

This past Monday (March 16) evening I went to the District 64 school board candidate forum sponsored by the PREA teachers’ union, the Parent Teacher Organization and the Elementary Learning Foundation.  (I had to look up the latter organization, which appears to be a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit that awards “grants to teachers and staff who are committed to excellence in education” and is governed by a group of parents.)

The candidate line-up was different than I expected.  Tony Borrelli, an incumbent, was there, along with newbies Greg Bublitz and Tom Sotos, but Mark Eggemann was at work and sent a statement that was read by the moderator. Bob Johnson was there even though he is running unopposed to fill out the term to which he was appointed when a former board member resigned his seat last summer.

This post won’t attempt to be a strict account of the evening, just my impressions based on the public and private remarks of the candidates.  The newspaper article previewing the event promised that “members of the community will be invited to ask questions,” which turned out to be wrong. But I was able to squeeze in some informal questions when people were milling around afterwards.

My biggest impression:  None of the candidates made one.  It would have been hard for any voter to walk out of the forum ready to support any of the candidates – because none of them expressed any clear, specific points of view.

For example, a common refrain during the event was “for the children.” As in: “We’ll do what’s right for the children,” and other variations on that theme.  Look, it’s clear to me that everyone involved has the best of intentions and wants District 64 schools to be the best they possibly can.  No one needs to prove that.  But this phrase doesn’t translate into any firm point of view.

So, please, Messrs. Borrelli, Bublitz, Eggemann, Johnson and Sotos:  Can we please retire this rhetorical crutch?

The second most-used phrase of the evening was “do more with less,” a reference to the supposed tightness of D64 budgets which actually increase every year.  To that point, the candidates who said they’d “do more with less” never said how they’d achieve this.  There were some questions from the moderator about how candidates would manage spending and whether or not they’d raise taxes, but nobody committed to any positions beyond saying that if a ceiling was falling apart, “we should fix it.”

With the exception of Tony Borrelli, who’s been on the board for four years, there seemed to be a lack of knowledge of how the budget actually works.  For example, Sotos — who told me he’s reading “a big stack” of research — hadn’t even heard of the “step and lane” system by which teachers get annual pay increases according to their years of service (steps) and level of education (lanes).  Stated another way:  The 2% annual pay increase given to the teachers in 2012 is over and above these “lane and step” increases, meaning that they effectively get an average increase of +3.6% per year.

Although Tony can definitely claim he was only one of two “no” votes against the +2% pay increase of 2012, I was left wondering how serious he would be about controlling costs in his second term.  In December — just three months ago — Borrelli, Johnson and four others voted for a +4.6% budget increase, above the legal limit, because “we have to ask for more so Cook County will approve the maximum allowable.” The maximum allowable?  This does not sound like cost control to me.

In public comments Monday night Borrelli said the school board should let administrators do their job and only provide “oversight to ensure policies and procedures are being followed,” which didn’t suggest a willingness to hold administrators accountable.  I was waiting to hear a candidate say they would instruct the superintendent to prepare multiple budget options, e.g., one that cuts spending by 2%, one that keeps spending flat, and one that takes the fully-allowed-by-law increase (which is what they vote for every year).

To be sure, managing a big budget like this one is a tough task, and elected representatives aren’t paid to do it.  But these candidates were there willingly and perhaps should at least ask the hard questions.

Can we cut administrative positions?  Freeze administrators’ salaries?  Which of our expenses is rising faster than the CPI and which are rising more slowly?  If we cut the budget by 2% and didn’t cut teachers’ salaries, what would we cut? Maybe these questions are being discussed; but if so, no such discussions occurred Monday night.

The only outright gaffe of the evening was Bob Johnson’s statement that “the community doesn’t want a teachers’ strike,” accompanied by a colorful listing of all the negative consequences; e.g., Park Ridge on the 10 p.m. news (but, curiously, no concern for children not being able to attend class).  I’d venture to say that it’s true, the community would rather not have a strike.

But Bob was answering a question about how to handle the upcoming teachers’ contract negotiations. PREA teachers’ union president Andy Duerkop was sitting right in the front row and now knows at least one board member will be a pushover at the bargaining table.

On the same topic, I asked Greg Bublitz if he would recuse himself from teacher contract negotiations, but he didn’t really answer yes or no.  Would his experience as a District 63 teacher and administrator help inform the discussions, or make him sympathize with the union, or both?  What about the fact that his wife is a District 64 teacher?  My point was that he owed voters an answer before Election Day, not after.

All of this comes back to the budget.

When I moved to Park Ridge ten years ago my property tax bill was $9,880, and by last year it had doubled to $19,549.  I’ve since negotiated down my assessment, so my tax bill is “only” $16,836. But what that really means is only that I succeeded in shifting part of my tax burden to my neighbors.  Nevertheless, District 64’s portion of my tax bill has jumped from 37.3% ten years ago to 42.5% this year, which shows how fast the budget has increased.

When I explained this to one of the candidates, he retorted that I should be complaining about the City of Park Ridge’s planned +22% increase.  This really made me mad because, when I ask the Park Board for some fiscal responsibility, they blame the school districts. Yet now here’s the school district blaming the City.  Which is rich because a big chunk of the city’s increase stems from the Uptown TIF — and money it must pay to Districts 64 and 207 under the City’s TIF agreements with those districts.

We should be able to demand fiscal responsibility from all our local taxing bodies, all the more so because they are composed of our friends and neighbors — people we live and work with.  Which leads to my last point.

It seemed to me that none of the candidates were willing to stand up for a position on anything because they were too afraid to offend, alternately, the teachers, the administrators, or their neighbors.  It’s as if they must keep saying “for the children” as much as “do more with less” so they can’t be accused of being anti-child, anti-teacher or anti-tax increase.

I’m all for comity and friendship.  In fact, I genuinely enjoyed meeting Andy Duerkop, and we have some important, personal things in common.

But the candidates weren’t supposed to be there to make friends. They were there asking to be elected to a local body that decides how much money will be demanded from you, me and every single one of our neighbors. The least they could have done was tell us what they would do if elected.

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Two important events will occur this evening that merit your attention.

Election of Acting Mayor: Early on in the Park Ridge City Council’s agenda for tonight is the scheduled election of the Acting Mayor pursuant to Section 5 of the Illinois Municipal Code. Because Mayor Dave Schmidt died with less than 28 months left in his term, state law provides that the Council shall elect the Acting Mayor from among its members.

Because state law does not provide for a “temporary mayor” who would serve until the successors to current Alds. Joe Sweeney (1st) and Jim Smith (3rd), the City Attorney has recommended that the Acting Mayor be chosen as soon as possible. Hence, tonight’s election.

We would hope that whomever is chosen will make a public commitment to continue on the trail Mayor Dave blazed over these past six years. This Council, and the one that will follow it come May, owe a debt of honor to his legacy of honesty, integrity, transparency and accountability in City government through what would have been the final two years of his second term, at the very least.

But just because state law doesn’t provide for a temporary mayor to serve for the six-plus weeks until the two new aldermen will be seated, doesn’t mean some ill-informed folks won’t call for the Council to wait anyway. As if brand new out-of-the-box aldermen could possibly have anything close to the sense of the current Council’s group dynamic – and what it’s like to work with each of these individual aldermen – that Sweeney and Smith have developed over 4 years of Council service.

So if candidates Cline, Moran, Van Roeyen and Wilkening want to demonstrate a little statesmanship, they should all show up at City Hall tonight and unanimously tell the Council, and their fellow citizens, that they don’t want the Acting Mayor vote postponed – because the aldermen most qualified to vote on the Acting Mayor are already sitting around The Horseshoe.

We’re not going to hold our breath waiting for that to happen, but we would be delighted if it did.

D-64 Candidate Forum: A candidate forum for Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 will be held tonight from 7:30 to 9:00 p.m. in the Roosevelt School auditorium, 1001 S. Fairview.

The forum purportedly is being “sponsored” by the various D-64 Parent-Teacher organizations, the Elementary Learning Foundation, and the Park Ridge Education Association a/k/a the teachers union (“PREA”). But make no mistake about it: this is the PREA’s rodeo, as even the title of last week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate story suggested (“District 64 teachers, school groups host candidate forum,” March 10).

That story quotes PREA president Andy Duerkop as admitting (a) that the union recruited candidate Greg Bublitz, a former special-education teacher and current East Maine School District 63 administrator; and (b) that candidate Athan “Tom” Sotos sought support from the PREA. In other words, one started out in the PREA’s pocket, and the other happily climbed in with him.

Which would explain their campaign signs paired around town. And why the PREA wants to put as many PREA-beholden sock puppets on the new Board as it can, seeing as how that Board will be negotiating – with the PREA, naturally – the new teachers’ contract next year.

They’ve already got Scott “Mini-Heyde” Zimmerman in their pocket, and we can’t imagine the malleable Vicki Lee standing up to the PREA. Appointee Bob Johnson has done nothing in his 7 months on the Board to dispel the concerns we expressed about the process by which he was selected. Worse yet, the performance of two candidates whom we previously endorsed – Board president Tony Borrelli and Dathan Paterno – has been underwhelming, to say the least.

We wouldn’t be surprised if the PREA turns out a hefty number of teachers and friendly parents in support of their sock puppets. And to hiss their Public Enemy No. 1: candidate Mark Eggemann, who is decidedly not a sock puppet and who is the only D-64 non-incumbent (according to the H-A’s March 12, 2015 candidate profiles) who is demanding improved student achievement and more accountability to the taxpayers.

If you’re feeling a little civic-minded tonight, you could go to City Hall at 7:00 to see the Acting Mayor selected and still have time to catch most of the D-64 candidates forum at Roosevelt. But if you can only go to one, then the place to be is the Roosevelt auditorium.

Because that’s where you’ll find the sock puppets on parade.

UPDATE (03.16.15).  Moments ago, Ald. Marty Maloney (7th) was elected Acting Mayor by a 6-1 vote of the City Council: Alds. Milissis, Shubert, Knight, Mazzuca and Maloney – yes; Ald. Sweeney – no; Ald. Smith – abstain, which counts with the majority.  Maloney pledged to extend the legacy of the late Mayor Dave Schmidt.

Maloney said he would remain an alderman rather than give up his aldermanic seat in return for being able to exercise mayoral veto power.  Sweeney claimed Maloney’s refusal to relinquish his seat was the reason for his “no” vote, but Sweeney promptly congratulated Maloney after the vote.

Godspeed, Acting Mayor Maloney.

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