In our 07.07.14 post we criticized the completely gratuitous secrecy with which the Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 School Board shrouded its deliberations that resulted in the appointment of Robert Johnson to fill the chair Terry Cameron gave up when he moved out of state.

To be clear, our criticism was directed solely at the Board and its unacceptable process, not at Johnson.

At that time we called D-64 “the closest thing to a secret society among any of our four local governmental bodies.” We discredited D-64 propaganda minister Bernadette Tramm for clamping a lid down on the identities of the 12 applicants for the vacancy, and even keeping the names of the 8 finalists secret until six hours before the “public hearing” at which those finalists were to be interviewed by the Board – which she did with either the express direction or tacit approval of the D-64 Board.

Not surprisingly, Tramm provided no biographical information about those 8 finalists.  Worse yet, the D-64 Board apparently didn’t care whether any members of the public showed up to bear witness to those interviews, much less contribute meaningful information or ask questions that might aid in the vetting process.

But this week we learned that Ms. Tramm’s secrecy has been eclipsed by her counterpart at Maine Twp. School Dist. 207, David Beery, who ratcheted up Tramm-style concealment by hiding the identities of the reported 7 applicants for the seat of departing School Board member Eric Leys, who also is moving out of state, until AFTER the Board made its decision.

Hmmm…is local school board members moving out of state a trend we should start tracking?

Beery and the D-207 Board, doing its best Star Chamber impersonation, kept the names of those 7 applicants completely under wraps through the special meeting held last Sunday (August 24) at 2:15 p.m. (gee, was the 2:15 a.m. slot already filled?) that, according to the meeting agenda, featured a closed-session during which that Board deliberated the appointment which culminated in the announcement of Park Ridge resident Pablo Morales to fill Leys’ seat.  And even now that the announcement has been made, the identities of the 6 other applicants still appears to be a closely-guarded secret.

Unlike D-64, even the D-207 Board’s applicant interviews must have been conducted in closed session – based on that August 27 agenda and a Chicago Tribune article (“District 207 seeks to fill board vacancy,” 08.07.14) in which Beery was quoted as being “almost certain” that both the interviews and Board deliberations would be conducted in closed session. So, even more than with D-64, the D-207 taxpayers were deprived of any meaningful ability to judge the qualifications of the applicants for themselves, and to contribute to the selection process of either Mr. Morales or his anonymous competition for that vacancy.

For a School Board fixated on minimizing scrutiny and avoiding accountability for such dubious “achievements” as the continuing decline in the academic rankings of D-207 and Maine South, sharing the identities (and, heaven forbid, the applications and resumes) of applicants for such an important position in advance of the selection just wouldn’t be prudent.  Consequently, unless a D-207 version of Edward Snowden leaks that information, D-207 taxpayers will have to blindly accept the glowing assurances of Board president Margaret McGrath (in the announcement of Morales’ appointment) that D-207 “had seven outstanding candidates from which to choose”; and that Morales was the best of the bunch.

Just like D-207 taxpayers had to blindly accept McGrath’s glowing assurances that D-207 “had nine outstanding candidates from which to choose” the replacement for a departing Donna Pellar (who only moved outside the district) in announcing the appointment of Paula Besler after a similarly stealthy selection process that culminated in another Sunday afternoon closed-session interview process and deliberation last April – according to the agenda for that meeting.

Whether Morales and Besler truly were the best choices among the applicants is a question that likely will never be answered because, now that both of those kangaroo courts have rendered their verdicts, even a FOIA request for those names-that-must-not-be-spoken and their applications/resumes doesn’t appear to be worth the effort.

But we believe it’s worth mentioning that Morales currently has two sons attending Maine South. And Besler has two children at Maine South, with another one likely to go there upon graduation from D-64. If that causes D-207 taxpayers to wonder just how aggressive Morales and Besler might be in holding Maine South teachers and administrators accountable for their performance, or in overseeing negotiations of the next teachers’ contract, or in considering raises and benefits for administrators, it should.

Over the years we have repeatedly heard parents of Maine South and D-64 students express anxiety aplenty about whether and how to voice complaints about curriculum, books, materials and personnel for fear of retaliation or other repercussions against their school children. And we’ve heard anecdotes about such retaliation and repercussions actually occurring.

Whether those anecdotes are legit or pure hooey is effectively meaningless, however, because the prospective chilling effect on parents appears to be real.

Accordingly, filling the School Boards of both D-207 and D-64 with arguably “vulnerable” members whose duty to look out for the taxpayers’ interests might very well be compromised (if not outright conflicted) by their desire to look out for the interests of their own children, creates a risk – and maybe even a likelihood – that such vulnerable Board members will just be more bobble-head rubber stampers for whatever the teachers and administrators want.  It also raises a legitimate question of whether these opaque selection processes are being orchestrated by D-207’s and D-64’s Board presidents, each of whom have children in schools within their respective bailiwicks.

Meanwhile, these Star Chamber selection processes are big-time whacks on the derrieres of the taxpayers by their elected and appointed officials whose governmental bodies consume, collectively, over TWO-THIRDS of our property taxes.

Thank you, Boards…may we have another?

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A “silver bullet,” according to the Urban Dictionary, is “a specific, fail-safe solution to a problem (from the notion that a bullet made of silver is necessary to kill a werewolf).”

As reported in last week’s Park Ridge Journal (“Chromebooks Aim To Inspire Dist. 64 Students,” August 20), Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District 64’s new director of innovation and instructional technology, Mary Jane Warden, is touting the District’s new Chromebooks as devices that will inspire students toward more creativity, more involvement in learning and critical thinking, and collaborating on projects.

In other words, silver bullets…which we sincerely hope they turn out to be.

But as we pointed out in our 07.10.13 and 07.21.14 posts critical of the way D-64 has foisted this Chromebook initiative on the District’s students and, more importantly, its taxpayers, D-64 has provided no criteria for determining whether this initiative will be a success or a failure. Sadly, that should come as no surprise to anybody keeping a critical eye on D-64 for the past 20 years.

D-64 has consistently failed, or refused, to establish any metrics for measuring the success or failure of any of its many initiatives ostensibly implemented to enhance student learning. Consequently, neither parents nor taxpayers have been able to judge for themselves whether the hundreds of thousands, or millions, of tax dollars expended on any one initiative produced an educational boon or boondoggle.

Exhibit A? Try the “middle school concept” and the new Emerson Middle School building.

Exhibit B? The 2007 “Strong Schools” tax increase referendum campaign.

Metrics that provide meaningful transparency and accountability have long been anathema to both teachers and administrators – indeed, to the whole culture – at D-64. And the dozens of School Board members who have cycled through there over the past 20+ years have failed to make any noticeable dent in that culture, even as the cost to the taxpayers spirals upward and the performance, at least according to comparative rankings based on objective measurements like ISAT scores, continues to stagnate or slide.

Seventeen years ago a new way to group students (grades 6-8 in a “middle school” v. the old grades 7-8 “junior high”) and a new $20 million-plus Emerson school building (to replace the then-newest school building in the District) were supposed to “inspire” students to higher achievement.

Seven years ago the inspiration was supposed to come through a boatload of extra funding that would enable D-64 to reduce class sizes, increase programs, modernize technology and provide “a quality education that is competitive with the best schools in the state, which attracts families to our towns, and ultimately safeguard [sic] our investments in our homes” – according to an FAQ Sheet by the “Citizens for Strong Schools” committee that raised and spent over $25,000 to pass that tax increase referendum.

We’re still waiting for D-64 to provide any objective criteria to demonstrate that the new Emerson and/or that 2007 tax increase gave any significant boost to the quality of a D-64 education and student achievement, or made it among the best primary school educations in Illinois. The current D-64 Board, like the boards that went before it, goes stone deaf anytime such a thing is even mentioned, which is a dereliction of duty by the folks we elect to look out for EVERYBODY’s interests, including the students’ and the taxpayers’.

Frankly, we’d have more respect for the D-64 Board if it came right out and simply admitted it doesn’t want to bother with metrics to determine the success of the Chromebook initiative. Or that it doesn’t think taxpayers are capable of making that kind of determination no matter how much data they are given. Or that it doesn’t care what the taxpayers want or need because the Board members are more concerned with keeping the teachers and administrators happy by reflexively rubber-stamping whatever they want.

If we can’t get transparency and accountability out of them, at least a little honesty would be something. But we’re not holding our breath waiting on honesty, either.

Warden may be new to D-64, but she’s got seasoned Propaganda Minister Bernadette Tramm feeding her proven sound bites like: “We want to create a learning environment to help students become lifetime learners.”

Not surprisingly, there are no metrics for that one, either.

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The main reason we have boards of elected officials overseeing all those paid-to-play bureaucrats who operate our various local governmental bodies on a day-to-day basis is to ensure that the taxpayers who pay the bills are getting fair value for their money.

One of the reasons we have been highly critical of Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 is because it keeps on hammering the taxpayers with ever-escalating teacher and administrator pay, and ever-escalating per-pupil costs, without any commensurate increase in student performance as measured by those standardized tests our teachers and administrators love to hate.

Worse yet, D-64 is the principal “feeder” school system for Maine South, which has seen its academic ranking drop from the top-5 around 1990 to the mid-20s – suggesting that D-64’s under-performance may be contributing to Maine South’s decline, despite the latter’s own escalating teacher, administrator and per-pupil costs.

Against that backdrop comes last week’s flip-flop decision by the D-64 Board to have the taxpayers pick up the tab for $500,000 of Chromebooks for its middle school (grades 6-8) students. That half-million is in addition to the cost of Chromebooks and other tech hardware for grades K-5 added to the taxpayers’ tab in April in connection with Board approval of the District’s “1:1 Technology Initiative.”

According to the District’s announcement on its website, this Chromebook-fueled initiative is “a further investment in student learning.” But don’t expect the Board to identify any measurable return on investment (“ROI”) from this latest $500,000 tech buy. D-64 has a long history of disdain for objective performance measurements, so this Board wasn’t about to require measurable ROIs for which its members, the administrators, and/or the teachers might be held accountable.

Shifting this $500,000 expense from middle school parents to the taxpayers at large ostensibly was based on the July 14, 2014 Updated Recommendation of D-64’s new Director of Innovation & Instructional Technology, Mary Jane Warden. Like almost everything that comes out of D-64 these days, however, it reads like it was quarried, cut, polished and set by the District’s minister of disinformation, Bernadette Tramm: phrases like “an exciting 21st Century Learning Plan” and a “21st century learning ecosystem” with “appropriate controls [on Chromebook use] in order to establish classroom and cultural expectations” are classic Tramm-a-ganda.

“Learning ecosystem”? “Cultural expectations”? C’mon!

Back on April 28th the Board approved the 1:1 Learning Initiative by a one-vote majority: Heyde, Zimmerman, Lee and Cameron v. Borrelli, Paterno and Collins. For reasons that appear to have been arbitrary and purely political rather than policy-based, however, that resolution included “cost-sharing” that hit the taxpayers for the cost of the Grades K-5 devices but had middle school parents paying for their kids’ Chromebooks.  And with typical D-64 secrecy the relevant portion of those meeting minutes discloses nothing – NADA – about either the total cost of the new devices or the costs to the taxpayers and parents, respectively.

The “political” nature of that arbitrary April baby-splitting exercise, however, was confirmed with last Monday’s do-over vote, which demonstrates how D-64 blithely increases spending just because it has the money to do so.

In this case, a mid-year budget review by the District’s $200,000/year wonder girl, business manager Rebecca Allard, revealed that the year-end deficit she had projected had somehow morphed into a surplus of $1.7 million. Given the spend-and-spend-some-more mindset at D-64, the effect of that kind of revelation was tantamount to a drunk stumbling out of a tavern with an empty wallet, only to discover a crumpled hundred in his coat pocket.

So with that newly-found $1.7 million burning a hole in their pockets, the Board members promptly shifted the responsibilty for that $500,000 of middle school Chromebooks from the parents to the taxpayers by a 5-1 vote (Zimmerman absent).

Dan Collins cast the only “no” vote and was the only Board member who expressed any concern about the taxpayers funding what effectively are $322-per-Chromebook gifts to middle school parents. Notably, Collins also was the only Board member to identify himself as the parent of kids in D-64. So his “no” votes back in April and last week not only could be viewed as pro-taxpayer but also were against his own economic self-interest, to the tune of $644 worth of Chromebooks for his two kids.

Collins’ disclosure and his “no” votes got us thinking about the other Board members who have children in D-64 schools, specifically whether 5 of them may have had conflicts of interest when they voted last Monday to shift Chromebook costs from parents to the taxpayers – and maybe also back in April when 4 of them voted to place the costs of the Grades K-5 computing devices on the taxpayers instead of the parents.

Shouldn’t those Board members with children in the District’s schools have abstained from voting in favor of something that would directly benefit them economically?  Or, at the very least, shouldn’t Board members announce before voting that they have children in the District’s schools and will directly benefit financially by how they cast their votes?  Isn’t that what the taxpayers deserve from their elected officials?

Didn’t these Board members comprehend the possibility of such conflicts of economic interest, or is it that they just didn’t care?

It can’t be that they considered $322 per Chromebook such a nominal amount as to be irrelevant, especially with Borrelli quoted in a Park Ridge Herald-Advocate article as having “felt the addition of the fee of the computer on top of student fees was going to be a burden for some folks.” (“District 64 to pay for student Chromebooks,” July 18) Unfortunately, he produced no data or other evidence to prove that what he “felt” was actually true and not just misplaced empathy for the greedy impersonating the needy.

If there are parents who truly can’t afford to buy Chromebooks for their middle school kids, why not let them petition the District for financial assistance and demonstrate the legitimacy of their hardship claims with sworn financial statements and signed income tax returns? Or let the Elementary Learning Foundation (“ELF”) help out?

But, as best as we can tell, means-testing wasn’t even discussed – perhaps because these Board members are afraid of the vocal minority who demand free Chromebooks because the $13,000+ per kid worth of education they’re already getting for the $2-3-4-5,000 they pay in property taxes to D-64 just isn’t a good enough ROI for them.  And maybe because these Board members are simply dismissive of the battered and beleaguered taxpayers for whom THEY are supposed to be looking out.

Or have these Board members simply become so financially jaded that they view $500,000 as just another slice off a cut loaf that won’t be missed?

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Beginning at 6:00 p.m. tonight the Board of the Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 will interview 8 applicants to fill the seat recently vacated by former Board member Terry Cameron.

The original field consisted of 12 applicants, although D-64 has not explained why or how that field was reduced to the final 8: Vicki Loise, Kristin Gruss, Jennifer Kuzminski, Kimberly Miller, Patrick Moon, Holly Schneider, Katherine Ranalli, and Robert Johnson.  Their names are, literally, all we know about them, even though the interviews are only 4 hours from kick-off.

Why?

Because despite all sorts of claims to the contrary, D-64 remains the closest thing to a secret society among any of our four local governmental bodies – thanks in large part to its minister of disinformation and propaganda, Bernadette Tramm, and a complicit School Board that seems to equate anything less than a total information blackout with crystal-clear, well-lit transparency.

How did we find out the names of these finalists? Not from the D-64 website but from a story that was published in the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate at 11:40 this morning – “District 64 School Board conducting open meeting to select new member” – barely more than six hours in advance of the meeting at which those 8 finalists will be interviewed in what D-64 is billing as a “public” hearing.

Except that the only “public” part of it will be the applicant interviews themselves.

Once those are over, the six remaining Board members will disappear into…wait for it…closed session “to deliberate and possibly select the new board member,” according to the H-A article.  Secret deliberations are the way D-64 has always rolled.

That’s where the horse-trading and deal-making will go on, well beyond the eyes and ears of the taxpayers and the press who should be entitled to see and hear, either in person or on videotape, every last word of those deliberations – because the person getting Cameron’s old seat will be getting a free pass from the kind of public scrutiny an actual candidate for that office, including Cameron, endures during the course of a normal political campaign. The press and those taxpayers also should get to hear all the reasons for and against each candidate, and get to know which reasons came from which of the six board members.

But D-64 is Chinatown, Jake.  It doesn’t operate out in the open.

In fact, D-64 so revels in its culture of secrecy that, as of 2:00 p.m. today, we still couldn’t find any of the applications for those 8 finalists – or the 4 applicants who mysteriously dropped (or were dropped) out of the running – either on the D-64 website or on the H-A website. So much for any members of the public or the press being able to show up at 164 South Prospect at 6:00 p.m. with even the barest minimum of information from those applications or from the applicants’ answers to three questions which reportedly were sent to them on July 1 and were due back to the District by 6:00 p.m. on July 5, right smack in the middle of the 3-day 4th of July holiday weekend.

The questions:

1. What do you perceive to be the most pressing challenge that District 64 faces and what ideas or strengths would you bring to the Board, if appointed?

2. Additionally, what do you feel is a particular strength of the District and why?

3. Should you be selected, how have you or will you prepare for this position?

Frankly, we’re not impressed with the breadth or the depth of these questions, which seem like they were thrown together between a trip to the grocery store and the beginning of a World Cup game.  We also have to wonder how much more insight into the candidates’ knowledge, views and philosophy of public education can be gained in the scheduled 15-minute interviews, given the shallowness of these initial inquiries and the cumulative 500-word limitation on the answers to all three questions.

But in the end we suspect that, like so many of the ostensibly “public” things D-64 does, those interviews will be more for show than for dough.  The really important stuff will take place where those taxpayers who contribute one-third of their property taxes each year to D-64 won’t get to see or hear it.

Behind closed doors.

UPDATE (07.09.14) D-64 reports that its Board has selected Robert Johnson of Park Ridge to fill the Terry Cameron vacancy.

Johnson has an undergraduate degree from the University of Notre Dame and an MBA from the University of Chicago’s Booth School.  He is a senior vice president at Northern Trust who manages relationships with non-profit organizations, including universities, foundations and endowments.  He is the father of an Emerson 8th grader and two D-64 graduates, and previously served on the elected board of a Chicago parochial school.

More information can be found at: http://www.d64.org/news/District-64-Board-of-Education-to-Appoint-Robert-Johnson-to-Vacant-Seat.cfm

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For those of you who are regular readers of this blog, you know that we write a majority of our posts about City of Park Ridge government.

One reason for that is that City government is the most transparent of the four principle local governments; i.e., City, Park District, D-64 and D-207. Another reason is that the issues are generally easier to understand, and because the current mayor and many of the current aldermen seem to try to simplify them more than do their counterparts running the other governmental bodies.

But the City represents only about 10% of our property tax dollars, while the two school districts combine to take almost a 70% bite and the Park District grabs around 5%.

So today we’re going to take a look at D-64 – specifically the topic of a June 17 article in the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate titled “District 64 school board approves 112 salary hikes, kills bonus program” – which reports that 112 D-64 staff members will get raises ranging from 2% to 3.75%, costing D-64 taxpayers approximately $157,000.

Why?

What have those administrators done that has measurably improved the quality of education at D-64?  What have they done to deliver even the same quality of education more cost-effectively?

Don’t expect to have those questions answered if you watch the video of the June 9, 2014 D-64 Board meeting.

If you jump to the 15:09 mark and watch to 42:15 , you will see the Board vote on 6 salary increases and one bonus payment, 5 of which were passed with barely a whisper of discussion by the Board members. And although Business Mgr. Rebecca Allard claimed the raises were tied to both performance and the Consumer Price Index (“CPI”), as best as we can tell only the $40,636 in raises for “Building and District Administrators” and the $18,500 of “Merit Awards” were anything even arguably merit-based.

All $18,500 of “Merit Awards” – including the $2,000 award departing Supt. Phil Bender tried to toss Allard’s way for alleged “exemplary performance and leadership” – were cancelled by a 4 (Board president Tony Borrelli, Dathan Paterno, Terry Cameron & Vickie Lee) to 2 (John Heyde & Scott Zimmerman, predictably) vote of the Board. But at least each of the proposed recipients of those awards, and the amount of his/her proposed award, was specifically identified in a June 9 memo of Supt. Phil Bender.

Neither the recipients nor the individual amounts of the $40,636 of raises passed by a 5-1 vote (Borrelli the only dissenter), however, were identified. And when Allard was asked about them, the H-A article reports that she effectively told the questioner to pound sand, stating that the information should be obtained through a FOIA request.

That’s what far too often passes for “transparency” at D-64.

You may recall from our 02.19.14 post that Allard herself is the recipient of a major sweetheart deal: she’s going to get $212,063 for the upcoming school year, allegedly her last before retiring with a guaranteed pension of what we understand will be upwards of $125,000 a year. For those of us who haven’t made a career of feeding at the public trough, that’s about $3 million worth of 401(k), assuming it’s well-managed.

Why does all this matter? Because D-64 taxpayers are paying premium prices, starting with the price of its personnel, for what is nowhere near a premium education.

Although you’d be hard-pressed to find the information on the D-64 website (we tried for 20 minutes and struck out), a list of D-64 full-time personnel and their compensation published on the Better Government Association website reveals that 79 teachers are paid over $100,000 a year (orange highlight), another 64 are paid over $90,000 a year (yellow highlight), and another 61 are paid over $80,000. And that’s for only 8-9 months of work, meaning it annualizes out to over $130,000, $120,000 and 100,000, respectively.

That’s more than Park Ridge’s median household income of approximately $90,000.

That’s with no risk of their employer relocating to another state or country, virtually no risk of their services being outsourced to private providers, and basically no chance of being fired.  Those great salaries also come with guaranteed defined benefit pensions that generally start at around 75% of the final years’ salaries, and increase annually by a cost of living allowance.

For those teachers who become administrators it gets even better, especially on the pension end.

According to the BGA website, our former D-64 superintendents are doing just fine, thank you: last year Elaine Rieger, who retired in 2000, drew $83,612, while Fred Schroeder, who retired in 2003, drew $170,974; and Sally Pryor, who retired in 2010, drew $183,377.  Meanwhile, former Emerson principal Vicki Mogil, who retired in 2011, drew $133,750; and former Lincoln principal Jim Blouch, who retired in 2009, drew $135,552.

And we believe all of them retired before reaching age 60.

Meanwhile, our elected representatives on the current D-64 Board – like their predecessors for the past 20+ years, at least – keep doling out the cash with no rhyme or reason, just because they can. Without any major qualms, without much in the way of serious debate, without any evidence that our kids got a better education this year than last, and without any demands that our kids will get a better education next year than they did this year.

If you don’t believe that’s acceptable or sustainable for a community such as ours, you can do something about it. But you have to act fast.

Board member Terry Cameron is moving out of the area and must vacate his seat, so the Board will be interviewing for his replacement in the next few weeks.  However, the deadline for applying for that appointment is 4:00 p.m. TOMORROW, MONDAY, JUNE 23!

You can get all the information you need on the D-64 website’s Board member vacancy page.  But you had better act fast, because you can be sure that the Park Ridge Education Association will do its best to fill Cameron’s seat with someone who can be depended on to rubber-stamp higher pay and even less accountability for teachers and administrators – while claiming it’s all “for the kids.”

And because D-64 practices faux-transparency rather than the real thing, the Board claims it will be conducting the candidate interviews during an open Board meeting – but then will adjourn to the ostensible secrecy of CLOSED session to deliberate over its members’ choice of who gets the vacant seat.

Because a majority of the current Board members have no desire to share their decision-making process with the taxpayers who got to elect Cameron but aren’t getting a vote on his successor.

To read or post comments, click on title.

To hear Park Ridge City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton tell it, he and his staff have been asking Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District 64 since January for information the City needs to verify and confirm the amounts D-64 claims the City owes for the outstanding annual TIF payment (a/k/a the “TIF Bribe”) before it will pay this year’s bill.

To hear D-64 Board president Tony Borrelli and D-64 attorney (and former D-64 board president) Dean Krone tell it, D-64’s staff has reached out to the City 11 times since January to help the City figure out exactly what the City owes.

Either somebody’s lying, or somebody’s incompetent. Oh, wait…maybe it’s both.

It shouldn’t take four months to get data from D-64, especially since it appears to be data D-64 itself actually needed to calculate what it claims the City owes it for this year’s TIF Bribe. So either City staff is lying about the legitimacy of its requests and the diligence of its efforts, or D-64 is lying about the promptness and completeness of its responses.

Or maybe both.

But there’s one simple way to resolve that issue: a joint meeting of the City Council and D-64 Board, with senior staff present.

Hold it at City Hall next Thursday night – so as not to conflict with a possible Game 5 in the Blackhawks’ conference final series with the LA Kings – and let the respective sides explain their positions and make their arguments face-to-face, in public and on television, with the press scribbling away.

Let Hamilton look right at Supt. Phil Bender and tell him what he needs and why. Let Bender tell Hamilton when it was produced, or when it will be produced, or why it won’t.

Let City Finance Director Kent Oliven go toe-to-toe with D-64’s Rebecca Allard on the completeness or incompleteness of the financial data that’s already been exchanged, if any, and the relevance of what’s still missing.

Let City attorneys Everette “Buzz” Hill and TIF-expert Matthew Welch debate the legal issues of this dispute with their D-64 counterparts, Dean Krone and Ares Dalianis.

And then let Mayor Dave Schmidt and the City Council discuss with Board President Tony Borrelli and the D-64 Board, then and there, how this dispute is going to be resolved with the least aggravation and expense to their collective taxpayers.

All of it in public, on television and video-recorded for posterity. No back-room deals, no closed-door sessions, no behind-the-scenes whispering, no he-said-she-said silliness, no sound bites, no spin, no propaganda.

That means D-64’s minister of propaganda and spin, Bernadette Tramm, can stay home – because the City has no equivalent taxpayer-paid public relations flak with whom she can spar about the “message” of the meeting.

It’s way past time for cutting through all the posturing and other nonsense that seems to have plagued this effort since at least January and has pushed the respective governmental bodies closer to stupid litigation than to wise resolution. That means more light and less heat.

Which brings us to Board Pres. Borrelli’s e-blast Monday afternoon about the TIF dispute.

We think highly of Borrelli. We endorsed his election to the Board three years ago, and we have praised many of the initiatives he has brought to that previously-opaque and unaccountable backwater body – although we harshly criticized the way he and “his” Board mishandled the process of hiring the new superintendent, including the closed session discussions of how much to pay her.

Unfortunately, Borrelli’s blast seems to have borrowed liberally from the Bernadette Tramm playbook of political tactics, misdirection and obfuscation. It responds to the detailed points of City Mgr. Hamilton’s 5-page April 7, 2014 letter not with specific counter-points but with D-64 – aggrandizing bloviation that, distilled to its essence, demands that the City keep on making what may be TIF Bribe overpayments simply because it has done so without question for the past 11 years:

“We would describe the April 7 letter from the City as an emphatic ‘no’ to our simple and reasonable request that the City live up to its financial obligations – as it has done routinely each year since 2003. Certainly, the April 7 letter was not an invitation for further dialogue and compromise.”

If you can’t see B. Tramm’s fingerprints all over statements like that, you really haven’t been paying attention to the propaganda being churned out by D-64 the last few years to cover up mediocre performance at premium prices.

Eliminating, or at least reducing, that kind of propaganda is yet another reason why the taxpayers deserve a face-to-face joint City and D-64 meeting about this TIF dispute immediately, as in next Thursday, May 29.

And remember: Ms. Tramm isn’t invited.

UPDATE (05.23.14) Instead of the very public meeting we suggested in this post, we understand that there was a meeting this morning between the City’s bureaucrats and D-64s bureaucrats, along with their respective legal counsel.  And, disappointingly, it was not a “public” meeting; i.e., neither the public nor the press were invited to attend.

Of course, that’s just the way the bureaucrats like it.  Public scrutiny, or “sunshine,” is about as welcomed by bureaucrats as it is by vampires.

Nevertheless, we can only hope that the same bureaucrats who have so ineptly handled this situation over the past several months have somehow become enlightened and will be able to make some serious progress toward getting this situation resolved. But the fact that it’s being done behind closed doors makes us wonder just how much the taxpayers are being sold down the river.

Judging by City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton’s latest missive to D-64 Supt. Phil Bender, a May 22, 2014 letter, we’re still not sure.

The letter points out some of the boneheaded terms of the existing intergovernmental agreement between the City and D-64 which our City officials back in 2003-04 were only too happy to sign off on in order to lock in the TIF Bribe – which it sounds like the City is trying to renegotiate.

But one idea that we hadn’t heard discussed all that vigorously by the Council until now is actually being presented in Hamilton’s letter as a proposal: “The City requests the taxing districts to cooperate in the legislative extension of the TIF term by 12 years.”

We’ll have to go back to the Kane McKenna report to look into all the pluses and minuses of such a 12-year extension.

But from our knowledge of TIFs, that’s never a good thing.

To read or post comments, click on title.

We’ve been pointing out for years how it’s the taxpayers – present and future – who pay the price for all the incompetence, waste, graft, fraud and corruption to be found in most of the almost 7,000 units of government in Illinois.

Unfortunately, Illinois ranks No. 1 among the 50 United States when it comes to positively rank government, so it’s more than a little annoying to realize that Illinois taxpayers are figuratively pouring truckloads of their tax dollars down various governmental rat holes.  That being the case, it’s even more annoying when local governmental bodies botch their respective jobs so thoroughly that they end up in litigation with each other.

Can you say “taxpayers paying legal bills for both sides of the same dispute”?

That might be what we’ll soon be looking at here in Park Ridge, judging by the stories in last week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“District 64 to Park Ridge: Pay money owed or go to court,” May 12), the Park Ridge Journal (“City Contests TIF Funds Owed To D64,” May 14) and The Bugle (“Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 demands money from city of Park Ridge,” May 12) about Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 threatening to sue the City of Park Ridge over an approximately $600,000 payment allegedly owed D-64 this year.

And annoyance becomes infuriation upon the realization that this dispute arises from that multi-million dollar albatross dangling around the City’s neck.

Yes, of course we mean the Uptown TIF.

As described in City Finance Director Kent Oliven’s April 11, 2014 Memorandum, the TIF’s originally-projected property tax revenue of $73 million has now been cut by almost 50% (47.5%, to be precise) because of the County’s decision to reduce assessment levels in 2009, and because property values have declined almost seven percent more in the TIF district than the 20% decline in the rest of the City.

As if that news isn’t bad enough, we’re now being told that the TIF-related bonds were “back-end loaded,” meaning that the annual TIF debt service payments will actually increase by an average of over $400,000 a year in 6 of the next 8 years, peaking in a debt service payment of $4.875 million in FY2022.

Those ill-conceived Uptown TIF bond obligations made over a decade ago already have caused the City’s debt rating to be downgraded, raising the City’s borrowing costs even though Moody’s has expressly recognized that current City management is responsibly biting the bullet “is implementing the necessary policies to balance TIF operations and rebuild General Fund liquidity” – through major expense cuts, layoffs, and tax and fee increases.

Needless to say, the City doesn’t have the luxury of wasting money – whether by overpayments to D-64 under the TIF-related September 8, 2003 intergovernmental agreement (a/k/a, “The Bribe Agreement”) or by litigation.  And we can’t imagine D-64 has a spare hundred grand laying around to litigate with the City.

But according to an April 7, 2014 letter from City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton to D-64 Supt. Philip Bender, D-64 has been improperly charging the City for “new students” in the TIF district whose addresses are not in the TIF district and, therefore, don’t qualify for new-student payments.  D-64 allegedly also has been charging the City for half-day pre-K and Kindergarten students for whom D-64 is not entitled to payments.  And the City claims it has been improperly charged for “new students” in the TIF district who aren’t “new” because they moved there from elsewhere inside D-64.

If that isn’t enough to sort out, there’s also a dispute about payments made to D-64 related to “new property” which – according to Matthew Welch, a TIF-specialist attorney hired by the City – may not even legally exist in the TIF district under applicable state law, as interpreted by the Illinois Department of Revenue.  Such “new property” charges might account for almost 3/4 of the City’s annual payment to D-64.

Consequently, it’s possible the City already has overpaid D-64 by millions of dollars over the past 11 years – and may have overpaid D-207 and the Park District, too!

So the City wants a reconciliation of its account with D-64 before coughing up another $600,000 for this year’s installment, which sounds reasonable notwithstanding the apparent lack of any sound justification for somebody(ies) at City Hall being asleep at the switch on this for the past 11 years.

But that’s not what D-64 wants to hear, especially when its own free-spending habits reportedly have made some of its programs and even its class sizes dependent on receiving that annual $600,000 (or so) from the City.  At least that’s what D-64’s leading tax/borrow/spend Board member, attorney John Heyde, is warning – while at the same time suggesting the City is acting in bad faith and attempting to “rewrite history just because [“The Bribe Agreement”] no longer suits [the City].”

So in addition to having the benefit of advice from attorney Dean Krone, who was a member of the D-64 Board back in 2003 and whose school law firm is the District’s regular counsel, D-64 now has hired former D-64 Board member Ares Dalianis of a different school law firm to handle any TIF-related litigation with the City.

Apparently it pays to be a former D-64 Board member who practices school law.

Before this turns into a full-blown legal battle on a collection of wide-ranging issues, however, D-64 owes the City a complete accounting of all the students for whom it has been charging TIF fees under The Bribe Agreement.  That way, the parties should be able to at least narrow the scope of any remaining disputes so that any litigation is as simple, narrow and efficient as it can possibly be.

Ideally, the only issues that would require court resolution would be purely “legal” ones related to whether or not there is – or can be – “new property” within the meaning of the PTELL/”tax cap” statute as interpreted by IDOR, an issue described in greater detail at Pages 4-5 of Hamilton’s April 14, 2014 letter, which would appear to have been written by the City’s TIF attorney.

From the sound of things, both the City’s counsel and D-64’s counsel may have screwed up in their haste to approve The Bribe Agreement 11 years ago.  But the last thing Park Ridge and D-64 taxpayers – not the exact same group of taxpayers, you know – need now is to have that screw-up compound by hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees because two cash-strapped local governmental bodies fighting over the same bone.

Hamilton’s letter seems to lay out the City’s position clearly and straightforwardly.

Where’s D-64’s equally clear and straightforward response?

To read or post comments, click on title.

We’ve previously written that we subscribe to the letter and the spirit of the well-known quote from Pres. John F. Kennedy’s only inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”  Which is why, over many years of observing the workings of local government and the way certain residents or groups of residents exploit it, we’ve come to the conclusion that there are two basic groups: net tax payers (the “NTPs”) and the net tax users (the “NTUs”).

Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised by the admission that we don’t particularly like the NTUs – which is why we sometimes refer to them as “freeloaders.”   It’s nothing personal, mind you.  It’s more a public policy thing, and a matter of prioritizing the needs of the NTPs along the lines of what JFK was talking about.

That usually sends certain readers into paroxysms of outrage, which both amuses us and makes us happy.

And in search for some new amusement and happiness, we found an article in the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate that seemed to fit the bill, titled: “District 64 punts on full-day kindergarten until new superintendent takes over” (March 25, 2014)

The article talks about one of our “favorite” (i.e., most loathesome) governmental devices, the survey.

We loathe governmental surveys because they always seem to be commissioned to produce results that the governmental body, or some significant faction of it, wants – but for which it feels the need to fabricate some supporting data in order to provide sufficient political cover for the public officials who will approve it.

In this most recent case, the survey was another one of those easily-manipulated “on-line” ones commissioned by the Board of Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 to find out whether parents of D-64 students wanted the proposed full-day kindergarten program.  The results, as reported in the H-A article: 79% of all surveyed parents and 86% of surveyed parents of current pre-school students supported FREE full-day kindergarten in their neighborhood school.

We could have predicted that in our sleep.  For free.

But when those on-line survey takers were asked if they would be willing to PAY for the extra half-day kindergarten program in their neighborhood school, guess what?  Only 32% of all surveyed parents, and only 35% of surveyed pre-school parents, answered “probably yes.”

We could have predicted that in our sleep, too.  Also for free.

That’s because NTUs (a/k/a freeloaders) only want things if they are free or, at the very least, where the benefits to them substantially outweigh their costs – with the difference being made up by the NTPs.  That’s why, for example, many/most parents of D-64 kids want no expenses spared by the District: if they are paying $12,000 a year in property taxes and $4,000 of it goes to D-64, they’re still ahead the approximately $9,000+ difference between that $4,000 and D-64’s roughly $13,000 per-student cost.  Throw a second student in the mix and the delta is a whopping $22,000+.

Per year.  Every year they have at least one kid in the D-64 schools.

Multiply that by 9 years (grades K-8) and we’re talking between $81,000 to almost $200,000 of benefits over costs for two children.  Add a third or fourth kid and it becomes almost obscene, albeit ecstasy for the NTUs.

Not surprisingly, our favorite School Board member, John Heyde, did what he has done so well for so long.  He supported the full-day kindergarten…but only if it could be done for free.  Heyde can’t bring himself to make parents who what amounts to enhanced babysitting pay for it when the NTPs remain so fat and docile.

And also not surprisingly, Scott Zimmerman – the Charlie McCarthy to Heyde’s Edgar Bergen – was for it, too.  Go figure.

Lori Hinton, Ass’t Sup’t for Student Learning who reported on the survey results at this past Monday (03.24.14) night’s meeting, added the proper dose of edu-bureaucratese by telling the Board to survey K-1 teachers, study the space requirements, and make sure they get all the “stakeholders” on board with the decision.  In other words, D-64?s minister of propaganda, Bernadette Tramm, had better prepare for some overtime if she’s going to bamboozle those “stakeholders” if/when the decision is made to go forward with the program when new Supt. Laurie Heinz shows up this summer.

Of course, nobody at D-64 thought about going out of their way to survey the NTPs.  That might skew the desired results, which were effectively manipulated by the District’s posting an announcement of the survey on its website on February 24, e-mailing the survey link directly to all D-64 parents (but not the NTPs), distributing it to area pre-schools (but not the NTPs), and closing the survey site on March 10.

We could find no press release about the survey, nor any story about it in the H-A or the Park Ridge Journal during the two weeks the survey process was going on and NTPs could respond.  Chalk that up to Ms. Tramm’s deft touch and knowing when silence is golden.

We aren’t ready to predict which way this decision will go.  If the NTPs wake up and realize that they might end up footing the bill for free enhanced babysitting service for the NTUs, they might start making nasty phone calls to their elected school board members and demanding explanations.

That’s when those bogus on-line surveys prove their worth. 

To read or post comments, click on title.  

Back in 2003, when members of the Park Ridge City Council were like cats in heat trying to get the Uptown TIF off the ground, they needed the support of the Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 School Board.  And the Council knew that support wouldn’t come easy.

The TIF plan was going to take money from D-64, D-207 and the Park Ridge Park District.  Because D-64 would be the most financially-impacted by the TIF of those three taxing bodies, it hired a top-notch TIF attorney: John B. Murphey of Rosenthal, Murphey, Coblentz & Donahue in Chicago.  And Murphey told the D-64 Board that the City could not prove its contention that the proposed TIF district met the “but for” test: but for the creation of a TIF district, that area would not be redeveloped.

Armed with Murphey’s opinion, the D-64 Board demanded some significant financial concessions from the City in order to forego a lawsuit.  And those randy cats on the Council – happily slurping up all the pro-TIF Kool-Aid being doled out by then-mayor Ron Wietecha, then-city manager Tim Schuenke, and the various bond consultants and attorneys who saw the TIF as a nice chunk of revenue for them – jumped at the chance to effectively bribe D-64 for its support.

They cut a deal that required payments to D-64 irrespective of whether or not the TIF was successful.  And, by now, we all know how that’s turned out for the City..

So it comes as no surprise to hear that the City has been behind in making payments to D-64, as recently reported in the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“Park Ridge owes cash to schools, District 64 says,” 03.07.14).

Right now City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton and Finance Director Kent Oliven claim to need more and better new-student data from D-64 to determine how much the City owes.  For its part, D-64 says it provided its calculations back on January 9, but D-64’s highly-paid Business Mgr. Becky Allard reportedly was unavailable for comment.

Interestingly enough, the H-A article does not report either the dollar amount claimed by D-64, or the City’s proposed payment to D-64.  And the most recent Agenda Cover Memorandum on this issue says only that payments to D-64 were due by December 15 but D-64 didn’t even submit its new student data to the City until January 9.

Whatever the number turns out to be, the City should pay it promptly because – in true Chicago Way style – once you’ve been bought, you stay bought…so long as you get paid.  The City bought D-64 back in 2003, and it now owes that obligation despite the TIF’s turning out to be the financial white elephant for the City that some of us warned about back in 2003.

Although some folks at City Hall would like to renegotiate the bribe deal their predecessors cut a decade ago, the D-64 Board owes its constituents (a good number of whom are not Park Ridge residents) the duty to collect the TIF-related payments D-64 is owed.  And the D-64 Board has every right to take a lesson from the fictional “Paul Cicero” in the movie “Goodfellas”:

“But now the guy’s gotta come up with Paulie’s money every week, no matter what.  Business bad?  #@$% you, pay me.  Oh, you had a fire? #@$% you, pay me.  Place got hit by lightning, huh?  #@$% you, pay me.”

Back in July 2003, Wietecha criticized the few aldermen who hesitated to vote for the TIF.

“The people are expecting you to do your job, and your job is to cast a vote.”

Two months later, after the Council foolishly passed the TIF, Wietecha resigned his office on a Friday night and subsequently moved to Barrington.

Before his bill came due for “Paulie’s [TIF] money.”

To read or post comments, click on title.

A couple of weeks ago we published our 02.07.14 post about new Park Ridge-Niles School District 64’s new superintendent, Laurie Heinz and the closed-session process by which the D-64 Board decided on the salary and benefits offered her.

We questioned how and why Heinz, being given her first crack at a superintendent position, should be paid as much as her predecessor, a veteran superintendent with four years of service here and a number of additional years in the a similar position in Indiana.  Not that she shouldn’t be paid that much, mind you, but we thought the taxpayers should know why and how that deal was actually determined.

Of course, that process is and likely will remain a mystery, because the D-64 Board didn’t want to disclose any of the factors or what passed for “reasoning”  during its deliberations.  Giving away large sums of tax dollars, especially in wages that dwarf the median Park Ridge household income, is not the kind of thing that those Board members want scrutinized by pesky taxpayers.

But the $201,000 salary (total compensation: $243,010) that Heinz will be paid as the District’s big cheese almost seems like a bargain compared to the Board’s recent decision to give business manager Rebecca Allard a contract extension for the 2014-15 school year and pay her a whopping $212,063 – which purportedly represents “an increase of two percent (2%) in the Administrator’s creditable earnings reportable to the Teacher’s Retirement System over her compensation package for the 2013-14 school year,” according to a copy of her June 28, 2014 Administrator’s Employment Contract that someone anonymously flung over our transom.

Oh, and part of the extension deal, according to the contract language, is that Allard tendered her “irrevocable notice of intent to resign for retirement purposes on June 30, 2015.”  Which means that extra bump could be felt in multiple amounts by Illinois taxpayers for another 20-30 years in the form of higher constitutionally-guaranteed pension benefits Allard can collect.

Although Allard’s deal was formally approved at the Board’s January 28, 2014, meeting, the details appear to have been worked out in typical D-64 secrecy during…wait for it…a 2-hour plus closed session on January 14.  So the taxpayers have no ability to see or hear whatever wisdom or absurdity went into shaping those contract terms.

District taxpayers will also hand Allard an additional $3,500 for “Personal Growth,” and may toss her an extra $2,500 “Merit Award” at the superintendent’s discretion.  Throw in $1,100 for cell phone expense and some car mileage money and Allard’s entire final-year package totals up to a nifty $219,163.

And that extraordinary sum also includes more than nine – NINE! – weeks of “vacation”: a month of paid vacation, 12 “legal school holidays,” and the potential for another three weeks of Xmas break and Spring break, should her services not “be required by the Superintendent” during those break periods.

That’s almost $70,000 more than the City of Park Ridge pays its rookie city manager, and almost as much as the City paid its previous veteran city manager – under a boneheaded contract awarded, over Mayor Dave Schmidt’s veto, by then-alds. Rich DiPietro, Don Bach, Jim Allegretti, Robert Ryan, Tom Carey, Frank Wsol and current Ald. Joe Sweeney, only a few months before all but DiPietro and Sweeney left the Council without even attempting to run for re-election.

Call it a fond parting gift to City taxpayers that kept on giving long after the boneheads departed.

Allard’s $212,000 base salary alone puts her well into the notorious “Top 5%” category of this country’s “rich” people which starts, based on the latest IRS figures, at around $168,000.  And according to the data we’ve reviewed from a variety of sources – Illinois doesn’t make it easy for the taxpayers to find such information in any one place, and different databases seem to have conflicting information – Allard might be able to collect around $150,000 a year in pension benefits, which will keep her within hailing distance of that “Top 5%” category into retirement.

Not half bad for government work – especially for someone who more than earned her share of the criticism we doled out in our 06.12.09, 03.17.11, 05.13.11, 07.22.13 and 01.21.14 posts.

Not surprisingly, we couldn’t find a D-64 press release hailing Allard’s contract from D-64’s minister of propaganda, Bernadette Tramm.  As Pres. George H.W. Bush used to say: “Wouldn’t be prudent” – especially having been concocted around the same time as the D-64 Board was secretly cooking up its sweet deal for Laurie Heinz.

And that, dear readers, is just more business-as-usual at D-64, where delivering measurable quality education seems to rank a distant second behind paying teachers and administrators handsomely, both while working and in retirement.

Compliments of, as always, OPM.

To read or post comments, click on title.