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.

Four years ago we endorsed Mel Thillens, Mary Wynn Ryan and Jim O’Brien (collectively, “TRO”) over a slate of candidates sponsored by Local 73 of the Service Employees International Union (“SEIU”) – because we didn’t, and still don’t, believe it’s any healthier to vote employee union lackeys onto the Park Board than it is to vote teachers union lackeys onto our school boards.

TRO won handily. And now they’re up for re-election against one challenger: Cindy Grau. So just like in the D-64 race, the only question about this Park Board race is: who will be the odd man/woman out?

In a number of respects TRO have done a good job overseeing the day-to-day management of the Park District. The facilities generally appear to be well-maintained. And the District has followed the City’s lead in reducing the number those damnable closed sessions where cowardly public officials try to hide their activities from scrutiny by the people who elected them.

We also have to give a big Watchdog bark-out to the District’s having become increasingly self-sufficient, with fees and other earned revenue increasingly replacing property tax revenue. That suggests the “marketplace – i.e., the consumer – believes the District’s facilities and programs provide good value for the price. That’s very good.

But in a stretch of less than six months, TRO and the rest of their Board buried the District in approximately $20 million of long-term debt, $6.3 million of which went to build a third-rate Centennial water park usable for only 3 months a year without even an advisory referendum. And, worse yet, that involved a dishonest bait-and-switch: the District cut what reportedly was the most desired feature of the design – a “lazy river” – because it apparently lacked sufficient non-referendum debt to build it.

Why did TRO support incurring so much debt on such a cut-rate facility? Because they were too contemptuous of the taxpayers, and also too cowardly, to do what every park board since 1992 had done: ask the voters for approval of such a major debt-funded capital expenditure through a referendum.

So the taxpayers are now saddled with that water park debt which, along with the voter-approved Youth Campus/Prospect Park debt, will hogtie the District economically for the next decade and beyond. By then, however, TRO will certainly be gone from the Board. And we wouldn’t be surprised if one or more of them will have left town altogether.

That brings us back to the present and Tuesday’s election…and the question of who should be left without a seat when the music stops.

Frankly, TRO’s contempt for the taxpayers – in our book, the No. 1 sin among the 7 deadly sins of local government – curbs our enthusiasm for any of them. That contempt suggests they possess the typical politicians’ cynical view that taxpayers/voters are just pawns and dupes – to be exploited for their votes for candidates like TRO, but to be deprived of a vote on such major projects, expenditures and debt as the water park.

But we also can’t endorse Grau.

From everything we can gather from her website and articles about her in the local press, she would actually work to reverse the positive economic trend (save for that aforementioned $20 million water park bonded debt boondoggle) at the Park District. Although she makes the token one-time reference to her being “fiscally responsible,” both newspapers have reported her recent complaints about the very user fees that have made the District more economically self-sufficient and less dependent on the taxpayers.

She was critical of the fact that “[w]e make the users pay for camps and programming” (Keeping Costs Down Key To Park Ridge Park Candidates,” Park Ridge Journal, April 1) and she “could agree to a freeze in program costs” that would shift the burden of increasing program expenses onto the taxpayers. (“Park Ridge Park District candidates talk taxes, fees and flood-relief,” Herald-Advocate, March 31).

In other words, she would become the newest Park Board BFF to those special interest folks who don’t mind higher taxes for everybody (instead of user fees) so long as they can use the facilities and services enough to exhaust their tax share AND burn up the Other People’s Money (“OPM”) contributed by the vast majority of taxpayers who under-use Park District facilities and programs.

Which makes her a gold-dust twin of Ms. Wynn Ryan.

Notwithstanding WR’s flier trumpeting her “cost-effective” and “bang for the buck” attitude, she has never seen a local government that couldn’t be bigger, do more, and spend as much OPM as she can get her hands on – whether during her two years on the City Council (2005-07), during her eight years on the Park Board (2007-15), or as a member of the City’s Economic Development Task Force.

For her first four years on the Park Board (2007-2011) she led the fight to keep Oakton Pool open and, in the process, burned off about $300,000 of taxpayer money in operating losses. She also can be counted on to support annual property-tax-to-the-max levies like that 5.97% for 2012, even though she had a last-minute change of heart – most certainly campaign-related – and ended up voting against this year’s max levy. And the same H-A article that reported Grau’s complaints about fees, Ryan brags about “increasing the number and variety of free programs,” which she tries to spin into a kind of loss-leader marketing ploy.

And just today, campaigning on the Park Ridge Citizens Online Facebook page, Wynn Ryan shamelessly pandered to one of our community’s premier entitlement queens, Kathy Panattoni Meade, by saying she (Wynn Ryan) is “doing what [she] can” to reduce the price of the District’s “Beyond the Bell” child-care/babysitting service.

So coming at this race from the perspective of a non-endorsement based on who could do the most economic damage to the Park District in the next four years, that dubious distinction comes down to a classic Hobson’s Choice of Wynn Ryan or Grau. Neither one of them seems to have an intuitive grasp of the fact that government HAS NO MONEY other than what it takes from the taxpayers.

Unfortunately, one of them has to win.

To read or post comments, click on title.

For those of you who actually give a rat’s derriere about who runs our local governmental bodies for the next four years – and how they do it – tonight is what passes for the unofficial kick-off of the 2015 election season in these parts.

It’s the Republican Women of Park Ridge’s 2015 Candidate Forum, and it will be held at the South Park Field House, Talcott at Cumberland, beginning at 7:00 p.m.

It is expected to feature appearances by Tony Bennett, Lady Gaga, Pharrell Williams, Beyonce, Sam Smith…wait a minute, no…that’s the list of the performers from the recent Grammy Awards broadcast. Sorry.

Instead, you’ll get to see and hear the candidates for:

• Park Ridge alderman in Wards 1, 3, 5 and 7, of which only Wards 1 and 3 have contested races (Andrea Cline v. John Moran, and Rick Van Roeyen v. Bob Wilkening);
• Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 Board, where four candidates are running for three 4-year terms (Tony Borrelli v. Greg Bublitz v. Mark Eggemann v. Tom Sotos), and one candidate, Bob Johnson, is running unopposed for a 2-year term;
• Maine Twp. High School District 207 Board, with six candidates running for three 4-year terms (Paula Besler v. Theresa Collins v. Jill Dolan v. Chimanial Patel v. Pablo Morales v. Sean Sullivan);
• the Park Ridge Park District Board, for which there are four candidates running for three 4-year terms (Cynthia Grau v. Jim O’Brien v. Mary Wynn Ryan v. Mel Thillens); and
• the Oakton Community College Board, where five candidates are running for two 6-year terms (Thresa Bashiri-Remetio v. Christopher Evdoxiadis v. Constantine Ress v. Benjamin Salzberg v. William Stafford).

Although we don’t particularly care for the “forum” format in which each candidate speaks for around four minutes and fields no questions from his/her opponents or the audience, we understand the difficulties of implementing a “debate” format with so many candidates. Nevertheless, this event is worthy of your attention because it will be the first – and perhaps only – time where voters can expect to see and hear all the candidates for these offices in one place.

And that’s important.

While the now-ubiquitous websites and flyers can give you a lot of useful information about the candidates, seeing and hearing them in person is one of the best ways – if not the best way – to judge their sincerity, genuineness and credibility. That’s why the truth-seeking function of our judicial system is based on a judge and jury getting the opportunity to take the measure of witnesses in person.

And with our state and its subsidiary local governmental units in such cumulatively dire economic straits, electing the most qualified, sincere, genuine and credible candidates means more today than ever before.  So it’s pretty darned sad that we have two uncontested aldermanic races, and effectively only one contested race for the D-64 Board and the Park Board.  And then folks wonder why Illinois is in the mess it is!

The most important races are for the boards of the two school districts, which consume almost 70% of our property taxes.

Over the past several years their rankings vis-à-vis the public schools of other comparably-affluent communities (and of the Chicago magnet schools) have dropped considerably from the days when Maine South was a fixture among the Top Five public high schools in Illinois – and similar regard was given D-64 schools as being the principal feeder system for Maine South.

Meanwhile, both districts’ teachers and administrators appear to be among the highest paid, thanks to elected school board members who don’t seem to understand that they are supposed to be representing the taxpayers’ interests every bit as much as the students’ interests. Or the concept of paying for performance. Or of not being sock puppets for the teachers’ unions. Or of doing things of consequence out in the open instead of hiding in closed sessions, as we wrote about in our 08.29.14 post.

The D-64 Board members elected in April also will be charged with negotiating the next D-64 teachers contract in 2016. That may be the single biggest responsibility they will have during their four years in office.

The good news is that neither of the perpetrators of the last negotiated-in-secret sweetheart teachers contract – current Board member John Heyde and former board member Pat Fioretto – will be part of that process. The bad news is that Heyde’s “Mini Me,” Scott Zimmerman, will be the most senior Board member and likely to lead the negotiating team; and the rest of the current Board have shown themselves to be more sock puppet than steel-spined when it comes to fiscal matters.

The candidates in the two contested races for the City Council, on the other hand, seem to be focused on the issue of flooding. The decisive question there may end up being who is less of a one-trick pony and more of a big-picture visionary.

And we wonder whether the Park Board incumbents will even attempt to alibi/justify/spin the quality of their stewardship under which the District has taken on around $19 million of new long-term debt, $7 million of which (for the Centennial water park) never even went to referendum, and the remainder of which – for the new Prospect Park – went to referendum only because the $7 million water park debt used up most of the District’s limited non-referendum borrowing power.

So bundle up and come on out to the South Park Field House tonight to see and hear the candidates who want your vote, and control over your tax dollars, for the next several years.  Give yourself the best possible chance to make the best possible decision on election day.

Or you can always take the easy way out and move to Chicago – where “participatory government” means selling your soul, and your finances, to Mayor Tiny Dancer.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Today we’re borrowing a page from Ira Glass’ “This American Life” with two shorter-than-our-usual posts, which we will introduce in TAL fashion: 

Act One. Cindy’s Victory.

Cindy Grau reportedly has won her battle to be on the ballot in April’s Park Ridge Park District Board election. She will face off against incumbents Jim O’Brien, Mary Wynn Ryan and Mel Thillens. According to Ms. Grau, the hearing officer denied all the objections raised by Charlene Foss-Eggemann.

Our takes on this matter can be found in our 01.07.15 and 01.13.15 posts.

Not so fortunate, however, was Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District candidate Kristin Gruss, who reportedly was removed from the April ballot when a hearing officer determined that she did not have the required 50 legitimate signatures on the petitions she filed.

We congratulate Ms. Grau on her victory and hope this serves as an object lesson to prospective candidates on the value of knowing, understanding and following the Illinois election laws; and on the risks inherent in not going so. Running for the boards of governmental bodies that control the expenditure of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars isn’t like running for student council. And, like it or not, the politics of such elections “ain’t beanbag” – even in sleepy ol’ Park Ridge.

Act Two. Liquor Liberalization.

A report in this week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“Park Ridge looks to extend liquor sale hours at restaurants, stores,” Jan. 27) suggests that Park Ridge is bringing some long-overdue sanity to its arcane and antiquated liquor laws.

If the City Council approves the liquor law rewrite achieved through the yeoman’s efforts of 4th Ward Ald. Roger Shubert, the liquor code’s current 27 license classifications will be reduced to 8. At the same time, restaurants will be able to serve alcohol from 11:00 a.m. until 2:00 a.m.; and the sale of packaged alcohol will be permitted from 7:00 a.m. until 11:00 p.m.

We applaud anything that makes the liquor code less like something Carrie Nation would have drafted had she lived to see both the Volstead Act and the passage of the 21st Amendment. While alcohol abuse is a significant problem of many dimensions, no legitimate public purpose is well-served by the current regulations. And, frankly, we think it would make even more sense to permit alcohol sales by restaurants and retail stores during whatever their regular business hours, without imposing other arbitrary hours solely for liquor sales.

In that regard we take issue with the argument of Maine Community Youth Assistance Foundation director Teri Collins, who reportedly expressed concern that longer sales hours might give teens more opportunities to purchase alcohol and stated: “We don’t want increased access to alcohol by minors.”

Neither do we, Ms. Collins. But last time we looked, it was illegal for restaurants and retail establishments to sell alcohol to minors. So competent enforcement of the laws already on the books should be taking care of that already.

But if it isn’t, we learned 80+ years ago that prohibition – even if it’s only a partial prohibition through reducing the hours of alcohol sale – isn’t a workable solution to that problem. Better enforcement, and even heavier penalties, is.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Given all the mopes and scoundrels in Springfield – both Democrats and Republicans – who have combined to virtually bankrupt our state government over the past 30 years, it should come as no surprise that the Election Code they devised is far from a model of clarity and convenience.

But many other laws don’t meet that standard, either, which is why there is a continuing need for lawyers and courts. That’s also why the State Board of Elections publishes a pretty comprehensive candidate’s guide each election year.

The 94-page “Candidate’s Guide 2015” seems to contain all the information a competent candidate would need, even though it boldly warns in the Preface:

Legal information contained in this guide, however, is not binding and should not be construed as sufficient argument in response to an objection to any candidate’s nominating papers. The State Board of Elections recommends that all prospective candidates consult with competent legal counsel when preparing their nomination papers. [Emphasis added.]

And if that’s not warning enough, the very first point under the General Filing Requirements section of the Guide reiterates:

Candidates are strongly advised to obtain legal counsel regarding their qualifications for office, the proper method for completing the petition forms for a specific office, the minimum and maximum number of signatures required, the qualifications of the signers and circulators, etc. [Emphasis added.]

So why (according to a January 10, 2015 article in the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate, “Park District should be more helpful to candidates: commissioner”) does Park District Commissioner Joan Bende think “[t]he average citizen should not have to go to election lawyers and pay money to figure out how to do this”?

We’ve always assumed the “average citizen” can read the petition requirements and understand them well enough to file his/her petitions, often without consulting “competent legal counsel.” Thousands of candidates in Crook County alone have successfully done so in recent elections, so it really can’t be that darn tough or expensive. But, then again, those “average citizens” also must accept the consequences that flow from their decision to do it themselves if someone decides to object to their petitions, as occurred with the Park Board candidacy of Cynthia Grau.

Accepting consequences and accountability was not in Bende’s tool box at last Thursday (01.08.15) night’s Park Board meeting, however, as you can see for yourself by going to the Park District’s meeting video, starting at the 1:23:40 mark.

Bende spent several minutes bemoaning the “crisis” presented by an objection to the petitions of her friend Grau, who was in the audience. Bende also ripped on the Park District and its long-time attorney, Thomas Hoffman, for not making it the District’s obligation to hold the candidates’ hands and warn them when their petitions don’t satisfy election law requirements.

Hoffman stated that he always has advised District employees not to give what could be viewed as “legal advice” about candidate petitions, not only because that could make the employees witnesses in legal proceedings over such advice but, also, because doing so could constitute the unauthorized practice of law. And according to the H-A article, a State Board of Elections deputy general counsel voiced similar concerns, even while saying that nothing in the Election Code expressly prohibited the giving of such advice.

Those concerns make plenty of sense, considering that even separate branches of the Illinois Appellate Court can’t agree on something as simple as whether or not a paper clip satisfies the Election Code requirement that all pages of a petition being submitted for filing “shall be neatly fastened together…at one edge in a secure and suitable manner.”

Consequently, in Bendell v. Education Officers Electoral Board, 338 Ill.App.3d 458 (1st Dist., March 28, 2003), one appellate court panel held that a 6-8 page petition (Grau’s petition had 29 pages) fastened with a paper clip that needed to be removed to separate the pages “strictly complied” with the securely-fastened requirement. But in Girot v. Keith, 341 Ill.App.3d 902 (3d Dist. July 11, 2003), another appellate court panel held that petition pages fastened with a paper clip “could not meet the purposes of the [Election Code’s] requirements” and were not even in “substantial compliance” with such requirements.

As Justice (and law school dean) Warren Wolfson wrote in his dissent in Bendell: “Fastening securely is not a trivial or nitpicking requirement. It obviously is intended to prevent fraud or tampering, thus preserving the integrity of the papers. It is too easy to slip papers in or out of a packet when a paper clip is used.” Which is why there are staplers, and why the vast majority of people who papers securely fastened staple them rather than paper-clip them, or binder-clip them.

But until the Illinois Supreme Court decides to reconcile these two seemingly inconsistent decisions, or the geniuses in our General Assembly amend the current Election Code to expressly state whether the secure-fastening requirement can be satisfied by paper-clipping, binder-clipping, stapling, spiral binding, velo-binding, or arc welding, candidates would be wise to consult a competent election lawyer.

Which reportedly is what Grau has done, now that her petitions have been challenged. We’re guessing that will cost her a lot more than a pre-filing consultation would have – which might explain why her buddy Bende was in such a fine whine about petition-challenging “bullies” and how “terrible” and “fundamentally unfair” the petition rules and Park District’s no-advice policy are.

According to the H-A article, however, City Clerk Betty Henneman, a non-lawyer, claims that she does a petition compliance review for candidates for City office. Henneman even admits to having “accepted things with a clip on them and stapled it” because she doesn’t “see a big deal with that and…[doesn’t] think that should be an obstruction to running for office.”

Maybe not, but she seems to be getting uncomfortably close to petition tampering. And if the stapling of paper-clipped petitions is not a consistently-enforced City policy, there’s always the chance that one candidate’s paper-clipped petitions might get stapled while another candidate’s might not, thereby unfairly subjecting the latter’s to objections.

We wonder if City Attorney Everette “Buzz” Hill knows that’s what Betty’s been doing all these years?

When all is said and done, however, the competence, diligence and judgment of a prospective candidate must be called into question when she would go to the effort of collecting 200+ signatures but then consider anything short of stapling as a “secure and suitable manner” for fastening those petitions together – assuming she even read that requirement.

And we also have to question the competence, judgment and basic common sense of a sitting Park Board member who wants the Park District to voluntarily (and at no cost to the candidates) substitute for the private legal counsel even the State Board of Elections strongly suggests candidates should consult.

Apparently in Bende’s view of local government, that’s what friends are for.

To read or post comments, click on title.

We’ve never been shy about stating our belief that the taxpayers benefit from contested elections.

Representative government is best served when aspirants and incumbents alike are forced, in the course of actual campaigns, to have their views, ideas and records challenged. So even though we think Park Ridge Alds. Dan Knight (5th Ward) and Marty Maloney (7th Ward) have done fine jobs in their first terms around The Horseshoe and would have prevailed in contested elections, it’s too bad their respective constituents won’t get a chance to hear them defend their 1st term records and articulate their visions for the next four years in an adversarial forum.

Our belief in contested elections is why the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate story reporting on the challenges to the candidate petitions of Park Ridge Park District Board candidate Cynthia Grau and Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 Board candidate Kristin Gruss (“Park District trustee challenges petitions of newcomer candidate,” Jan. 6) leaves us with mixed emotions.

If Grau is removed from the Park District ballot, all three incumbents – Jim O’Brien, Mary Wynn Ryan and current Board president Mel Thillens – will be able to coast to new terms of office without breaking a sweat. At least D-64 will still have four candidates vying for three 4-year seats even if Gruss is launched, while appointee Board member Bob Johnson will be running uncontested for the 2-year seat he was given in semi-secret Board action when Terry Cameron resigned.

Meanwhile, six candidates are seeking the four 4-year seats on the Maine Township High School District 207 Board.

Our preference for contested elections, however, does not engender any sympathy for the challenged candidates, or antipathy for their petition challengers. After all, complying with the rules for circulating and filing nominating petitions isn’t that darned hard to do – as evidenced by the fact that almost every candidate seems to get it right, election after election.

The H-A article reports that Grau’s petitions are being challenged because (a) she failed to properly staple her petitions – we’ve heard she used one of those black metal binder clips – and thereby might not have complied with a requirement that petitions be securely fastened; and that (b) her statement of economic interest does not state that she is running for the “Park Ridge Park District” board.

According to the H-A article, the objections to Grau’s petitions were filed by Park Ridge resident Charlene Foss-Eggemann, who explained that “[i]t’s important to protect the integrity of the electoral process, including the details.”

That’s exactly right.

Like it or not, many things in life are decided by the “details” – so much so that it has given rise to the classic aphorism: “The devil is in the details.” And whether it is a sports contest or a legal proceeding, outcomes often are decided by compliance and non-compliance with what some folks demean as “technicalities,” sometimes even at the expense of the more substantive issue.

Just ask any attorney who has blown a statute of limitations by filing his/her case just one day later than the law permits and thereby nukes his/her client’s substantive claims.  Or think back to the game-changing significance of something as seemingly trivial as the “hanging chad” in the 2000 presidential race.

Maybe it’s because Foss-Eggemann is an attorney with an appreciation for rules and technical requirements. Maybe it’s also because she herself has been a candidate for public office – she ran for and won the position of Maine Township Republican Committeeman by an impressive 63%-37% margin last March – and has had to comply with the same technical petition-filing requirements as Ms. Grau.

[SIDEBAR: Foss-Eggemann serves on the Park Ridge Library Board with, and is a social friend of, the editor of this blog, who also has contributed to her campaign fund.]

So when candidates who claim they want to serve their community can’t/won’t even comply with the basic rules for becoming a lawful candidate, we have to wonder just how committed they are to the effort; and how diligent and intellectually rigorous they will be if elected.

Not surprisingly, Grau is “disappointed” that her petitions containing more than 250 signatures were even challenged, according to the H-A article.

“I think kicking me off the ballot is not giving voters a choice…[i]t’s the voters who lose when they don’t have a choice.”

You haven’t been kicked off the ballot yet, Ms. Grau. The hearing on those petition challenges is scheduled for this Friday, January 9, at the Cook County Clerk’s office in Chicago. And the outcome of such hearings is not something that anybody should take for granted, one way or the other.

But if you are kicked off the ballot, it will have been your inattention to the fundamental “details” of the nominating petition process that has deprived the voters of a choice involving your candidacy.  For want of a staple?  For want of a correct name?

Too bad you didn’t care enough about the voters to get those simple details right.

UPDATE (01.10.15)  Because the Park District employee who accepted Grau’s petition (and, therefore, is a key witness) was unable to attend yesterday’s hearing, the matter was rescheduled to next Friday, 01.16.15, at 9:00 a.m.

To read or post comments, click on title. 

For close to a century “man bites dog” has been the tongue-in-cheek benchmark for a newsworthy story.

That’s not quite what occurred at last Thursday (Dec. 4) night’s Park Ridge Park District Board meeting.  But it came pretty darn close.

The Park Board, by a vote of 5 (Rick Biagi, Dick Brandt, Jim O’Brien, Mary Wynn Ryan and Mel Thillens) to 2 (Joan Bende and Jim Phillips), REVERSED its 4 (Bende, Brandt, Phillips and Ryan) to 2 (Biagi and O’Brien, Thillens absent) vote for a 1.50% tax levy increase at its November 20 meeting.

Yes, you’re reading that right.  A local taxing body reversed field and CUT a previously-approved tax levy increase.

On a motion by previously-MIA Board president Thillens, Brandt and Ryan flipped positions from two weeks ago and joined the Biagi/O’Brien/Thillens team.

Brandt didn’t explain his change of mind.  But Ryan – an unabashed “the bigger the government the better” fan who hasn’t seen many, if any, tax increases she couldn’t salute or applaud – read from a prepared statement to explain her epiphany from a “yes” to “no.”

Ryan claimed to be concerned about this levy increase being “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”  In getting to that point she first kind-of-blamed the City for raising its tax levy by 22%, even though that increase was public knowledge prior to her earlier “yes” vote.  Then she also kind-of-blamed the $4 million (over 4 years) Library referendum tax increase, without mentioning that she was instrumental in helping pass it.  She even cited the tax increase from the $13.2 million 2013 Youth Campus Park referendum, also without mentioning her wholehearted support for its passage. But she barely touched on the 3-month-per year, $8 million ($7 million of long-term debt) Centennial water park that she also heartily endorsed.

Such epiphanies are fairly common for tax-borrow-and-spenders as they enter re-election mode and feel the need to re-invent themselves as fiscal neo-cons in the months before election day (April 7, 2015), when voters might actually start paying attention.

Before Ryan announced her epiphany, however, Philips mounted a spirited defense of the levy increase, focusing on the principle of “use it or lose it” (“UIOLI”) – a kind of redheaded step child of the tax cap law.

When the Illinois General Assembly enacted the Property Tax Extension Limitation Law (“PTELL,” commonly referred to as the “tax caps”) to protect homeowners from excessive property tax hits, it incorporated a maximum annual levy increase of the lower of 5% or the Consumer Price Index (“CPI”); and it built in an exemption for adding new growth or construction to a taxing body’s tax base.  The taxing body can capture additional property tax revenue generated by any new property (e.g., when a $300K home is torn down and replaced by a $1 million McMansion), but it must levy for that new growth – and make it part of the tax base – the very first year that new growth comes onto the tax role.

If the new growth and CPI are not captured in any given year, the caps prevent any future levy for that new property or to make up for that year’s forgone CPI; i.e., if you don’t “use” it – by levying for it – you “lose” it forever.

Call that Exhibit No. 861 for why Illinois government is so broken it very well may not be fixable: even things called “tax caps” are designed to enable and even compel higher tax levies.

Philips’ UIOLI argument iterated and reiterated how a failure to capture new growth and that 1.50% in this year’s levy would, with compounding, have a long-term adverse effect on the District’s ability to tax its residents.  He also noted how inflation has made what could be purchased for $1.00 back in 1994 into a $1.60 expense today.

And it looks like he’s right!  As far as it goes.

But basing taxing decisions on keeping pace with inflation is a lot like chasing your tail – except that, with inflation, somebody else controls the pace at which your tail moves.  Moreover, the higher Park Ridge property taxes climb, the less of a “bargain” (or even a “good investment”) Park Ridge homes tend to appear.

That didn’t seem to faze Philips, who noted with clear displeasure (joined in by Ryan) that the District’s property taxes have already been reduced to the point where they have been exceeded by the District’s user-fee revenue.

Hallelujah!  Can we get an “Amen”?

We have always advocated for the taxpayers footing the bill for “assets.”  In the Park District’s case, that means land/parks and facilities (e.g., parks, the Community Center, Ice Rink, pools, etc.).  The value of these kinds of hard “assets” can actually be appraised, and the facilities can even be valued as “going concern” operations.  Their value to the community, therefore, can be measured and readily allocated to the community; and, therefore, in fractional interests to each piece of taxable property.

When it comes to the costs of operating those “assets,” however, we believe those should be allocated to the fullest extent possible to their users through memberships, program fees and user fees.  Once the taxpayers pay for the basic costs of keeping those “assets” operational, those who don’t use those “assets” shouldn’t have to help foot the bill for the extra costs attributed to such use.  And, frankly, if the quality of the programs or operations provide enough added value, we can think of no good reason for the District not to charge – for the taxpayers’ benefit, of course – a fair market price commensurate with that value add.

Whether Thillens’ leadership on this particular do-over represents a genuine epiphany of his own while out on the campaign trail during his recent state representative run, or just a temporary Ryan-style re-election ploy, remains to be seen.  That shuttered-from-September-through-May Centennial water park, with its constantly-running debt service, that Thillens and his compadres hung on the taxpayers – without a referendum – remains a big black mark on his report card.

But fair is fair.

Which is why we’re giving a big Watchdog bark-out to our long-time whipping boy for not only making the do-over motion, but also for expressing his justifiable pride in the District’s seeming ability to provide so much diverse and successful programming as to make it the District’s dominant revenue engine.  While we’re at it, we’ll also add a big Watchdog bark-out to one of our long-time whipping girls, District Executive Director Gayle Mountcastle, for being instrumental in managing to achieve such results.

And, finally, a big bark-out to the Park Board majority for, in this one relatively small way, trying to give Park Ridge’s beleaguered taxpayers a break.

To read or post comments, click on title.

How does a $13.2 million parks project grow a $1.6 – $2 million cost overrun before the project has even gone out to bid?

Just ask the Park Ridge Park District.  Or not, given that it has become rather closed-mouth about this topic.

As reported by the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate in a November 12 article (“Higher costs predicted for Park Ridge Youth Campus”), a $1.6 -$2 million overrun is what PRPD Building and Grounds Supt. Terry Wolf is currently projecting.  According to Wolf, the Park District is “trying to clarify that [number] and identify where and why we have these overages.”

It’s as if they popped up overnight, like mushrooms in an autumn wood.

But you can’t think about this stuff the way you would financial problems in your private life, a/k/a the “real” world.  The bureaucrat world of 15% (or worse) cost overruns is nothing like the one the rest of us live in, where financial decisions have real consequences that can’t be pawned off on friends and neighbors the way bureaucrats can pawn them off on unsuspecting and relatively helpless taxpayers

Think about it this way.  You hire a contractor who tells you he can design and build that addition to your home for $100,000.  So you go to your bank and max out your equity line of credit to borrow that $100,000.  You sign all the paperwork needed to indenture yourself to the bank.  And then your contractor tells you, oops, your project is already 15% over budget…and he hasn’t even pulled the permits.

This cost-overrun disclosure makes us wonder exactly who was doing the budgeting over at Park District HQ back when this Youth Campus Park project was being put together and gussied up for sale to the community in a binding referendum in April 2013.

Can Park Board president Mel Thillens – the tax/borrow/spender who championed the no-referendum $8 million Centennial water park effort in 2012-13 and then followed that up by leading the Youth Campus Park referendum campaign before allegedly becoming a born-again fiscal conservative while running his losing race for state representative – explain how the Park District can be as much as $2 million, or 15%+, over budget yet not know exactly why?

Are we looking at a cynical case of bait-and-switch designed to bamboozle the voters?  Or is it just some irresponsible and/or incompetent WAG budgeting ?

Board president Thillens?  Thillens?  Anybody?  Bueller?

Either way, Park District management – Board and Staff – should have some big-time explaining to do.  But as we’ve seen with the water park boondoggle and the Senior Center/Kenmitz Estate fiasco, what passes for “management” at the Park District is shameless enough that providing explanations to the unwashed masses of District taxpayers is optional, at best.  After all, the votes on the Youth Campus Park already have been counted, so who cares!

Meanwhile, the Park District reportedly is the recipient of a $750,000 state grant for this Youth Campus Park project, and expects to receive an additional $500,000 from the sale of naming rights for a multi-purpose building on the site.

The naming rights deal was announced by Exec. Director Mountcastle at the November 6 Park Board meeting.  In response to Commissioner Rick Biagi’s question of whether that $500,000 in new money would result in an equivalent amount being shaved of the referendum-authorized bonding, or be rebated to the taxpayers, Mountcastle –predictably for a consummate bureaucrat –responded: “That would not be my recommendation.”

In other words, a million here and a million there is no big deal to the Mountcastle’s of the world, so long as those millions go toward building a better bureaucratic resume and not be wasted by giving them back to the taxpayers.

At the end of the day, the taxpayers have no more of an idea of where those $1.6 to $2 million in cost overruns are coming from than they did of where the original $13.2 million cost for the Youth Campus Park project came from for referendum purposes.

And the best way to cope with that is not to think of any of it as “your” money.

Because Mountcastle and most of the Park Board don’t think of it that way.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Park Ridge resident Dennis Sladky has spoken thoughtfully about flooding at several Park Ridge City Council meetings. But his letter to the editor (“Park District’s land grab is greedy,” Park Ridge Herald-Advocate, September 23) reflects a misunderstanding of recent actions by the Park Ridge Park District.

In fairness to Mr. Sladky, however, his misunderstanding seems to have been caused by the inept and heavy-handed way the Park District presented its proposal for letting the City use Northwest Park as part of its flood control program.

The premise of his letter is that the Park District is using its permission for the City to use Northwest Park as a flood water detention to extort the City out of an excessive amount of compensation, including the former public works facility at Greenwood and Oakton, a property reportedly appraised at $1.8 million. Mr. Sladky sees this as a sign the Park District is callously holding approximately 450 Northwest Park area flood-prone residents hostage.

First of all, Mr. Sladky seems to be making a mistake common to many/most residents: thinking that the City’s taxpayers are the same as the Park District’s taxpayers. Although the overlap is substantial, the City’s boundaries are not the same as the Park District’s, meaning that certain City taxpayers are not Park District taxpayers, and vice versa. That’s why the City and the Park District are two separate taxing bodies with two separate governing bodies.

Chalk that up to the absurdity that is Illinois government, with more governmental units – 6,968 – than any other state: over 2,000 more than Pennsylvania, the first runner-up in governmental inefficiency with 4,871. As if we needed 2,000 more ineptly and/or corruptly-managed governmental units.

Absurdity notwithstanding, the City Council and the Park Board are duty-bound to look out for their own provincial interests. Which is why, before the Park District can offer Northwest Park to the City for storm water detention, it owes its taxpayers a duty to lock the City into a binding legal obligation to minimize, and then repair, any damage to that park caused by the storm water.

That kind of guaranty is an appropriate quid pro quo for the Park District’s cooperation with the City’s flood control project for that area.

We suspect Mr. Sladky’s perception of over-reaching by the Park District came from the District’s September 10 letter to the City, in which Park District Exec. Director Gayle Mountcastle appears to link the District’s permission for the City’s use of Northwest Park to the City’s agreement to a variety of other District demands – including the City’s unmet TIF obligations to the District, a new City lease of the Salt Dome at Oakton, the District’s acquisition of the old City garage at Greenwood and Elm, and a variety of Northwest Park amenities like a “trail system for the park” and “tiered concrete retaining walls and stadium-style seating.”

We can find no evidence of the Park Board’s directing Mountcastle to draft up such a list of demands and figuratively nail them to the door of City Hall, Martin Luther-style. So we’ll chalk that up to Mountcastle’s one-dimensional, zero-sum view of the Park District-City relationship.

Any deal to use Northwest Park as a storm water detention area should stand on its own, and not be tied to other deals. The City and its taxpayers need to ensure the Park District and its taxpayers that any damage to Northwest Park from storm water detention will be prevented and/or remediated by the City.

But flood control should not be made dependent on other unrelated matters, such as whether the City can satisfy its Uptown TIF-related obligation to the Park District by selling the Greenwood and Elm former public works garage property for $1 – even if such an Uptown TIF deal may make sense in its own right.

Unfortunately, the Park Board apparently gave Executive Director Mountcastle a free hand to deal with these issues. And, not surprisingly, Mountcastle bungled them with her stupid and seemingly extortionate linkage of unrelated projects to the Northwest Park storm water detention deal.

Wake up, Park Board members…you should know better by now!

To read or post comments, click on title.

It took three weeks for the Park Ridge Police Department to finally report to the mayor and the City Council on the July 12 Hinkley Park incident in which a middle-aged Park Ridge man was beaten by three teenagers while a crowd cheered them on.

Unfortunately, Police Chief Frank Kaminski’s monolog at last Monday (08.04.14) night’s Council meeting was more noteworthy for what it didn’t say than what it did. And much of what it did say seemed like just another dose of the buck-passing that we previously criticized in our posts of 07.25.14 and 07.31.14.

You can judge for yourself by watching the meeting video, from 30:50 to 1:06:15, but to us Chief K’s “chronology” of the events leading up to the beating sounded like a mid-summer’s night snow job.

He started by confirming that two patrol cars (of the five on patrol throughout the City that night) responded to a “fireworks complaint” at Hinkley at exactly 7:58 p.m. There the officers found between 30 and 40 teens just “hanging out.” Thirty-five minutes later, at exactly 8:33 p.m., three patrol cars and a supervising sergeant responded to a “crowds gathering” complaint and found around 75 teens “hanging out.” Chief K claimed that in each instance the police officers “checked the area” before leaving the park to handle “other calls.”

That raises some interesting questions. 

• If the exact time of the officers’ arrival was so important, why wasn’t the time of their departures also important? Could it be that those departure times might show that the responding officers who “checked the area” for fireworks, alcohol, drugs, etc. really weren’t all that thorough in performing that task?

• Why didn’t the chief identify the time(s) and location(s) of those “other calls” the ROs supposedly had to run off to instead of staying at Hinkley and providing the kind of “police presence” central to the “community policing” the department claims to be practicing – especially on the second call, when the number of teens had inexplicably grown from 30-40 to around 75 in just 35 minutes?

• Why didn’t the chief talk about the reported police dispersal of more than 50 teens from the Library grounds between 9:00 and 9:30 p.m. – the ones who supposedly migrated en masse the two blocks to Hinkley and further swelled those ranks?

• Why didn’t the chief provide the Council with an actual “report” containing that kind of information, instead of passing around a sheet of ideas that he said came out of his “Chief’s Roundtable” meeting on July 29?

Not surprisingly, none of the ideas coming out of the roundtable point to any real improvement in the way the police handle wayward youths. Maybe that’s because, as Chief K has constantly reminded us since the beating video went viral, this wasn’t a policing problem but a “community problem.” Hence, the “solutions” focused on socio-political placebos like a “City wide campaign-Making Good Choices” (a successor to the less-than-impressive “Caught Being Good” campaign?), “Fund Youth Drop-In Center” (that the taxpayers wouldn’t support with direct donations after the City stopped giving it handouts), “Message from Community Leaders” to parents, “Parent sponsored events for weekends,” and “Youth outreach workers in the Parks and Community to engage young people.”

Our favorite, however, was: “Reinstate [Police Chief’s] Task Force to focus on this.” Anyone who followed the activities of the last Police Chief’s Task Force already knows what any new task force’s solution to the Hinkley problem would be: construction of another ugly building and adding a sally port to the current cop shop.

But we digress.

Sadly, most of the elected officials around The Horseshoe either weren’t interested or weren’t up to the challenge of eliciting any of the information Chief K failed to provide.

City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton – to whom Chief K allegedly reports – sat Sphinx-like during the chief’s monolog, which is the way Hamilton acts virtually every time a police or fire matter is on the agenda. One would think both the police and fire departments were autonomous, self-managing entities over which Hamilton has no authority, and doesn’t want any.

Public Safety chair Ald. Nick Milissis, an attorney, seemed intent on rubber-stamping everything Chief K said, going so far as to invoke the police department’s prior problems with “aggressive” policing – which sounded like an obtuse reference to the incident a few years ago when a youth already in custody in the back of a squad car was allegedly punched in the face one or more times by an officer, resulting in a federal lawsuit that was settled for $185,000.

Sorry, alderman, but we believe you’re better than a rubber-stamp and shill for such apples-to-watermelon comparisons.  Or you should be.

Even Mayor Dave Schmidt, also an attorney, seemed to duck into the nearest safe harbor with his: “I’ve always felt that elected officials should be very cautious about second guessing their public safety personnel about how they do their jobs and the decisions they make.” Sorry, Mr. Mayor, but simply asking tough questions is NOT “second guessing.”

Schmidt redeemed himself somewhat, however, with his final observation that the rapid growth in the size of the crowd was “such an unusual situation that it would have made sense to leave [at least one police officer] behind” to keep an eye on the situation for the couple of hours Hinkley was scheduled to remain open.

But by the time Schmidt made that observation Chief K had already off-loaded any accountability for his department’s pre-incident performance.

With flourishes of political rhetoric worthy of Marc Antony in Act 3, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” Chief K praised the Park Ridge Park District with faint damns. While claiming not to be placing blame, he complained about Hinkley’s police-ability because of the different operating hours of its various activity areas. He bemoaned Park District rules for not having been updated since 1997. He cited the Park District’s non-deployment of its private security “monitors”(or “rent-a-cops,” as Ald. Joe Sweeney referred to them) to Hinkley that evening. And he even took a backhanded swipe at park Board president Mel Thillens, noting that his police officers’ hands were tied because only the board president could legally authorize a park closing.

He also deftly created, and immediately demolished, the straw-man suggestion that the assembled teens could have been charged with “mob action.” That was an especially nifty maneuver, given how it effectively diverted attention from what is generally considered the most police-friendly “tool” for dealing with crowds of any type: a “disorderly conduct” charge, the provisions most relevant to this situation appearing in Section 14-5-2 (E), (F) and (I) of the City’s Municipal Code.

And once he had foisted enough non-blame on the Park District and the lack of “tools” in his law-enforcement “toolbox,” he conflated both the weather and Taste of Park Ridge into a back-up excuse: the need to “evacuate” the Taste around 9:30 that night due to an incoming storm – as if a Katrina were on its way and he was not about to let himself become the butt of any “Chiefski, you’re doing a heck of a job” jokes.

All things considered, it was a political tour de force by a master politician who – aided by the talismanic power of his badge – totally overmatched the faux-politicians around The Horseshoe who are charged with holding him and his department accountable to the taxpayers for the public safety and order of Park Ridge. 

For a guy who claims to be short on tools, Chief K showed himself to be quite a craftsman. 

And pretty darn crafty.

To read or post comments, click on title.