Oops…they did it again.

A recent report in the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“District 207 administrators bank raises for new year,” August 15) confirms what we’ve all known for far too long: that the folks we elect to keep an eye on the bureaucrats we don’t elect, and on how those unelected bureaucrats spend our tax dollars, are themselves compulsive spenders.

So if you’re Maine Twp. High School District 207 Superintendent Kenneth Wallace or any other D-207 administrators and non-teaching staffers, you’ll be finding extra money in your pay envelope this coming year.  For Wallace, that means an extra $6,000 in salary – from $200,990 last year to $207,020 this year.

As H-A reporter Natasha Wasinski notes, Wallace now has had three straight years of 1% salary bumps, starting with a 1% increase in 2011, a 2% bump last year, and now a 3% hike.  And back in June, the D-207 Board gave him a $25,000 “performance annuity payment” – while also giving a 2% boost to D-207 support staff and a 1.5% boost to other administrators’ base salaries.

Why?

Chief D-207 propagandist Dave Beery tried to justify these increases by pointing out that administrative pay is based, in part, on performance.  Not surprisingly, however, Beery doesn’t explain what specific “performance” justified Wallace’s recent 3% pop, or his 1-2-3% three-year run (Anybody want to hazard a guess what percent next year’s raise will be?)  Or the “performance” that justified the $25,000 windfall.  Or the “performance” of all the other administrative and staff people.

Having studiously observed bureaucrats in the wild for the past 20 or so years, we’re willing to bet that whatever those “performance” standards might be, they are more about individual performance than student or district-wide performance.  Otherwise, Beery would be proclaiming District 207 achievements from the rooftops: “D-207 student achievement up 5%!”  Or “ISATs up in all 3 D-207 schools!” Or, mirabile dictu: “Rankings up, costs down at Maine Twp. schools!”

We don’t recall reading any such headlines.  Do you?

Interestingly, the H-A story reports that D-207 salaries and benefits collectively increased less than the Consumer Price Index increase of 2.5%, as if the CPI is even a rational benchmark for compensation increases.  Why is any public-sector employee compensation ever tied to the CPI – not only is it bad employment policy, but it’s an inflationary and divisive economic policy that actually rewards those public employees with COLAs for increases in the inflation to which their salary increases contribute, via the increasing number of tax dollars paid by private-sector employees who don’t get COLAs.

Not that the D-207 Board (or the D-64 Board, for that matter) cares about such things.

It also makes us wonder whether the raises would have jumped to 5% or even 10% if the CPI made similar leaps – because it seems like both the D-207 Board and the D-64 Board believe the taxpayers should be required to protect school employees from the adverse effects of inflation by giving them raises, irrespective of whether or not they actually perform their jobs better and more cost-effectively, or the performance of the schools and their students measurably improve.

In other words, fellow taxpayers, we get to insure our School District employees’ buying power, even though darn few of us have any similar kind of insurance in our own jobs.  Or tenure that virtually guarantees lifetime employment.  Or constitutionally-guaranteed pensions running up to 75% of our last salary when we retire from public employment…as early as age 55 or so.

No wonder the State is going bankrupt.

Nevertheless, we have to confess to almost feeling bad about hammering Wallace for his raises, however, seeing as he’s making almost $20,000 LESS than the drunken sailors on the D-64 Board are paying Wallace’s counterpart, Superintendent Philip Bender – despite Wallace’s overseeing an Illinois Top 20 high school district with a budget of $147 million, while Bender oversees a Top 100 (?) elementary school district with a budget about half D-207’s.

According to the H-A story, only new Board member Mary Childers voiced any concern about these raises on behalf of the taxpayers, although she apparently couldn’t quite bring herself to break from the rest of the bobble-heads who rubber-stamped those raises.

We know it’s tough being the only adult in a room full of children, Mary, especially when you aren’t drinking the Kool-Aid.

But it’s time to start just saying “no” to dopes.

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It’s no secret that we here at PW consider the current administration at the Park Ridge Recreation and Park District something decidedly south of a paragon of local governmental virtue.

So it probably should have come as no surprise to us to read in this week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate that the Park District’s new Centennial water park is now going to cost taxpayers nearly $600,000 more than the District was telling us last December, when the Park Board was passing the resolutions to green-light what was then billed as a $7.1 million project – without giving the taxpayers an opportunity to vote on it via an advisory referendum. (“Centennial Pool renovations will cost extra $600K for Park Ridge Park District,” August 12)

That’s because the parks and recreation “professionals” running the Park District know that you never put two park district funding referenda on the same ballot, or in consecutive elections – as the Park District could have done by putting the Centennial project on the November ballot and the Youth Campus project on the April ballot, if it didn’t want both of them on the April ballot – if you want to pass both of them.  When referendum questions are paired up in that way, the conventional wisdom is that the voters tend to pass the first and reject the second, or reject them both.

And being told “no” by the voting taxpayers is a capital offense to career government bureaucrats.

So Park District Executive Director Gayle Mountcastle and her staff, aided and abetted by a profligate and complicit Park Board, masterfully delayed consideration of the Centennial pool/water park project until months after the deadline for putting a referendum question on the November ballot, into the Thanksgiving/Christmas holiday season when most taxpayers customarily are distracted.  That way, the District could commit almost all of its non-referendum bonding power to the less-marketable project and save its best sales pitches for the more-marketable “legacy” Youth Campus Park referendum.

The bureaucratic reasoning was that, with the voters lacking any memory of recently having voted to issue $6.3 million of bonded debt for a $7.1 million Centennial water park, it would be much easier to convince them to vote for issuing $6.8 million of additional bonded debt for a $13.2 million Youth Campus project.

And the bureaucrats were right!

But the news of the $600,000 cost over-run for the water park just as ground was being broken has raised a few hackles from the thinking taxpayers who are realizing that they got conned even more than they originally thought.

We tend to derive perverse entertainment value from listening to the propaganda ministers of our various local governmental units try to spin performance dross into political gold.  And, according to the H-A story, Park District minister of disinformation Kathie Hahn didn’t disappoint – dismissing the original $7.1 million figure as “early on in the project” and then applying a layer of populist varnish to the $600,000 up-sell: “When we went to the public hearings and input meetings, we heard from the public about certain things they wanted at this park so we made our best attempt to include those items.”

Pretty slick, Ms. Hahn!  But exactly what “items” are you talking about?

As we understand it, the District had already cut the single most-wanted feature of the new water park (according to the half-baked resident “survey” provided by…wait for it…the designers of the new facility, Stantec Consulting) even before the Park Board approved the project: a lazy river connecting the various pools.  So we’re curious about what new “items” are being added to the project that would account for the additional $600K.

That’s not saying the information wasn’t communicated by the District in some fashion.  Park Board meetings aren’t covered nearly as diligently by the local press as are the meetings of the Park Ridge City Council, where “press row” is regularly filled by reporters from the H-A, the Park Ridge Journal, and the Chicago TribLocal.  And while Mayor Dave Schmidt and the Council members often engage in spirited debate over issues, the Park Board usually behaves like a rubber stamp for current Executive Director Gayle Mountcastle and her staff.

Since returning to the PRRPD after 8 years as Supt. of Recreation for the Des Plaines Park District,  Mountcastle’s agenda appears to be not unlike that of many high-level local government bureaucrats: spend money and pile up debt on facilities-as-monuments.  Those monuments earn them bragging rights at the various “professional association” networking/self-promotion conferences and conventions – like those of the Illinois Association of Park Districts (“IAPD”) and the National Recreation and Park Association (“NRPA”) – they regularly attend, usually on the taxpayers’ dime.

In fairness, up until now Mountcastle has been able to control costs and post some welcome surpluses, apparently by retaining the operating budget philosophy and strategy adopted by her predecessor, Ray Ochromowicz, during his relatively short tenure at the helm.  And from what we’ve seen and heard, maintenance and customer service continue to improve.

But whether the District can stay that course now that it’s saddled with servicing $13 million-plus of new long-term bonded debt remains to be seen.  If all those suspect revenue projections for the Centennial water park and the Youth Campus Park prove to be the kind of pie-in-the-sky that the revenue projections for the Uptown TIF turned out to be, the Park District and its taxpayers could be hurtin’ for certain in a few years when the surpluses and fund balances are depleted but the PTELL keeps the tax increases capped.

By that time, however, expect Mountcastle to have moved on to other, greener pastures on the strength of these two new resume enhancements, compliments of Park Ridge taxpayers.  And the Park Board members who rubber-stamped these projects with only one referendum instead of two will have become former public officials – just like city manager Tim Schuenke and his Council accomplices on the Uptown TIF were long gone by the time the financial chickens came home to roost on that project.

Meanwhile, however, the Park District is adding $600,000 of “switch” to the water park’s $7.1 million “bait” price, with barely a ripple of protest by our elected officials on the Park Board who are supposed to make sure that the taxpayers don’t get “had” by this kind of bureaucratic hi-jinks.

Next up: The Youth Campus Park.

Bidding starts at $13.2 million.

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Anybody who learned Government 101 – i.e., basic grade school Civics, at least before it got sliced and diced to accommodate more “contemporary” subjects like sociology, psychology, and Inuit studies – knows that there are divisions and levels of government.

Here in terminally-inept-when-not-outright-corrupt Illinois, we have more units of government than any other state: 6,994 separate “local” taxing bodies, or 2,100-plus more than runner-up Pennsylvania.  And of those 6,994 separate taxing bodies, 3,249 are single-purpose “special districts” such as library districts, park districts, fire protection districts, mosquito-abatement districts, etc.

All these taxing bodies are petri dishes for the breeding of fiefdoms loaded with taxpayer-funded jobs and opportunities for well-connected insiders to make deals and do favors for their families and friends.

Not only are all these layers of government expensive to maintain, but their overlapping boundaries also make it difficult to hold any finite, identifiable group of public officials strictly accountable for every dollar taken from the taxpayers, and every dollar spent.  That lack of accountability is another reason why all these units of government are favored by Illinois’ political class.

Which brings us to an item on tonight’s Park Ridge City Council Committee of the Whole agenda that merits a lot more attention than its relatively modest cost – $3,000 – would otherwise invite.

It’s described as “Vehicle donation to Maine Township Emergency Management Program” and it involves the proposed giveaway of a used Park Ridge SUV, worth an estimated $3,000, to a sub-unit of the Maine Township government our residents also support through our property taxes.

According to the materials accompanying Park Ridge Police Chief Frank Kaminski’s “Agenda Cover Memorandum”, something called the “Maine Township Emergency Management Program” (the “MTEMP”).was created by those folks who run the Maine Township fiefdom, and then given the “overall mission” to “provide emergency disaster services” to unincorporated Maine Twp. – areas which are also governed (and neglected?) by a Cook County government that wants to dump them on neighboring municipalities like Des Plaines, Glenview, Niles and…Park Ridge.

Maine Twp. government created MTEMP without getting the approval of, or even consulting with, the Park Ridge City Council.  Maine Twp. government set MTEMP’s “mission” without getting the approval of, or even consulting with, our City Council.  And, appropriately enough, until now MTEMP has been funded solely by Maine Twp. government.  That’s the way it should be: if you create it and control it, you pay for it.

But in another example of governmental “mission creep,” MTEMP apparently decided to expand its “volunteer” efforts beyond “emergency disaster services” for unincorporated Maine Twp. to provide non-emergency amenity services to privately-run events like Taste of Park Ridge, the Chamber of Commerce’s “Winterfest” – along with amenity services to such non-City public events as Maine South football games and the Maine East Carnival – all without the request or formal authorization of the Park Ridge City Council.

Also apparently without being asked or authorized by our City Council, MTEMP reportedly “outfitted our [CERT] team at not cost to the City” – according to Kaminski’s unsigned and undated (Unsigned?  Undated?  C’mon, Chief, you’re better than that!) memo accompanying his Agenda Cover Memorandum.

So now, having provided all those hours of amenity services on a “volunteer” basis as an arm of Maine Twp. government, without being asked or authorized by our City Council, and without any sort of formal intergovernmental cooperation agreement, MTEMP wants $3,000 – in the form of a used SUV.  And Kaminski, without a second thought and with the support of Fire Chief Mike Zywanski, wants to give it to them as a gesture of “support [of] their program and [to] say thank you for their years of service.”

Why?

Why should Park Ridge taxpayers pay for amenities provided by “volunteers” – especially when our elected representatives apparently never asked for those amenities or those volunteers, and never authorized them?  And why should Park Ridge give MTEMP, an entity which Maine Twp. government created without asking Park Ridge, a $3,000 used vehicle when MTEMP’s own Maine Twp. government is admittedly sitting on a fund balance of $1 million but won’t spring for the three grand?

This situation reminds us of those guys who used to swarm cars stopped at traffic lights, wash the windshields, and then expect money for a service neither requested nor authorized by the drivers of those cars.

There’s an old adage that, whenever somebody says that “it’s not the money but the principle,” it’s really the money.  But in this case, $3,000 is effectivley chump change for a City government with an annual budget of over $60 million.  So our objecting to its being “donated” to MTEMP/Maine Twp. government really is based on principle – a principle so basic and fundamental to government that it should be recognized by EVERYBODY in City government entrusted with the money it seizes involuntarily from residents through property taxes.

If MTEMP’s “volunteer” services really were so important to the City, Chief K and/or Chief Z should have asked the City Council, in advance, for authority to use those services and the authority to pay MTEMP for them.  Instead of seeking permission, however, the Chiefs apparently ignored the Council, went ahead and used those “volunteer” services as they pleased, and now want to guilt the Council into donating a $3,000 SUV – a/k/a, taxpayer funds – as some kind of gratuity.

Not surprisingly, that’s a win/win for Chief K and Chief Z, whose departments don’t have to rely on that $3,000 trade-in/re-sale value to get the new vehicles they want.  So spitting away $3,000 of Park Ridge taxpayer funds to help out their Maine Twp. public-safety fraternity brothers is of no consequence to them.  We suspect they’d be a little less cavalier with that $3,000 if they had to cut that amount out of their respective departments’ 2013-13 expenditures, however.

Giving away taxpayer funds to non-governmental entities was a bad idea when the money was being donated to private corporation community groups.  It’s an even worse idea when the money is going to help out the the bucks-up Maine Twp. political fiefdom…whose officials (Carol Teschky, Bob Provenzano, et al.) constantly brag about how well they are managing that fiefdom.

But if Chiefs K and Z really are so appreciative of those volunteer MTEMP services, we encourage them to propose $1,500 of cuts to their departments’ budgets for the current fiscal year.  Or else they can reach into their own pockets and either write personal checks to MTEMP, or agree to reimburse the City for the estimated $3,000 value of the SUV they want the City to “donate.”

How about it, gentlemen: Care to put your money – instead of the taxpayers’  – where your mouths are.

UPDATED 08.13.13.  Last night the City Council’s Committee of the Whole (“COW”) rejected Chief K’s recommendation to make a “donation” – on behalf of Park Ridge taxpayers – to Maine Twp. government, in the form of a used City SUV with an estimated value of $3,000.

Alds. Nick Milissis (2nd) and Dan Knight (5th) made the arguments against this wrong-headed idea, and they were joined in their “no” votes by Ald. Marty Maloney (7th).  Alds. Jim Smith (3rd), Roger Shubert (4th) and Mark Mazzuca voted “yes” without explanation; and, in the absence of Ald. Joe Sweeney (1st), the 3-3 tie prevented the proposal from moving out of the COW.

Whether the three aldermen voting “yes” had any good reason(s) or were mindlessly rubber-stamping Chief K’s recommendation remains unknown, as none of them reportedly spoke to the issue.  Hopefully, they’ll wake up and realize that giving away Park Ridge taxpayer money to any other governmental entity – especially one which most Park Ridge taxpayers already are being forced to support with their property tax dollars – is bad public policy; and they’ll do so before the next such boondoggle comes before them, as it inevitably will.

But for the time being, a big Watchdog bark-out to Alds. Milissis, Knight and Maloney for understanding Civics 101.  Now if only they can teach it to the other folks around The Horseshoe.

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About ten years ago, a battle-weary veteran female Dade County (Florida) state’s attorney offered a remarkable quote when questioned by a reporter about a particular sex crime she had successfully prosecuted: “Half of my cases would disappear if kids were taught that you don’t suck a penis for a cookie.”

Needless to say, that prosecutor wasn’t one to mince words.

But she raises a point that should not be lost on the Maine Township High School District 207 administration as it seeks to investigate and address the kind of “hazing” that allegedly went on at Maine West High School: At what point does a “boy” or a “girl” become charged with the responsibility of understanding that having one’s orifice(s) penetrated with anything, whether by a classmate, teammate, coach or teacher, is NEVER an appropriate or acceptable element of a school activity?

Had that lesson been adequately taught and learned, we suspect we wouldn’t be writing this post.  And a number of students would not be scarred by the reprehensible conduct of fellow students.  And District 207 wouldn’t still be running the meter on attorneys and consultants to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars investigating that conduct and the alleged blind eyes of the coaches cast toward that conduct.

According to newspaper accounts of the situation, the five month-plus investigation into the alleged hazing of players on the Maine West boys’ soccer team already has cost the District approximately $115,000 of attorneys’ fees paid to a prominent Chicago law firm.  The District also has paid an undisclosed amount to California-based consultant Community Matters “to survey the climate of bullying, hazing and harassment in the district” and produce a 24-page report, which was delivered to school administrators in May and can be accessed through the D-207 website under Community Matters Presents Report.

And the District and/or its insurer is also burning cash in defending against a civil lawsuit for money damages filed by the victims of this hazing.

All because it appears that male soccer players at Maine West somehow thought that conduct described in news accounts as “sodomy” – which covers more than one kind of sex act – was okay.  Or because those players didn’t necessarily think it was okay, but they didn’t have sufficient courage and resolve to resist the peer pressure that reportedly endorsed it and encouraged it.  And because some coaches allegedly knew about this conduct but did nothing about it, a la the Penn State football program.

We find it difficult to fathom how this sort of “hazing” could occur to the extent and for the length of time it is alleged to have occurred.  We find it equally difficult to fathom how sheltered even a 14 year-old boy would have to be so as not to understand and appreciate the wrongness of this kind of conduct – from the perspective of either the perpetrator or the victim.

We’re not suggesting that the accused coaches don’t bear the principal responsibility for this situation if it is determined that they knew about this conduct and did nothing to stop it.  That would be deserving of criminal prosecution as well as termination; and, to borrow a page from the Mennonite playbook, shunning.

But the finding by the law firm investigating these incidents that staff at the District’s three high schools reported having less time to be in places where hazing and bullying incidents are likely to occur highlights the age-old adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Just as there are not nearly enough attorneys and investigators in the Chicago U.S. Attorney’s office to investigate and prosecute all the incidents of political corruption in Chicago and Crook County, it is unlikely that D-207 will ever have enough staff to provide complete and seamless policing and prevention of all hazing and bullying that might occur.  It is, therefore, incumbent upon the students themselves to buy into and self-police a “zero tolerance” attitude toward such behavior.

That means the “kids” themselves are going to have to accept some responsibility for refraining from, resisting and reporting these kinds of abuse.  And their parents are going to have to accept some responsibility for impressing on their “kids” that this conduct is criminal and intolerable.  Aberrant behavior of any and every type must be rejected clearly, convincingly and consistently by our community as a whole.

The message must be unequivocal that the kind of behavior engaged in by those Maine West athletes is nothing remotely close to “boys being boys” or acceptable team-building activity.

With or without a cookie.

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As anyone who’s been paying attention (or reading this blog) knows all too well, the City of Park Ridge is in a financial squeeze – in large part because of the squandering of tens of millions of dollars of borrowed money (a/k/a, bonded debt) on the wrongheaded Uptown TIF development, including millions of dollars in subsidies to the private developer.

But we’ve heard that the City’s economic struggles aren’t deterring Crook County Board president Toni Preckwinkle and her County Board cronies from trying to push some of the expenses and responsibility for the unincorporated areas of Crook County – many of which are economically depressed and which are currently serviced, albeit less than efficiently, by Crook County government – onto municipalities like Park Ridge.

That strategy was recommended in April 2012 by the 13-member Crook County Unincorporated Task Force (the “CCUTF”) which Preckwinkle formed in 2011, purportedly to come up with a better way to deliver services to those unincorporated areas.  In reality, the goal was to find ways for the County to dump its costs for servicing those areas onto neighboring municipalities in the face of what Preckwinkle herself describes as the County’s “staggering budget deficit.”

Interestingly enough, Preckwinkle originally recommended charging the 98,000+ residents of unincorporated Crook County about $150 a year to maintain such County services as sheriff’s police patrols.  But that surcharge must have stepped on somebody powerful’s toes, because Preckwinkle soon dropped it like a hot potato and promptly came up with the idea of the CCUTF.

Funny how that kind of stuff seems to happen so often here in Crook County.

And this being Crook County, where only “somebodies who somebody knows” get political appointments, the CCUTF was made up of a number of usual suspects.

There were overtly political types like County Board members Tim Schneider and Deborah Sims, Maywood mayor Henderson Yarborough, and Maine Township’s own Carol Teschky.  Those of us who’ve watched Teschky over the years know that, in this kind of crowd, Carol was little more than a bobble-head doll readily nodding agreement with whatever she thought would ensure that she gets to keep her job (and pension) as Maine Twp. supervisor.

The covertly political CCUTF members were: Scott Saef, a prominent land use and zoning attorney with Sidley Austin LLP whose ties to Mike “Prince of Darkness” Madigan go back to a tour as the Speaker’s attorney back in 1993; and Barry Nekritz, high-powered real estate attorney with Faegre Baker Daniels and husband of high-profile Illinois state representative Elaine Nekritz.

The ostensibly non-politicals on the CCUTF included Adrienne Archia of Blaylock Robert Van, LLC, a municipal finance and debt underwriting consultant (who wants a piece of whatever bonded debt is needed to force these unincorporated areas into existing municipalities that don’t want them?); and DePaul University professor of “public service” H. Woods Bowman, whose CV suggests that he is 100% on board with anything that expands government services.

Then you have the folks who head up those pseudo-governmental organizations that make noise but accomplish little, like Laurence Msall of the Civic Federation; David Bennett, executive director of the fluff-and-stroke Metropolitan Mayors Caucus; and Randy Blankenhorn, executive director of the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning.

But the CCUTF member we’re most interested in is the emissary Preckwinkle is rumored to be sending out in the next couple of weeks to sell this unincorporated assimilation strategy to Park Ridge Mayor Dave Schmidt, Des Plaines Mayor Matt Bogusz, Village of Glenview president Jim Patterson and Niles Mayor Andy Przybylo.

King William Harris.

The King was a member of the CCUTF, ostensibly by virtue of his chairmanship of the Metropolitan Planning Council.  In a January 2009 story, Crain’s Chicago Business described him as an “heir to the Toni hair care and other industrial fortunes.”  He’s got an undergraduate degree and an MBA from Harvard, and he’s held a number of top positions with Pittway Corporation (one of those “industrial fortunes” to which he is an “heir”), Aptar Group and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.  He’s also been a director of those same entities, along with the Alberto-Culver Co. and Penton Media, Inc.

Not only is he a trustee of the University of Chicago, but he’s also a member of the Dean’s International Council of U of C’s Harris School of Public Policy – named after his uncle and mega-donor, the late Irving B. Harris.

This King very well could be one of those Chicago stereotypes: the “guy” behind elected officials like Preckwinkle.  More likely, however, he’s a front or surrogate for those kinds of “guys” who have figured out that people with Harvard and Yale pedigrees provide pretty darn good shields against close scrutiny.

As the King‘s biographical information suggests, he’s several cuts above the typical partisan puppets and jamokes Chicago and Crook County voters regularly elect to public office.  So when the King speaks, people probably listen – which would explain why Preckwinkle is sending him as her designated pitch man.

Whether he’s a match for the estimable Ron Popeil or Vince “ShamWow” Offer is unknown, which is why we’d love to see and hear the royal pitch King will make in trying to get Schmidt and his fellow honchos from our neighboring communities to sign onto annexing such marginal unincorporated areas as Park Ridge Commons and the neighboring areas north of Lutheran General Hospital – areas which are on their way to becoming Park Ridge’s equivalent of slums.

We assume he’ll wax eloquent about intergovernmental cooperation, raise the fear factor of rising crime and violence emanating from those unincorporated lands, and give vague assurances of County financial aid as if such assurances have any value coming from as economically bankrupt and corrupt a cesspool as Crook County government.  Preckwinkle is desperate and needs ways to save money, and pushing County obligations onto municipalities like Park Ridge is a low-hanging fruit way of doing it.

Presumably Schmidt will keep his ears wide open and the City’s wallet tightly shut.

Because no matter what the content of the King’s speech might be, its only purpose is to separate Park Ridge taxpayers from even more of their money.

UPDATE 08.04.13.  An agenda item on tomorrow night’s Park Ridge City Council meeting is the upcoming meeting being scheduled by King Harris for Mayor Schmidt and his counterparts in Des Plaines, Glenview and Niles.

As can be seen from the King’s memo attached to Schmidt’s Agenda Cover Memorandum, “close to 40,000 of the 110,000 people who live in unincorporated C[r]ook County live in Maine and Northfield Townships adjacent to your four communities,” many of whom “live in aging multi-family apartment buildings and are members of moderate to low income families.”  In other words, areas that pass for “slums” up here in the northwest suburbs.

Not surprisingly, the King suggests that, “[v]ia negotiated inter-governmental agreements…[these municipalities] might be able to take over code enforcement, construction permitting, and general police work without annexing any land.”  His memo contains not even a hint of a firm commitment of Crook County funding to cover the costs of these services from which the County wants to walk away – not that a firm commitment, or even a signed contract, would provide adequate security when coming from an economically-staggering governmental unit like Crook County.

If a May 1, 2012 Chicago Tribune article is a reliable guide, many residents of those unincorporated areas don’t want annexation because they don’t want to be under “the taxing and ordinance-heavy thumbs of their more restrictive neighbor towns.”  That sounds to us like code for: they’re a bunch of freeloaders, which appears to be corroborated in that same article by reports that Preckwinkle acknowledged taxes collected from residents of unincorporated areas aren’t enough to cover the cost of the services they use, making the County’s continued servicing of these areas expensive and unsustainable.

Which makes Preckwinkle’s dumping of her original plan to surcharge those areas $150 per year to eliminate that shortfall even more irresponsible and unacceptable.

But you Republican readers who enjoy pointing fingers at all those inept and/or corrupt Illinois Dems might be chagrined to discover that a leading opponent of Preckwinkle’s surcharge was none other than Republican County Board member Tim Schneider – who, along with his family, got bailed out by Crook County taxpayers when the Dem-dominated Crook County Forest Preserve District Board, of which Schneider is a member, agreed to buy their failing 56-acre privately-owned golf course (Rolling Knolls Country Club) for nearly $5.75 million in January 2010.

And, irony of ironies, Rolling Knolls was located in…wait for it…unincorporated Crook County.

Go figure!

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In our last post, “The Uptown TIF: Crapitalism Without Accountability,” we discussed how a misguided and poorly-executed decision on the Uptown TIF – by former public officials who seem totally unwilling to accept any accountability for it – has saddled current City officials and the taxpayers with some major long-term consequences.

It’s not just about the money, although a $5 million (and counting) TIF fund deficit which the City is required to make up with money from its General (operating) Fund is nothing to sneeze at.  All the subsidies the City gave to Uptown developer PRC Partners, LLC for project elements like the underground parking garage and a variety of street-scaping also didn’t do the taxpayers any favors.

And let’s not forget the arguably “bargain” price that the City charged PRC for those prime parcels of Uptown land: the “Reservoir Block,” as well as the former Bredemann property the City acquired (at less than a bargain-basement price) in order to sell them all to its developer of choice.  We’re still amazed how the City inexplicably failed to obtain an appraisal that might have confirmed whether the properties’ value really was the $6.129 million for which the City sold it, rather than the $8-10 million that some local real estate people thought it might be worth.

Was the “fix” in for PRC?  Who knows?  But for those of you who didn’t sit through any of those City Council meetings where the merits of the competing designs were being discussed, all we can say is that then-city manager Tim Schuenke and several elected officials around The Horseshoe back then sure seemed to be herding the rest of the cats in PRC’s direction.

But where the rubber meets the road anytime large sums of public money is expended, or boatloads of long-term public debt is incurred, is what other projects and services are effectively foreclosed by those commitments of money and/or debt.

For example, you folks who are frustrated by the pace of the City’s flood relief projects probably should cast a jaundiced eye on the bungled TIF financing and expenditures, because that current $5 million TIF fund deficit represents $5 million of potential flood remediation that might not get done.  And if that $5 million deficit spirals into the $27 million “worst-case” deficit forecast by the City’s new TIF consultants, flood control and other important City infrastructure projects might not get done, at least not without a substantial increase in our property taxes.

Unfortunately, it appears that a lot of infrastructure needs were neglected in the years leading up to the Uptown TIF fiasco, during which former mayor Ron “All O’Hare, All The Time” Wietecha obsessed over Uptown redevelopment in those few waking hours when he wasn’t consumed by shoveling tons of City bucks into that bottomless Suburban O’Hare Commission pit and its Peotone airport annex.  Within months of getting the Council to pass the TIF resolution in July 2003, Wietecha resigned mid-term without prior notice and fled to Barrington.

What a stand up guy!

He was followed by two mayors – Marous and Frimark – who acted as if they were every bit as committed to doing the Uptown deal as Wietecha, if not more so; and who couldn’t be bothered with something as mundane as inspecting, maintaining, repairing and replacing sewers when there were monuments to be built.

That might explain the July 15, 2013 Agenda Cover Memorandum by City Engineer Sarah Mitchell, which states that the City didn’t “resume” its sewer lining program until 2011 – although the memo doesn’t say when that program was suspended.  The schedule of sewers designated for re-lining during 2013-13 total 7,417 linear feet at a price of $310,000.  That schedule shows sewer lines ranging from 8 inches to 21 inches in diameter.

Are 8-inch sewer lines too small?  How about 15-inchers, or 21-inchers?  The City isn’t saying, nor is it saying how many more 8-inch, 15-inch or 21-inch sewers are out there, and in what condition.

Could those be contributing to, or even causing, a signficant amount of the flooding we’re experiencing?

We don’t know.  And, frankly, we doubt that anybody at City Hall or the Public Works building knows – at least not with the degree of certainty a pro-active infrastructure maintenance and improvement program requires.  But we have to believe that the $5 million that already has been sunk into covering those Uptown TIF deficits could have been put to much better use inspecting, maintaining, repairing and replacing that aged sewer system.

This isn’t to say that the Uptown project is a bad thing.  But considering that the combined Reservoir Block and Bredemann parcels was so attractive to developers back in 2002-03 that the City’s Uptown redevelopment RFQ/RFP drew 19 responses, 5 of which were “short-listed,” it’s a tad nauseating to think about how the City ended up handcuffing itself with long-term bonded debt in order to give PRC multi-millions of dollars in subsidies – especially now that PRC has banked its profit and walked away from the project, while the City will be struggling mightily to meet those debt obligations for the next 14 years.

Are the three amigos who led the Uptown TIF and PRC subsidies efforts (former mayors Wietecha, Marous and Frimark) willing to step up and publicly hold themselves publicly accountable for the Uptown TIF millstone?  How about the former aldermen who rubber-stamped the deal?

So far they’ve all been MIA.  And unless the TIF finances were to miraculously turn around, we suspect they’ll remain MIA.  And why not?  They’ve already basked in the glory of the project as proud parents when it was young and full of promise.

But now that the TIF is looking like a bust, it has become the red-headed step-child.

Or an orphan.

To read or post comments, click on title.

This week, both the TribLocal and the Park Ridge Journal published articles about the City Council’s discussion of Park Ridge’s Uptown TIF at this past Monday night’s Committee of the Whole meeting: “City Staff Reworking TIF To End Deficits,” (Journal, 07.24.13) and “Park Ridge hopes to reduce TIF drain” (Trib, 07.25.13).

At that meeting, City Finance Director Kent Oliven reiterated that the Uptown TIF fund – the special enterprise fund created to operate the TIF district – has already “borrowed” more than $5 million from the City.  Oliven also reiterated the findings of TIF consultant Kane McKenna and Associates, Inc. that, by the expiration of the TIF in 2027, the TIF fund is projected to owe the City over $20 million.

That’s not the kind of return one would hope for on the City’s approximately $40 million TIF “investment.”

It’s also one big reason why Moody’s downgraded the City’s bond rating in January 2012, while also assigning a negative outlook to the City’s finances.  And it’s got the City scrambling to salvage whatever it can from this long-term mess, using some of the ideas and advice given the Council several months ago by Kane McKenna.

For example, one way to put more TIF district tax revenue in the TIF fund is to segregate TIF district property that has gained in value from the property which hasn’t.  But that reportedly will take TIF revenue away from other taxing bodies, like School Districts 64 and 207, and the Park Ridge Recreation and Park District.  We suspect those taxing bodies might have something to say about that effort, even though they – and especially D-64 – were complicit in the creation of the TIF back in September 2003.

Back then, because D-64 had the most to lose from the TIF’s diversion of property tax revenues, the D-64 Board went through the effort and expense of hiring a top-notch Loop TIF attorney, John Murphey., He repeatedly advised then-D-64 Board members Joe Baldi, Rich Brendza, Ares Dalianis, Christine Heyde, Dean Krone, Steve Latreille and Sue Runyon that the land in question did not legally qualify for “TIF” status because it could be developed without a TIF; and that D-64 would likely be successful if it sued the City to stop the TIF.

For reasons that were vague even back then and virtually impenetrable today, however, the D-64 Board wimped out and cut a less-than-optimal financial deal with the City that the City reportedly will be looking to renegotiate now that the TIF has become an economic black hole.

Which illustrates, painfully, one of the biggest problems with government generally, but especially local government here in Park Ridge.

Lack of accountability of public officials for the decisions they make.

Less than 10 years after the foolish TIF-related decisions were made, not one of the elected City officials who made those decisions, or either of the two key City staffers who facilitated them – mayors Ron Wietecha and Mike Marous; alds. Mike Tinaglia, Don Crampton, Rich DiPietro, John Benka, Sue Bell, Andrea Bateman, Sue Beaumont, Howard Frimark, Dawn Disher, Mark Anderson, Rex Parker, Larry Friel and Jeff Cox; and city mgr. Tim Schuenke and finance director Diane Lembesis – remain in elective City office or City employment.

That leaves current Mayor Dave Schmidt and Alds. Joe Sweeney, Nick Milissis, Jim Smith, Roger Shubert, Dan Knight, Marc Mazzuca and Marty Maloney – along with City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton and City Finance Director Kent Oliven – to come up with desperate after-the-fact solutions to borderline-impossible problems created by the departed perpetrators of this TIF debacle.

Not only don’t those perps have to clean up their own mess, but we suspect they are delighted whenever they read superficial alibis for the TIF’s failure, like the TribLocal’s “a weakened economy and soft real estate market,” which gloss over how the $20 million-plus, bond-financed subsidy the City gave TIF developer PRC Partners, LLC was the product of fundamentally boneheaded public policy.  Or that, as we understand it, the servicing of that $20 million of bonded debt contributes mightily to the annual deficiency in the TIF fund.

That’s a “gift” from the perps that will keep on giving for years to come.

Giveaways of public money for private benefit are what properly have been dubbed “crapitalism.”  Unfortunately, it appears to be on the rise nationwide.  And irrespective of whether that crapitalism occurs at the federal, state, or local level, the politicians who make it possible and the recipients who crapitalize on it always seem to make out like the bandits they are.

While the rest of us taxpayers get stuck with the bill.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s ours.

To read or post comments, click on title.

It’s time to bury the hatchet.

And not in anybody’s skull.

As readers of this blog well know, since our July 7, 2008 post, we have been unabashedly outspoken critics of Taste of Park Ridge NFP (“Taste Inc.”), the private corporation which, back in 2005, was given a no-bid exclusive “deal” to run the City’s signature event, Taste of Park Ridge (“TOPR”).  Our beef has been simple and straightforward: why is the City getting stiffed on the reimbursement of expenses and the profit sharing that was intended in the original 2005 TOPR “deal”?

Since that first post we discovered that TOPR had been run from 2005 to 2009 by a for-profit corporation masquerading as a non-profit one (i.e, and “NFP”) – which the City (a/k/a, the taxpayers) was subsidizing to the tune of $10-20,000, or more, worth of City services (police, fire and public works), even as Taste Inc. built up a bank account approaching six figures.  The fact that politicians like then-Maine Twp. Supervisor Bob “the Dude” Dudycz and then-mayor Howard Frimark were instrumental in Taste Inc. made the situation even more problematic, as did the inexplicable lack of oversight by both the 14-member, pre-2006 referendum Council, and the 7-member, post-2006 referendum Council.

We called out the Taste Inc. folks and our City officials – the former for ripping off the taxpayers, the latter for letting the former get away with it.  We also called for transparency from Taste Inc., reimbursement of the City by Taste Inc. for TOPR expenses, profit-sharing between the City and Taste Inc., and a competitive RFP/bidding process to ensure that the taxpayers were getting the best bang for their buck, both economically and entertainment-wise.

Needless to say, that didn’t endear us to those Taste Inc. folks and many of those public officials imitating the see/hear/speak-no-evil monkeys.  C’est la vie.

Last year (for TOPR 2012), however, Mayor Dave Schmidt finally overcame all the wailing and gnashing of teeth to get the Council to take its duty to the taxpayers seriously.  They demanded that Taste Inc. do all those things it should have been doing since 2005.  Unfortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate.  So while Taste Inc. reimbursed the City for its expenses, there wasn’t any profit sharing to be had.

But as anybody who was around last weekend can attest, the weather for TOPR 2013 couldn’t have been better.  And the crowds that came out for the expanded (to 4 days) TOPR should end up making this year’s event a contender for most successful TOPR.  Evah!

For Taste Inc. and for the City.  Which is all we ever wanted in the first place.

So in the spirit of “all’s well that ends well,” we think it’s time for all of us who were justifiably critical of how TOPR was being operated to wipe the slate clean, and to give the Taste Inc. folks – Dave Iglow, Dean Patras, John Warnimont, Barb Tyksinski, Mel Thillens, Franklin Ramirez, et al. – a big Watchdog bark-out.  Hopefully, all of us learned something worthwhile from the “refining” process TOPR went through these past few years.

And hopefully TOPR 2013 will prove to have been successful enough to put some needed dollars in the City treasury this year…and in years to come.

To read or post comments, click on title.

We’ve never given a “Chutzpah of the Year Award.”  And we doubt we’ll institute one this year – if only out of concern that too many Park Ridgians might channel their inner Michele Bachmanns and mispronounce it the “choot-spa” award.

But if we were to give one out, the leading contender through the All-Star break would have to be Frank Gruba-McCallister, who chaired the Park Ridge Police Chief’s Advisory Task Force (the “PCATF”) from its creation in 2010 until it was disbanded by Mayor Dave Schmidt and the City Council in May of this year.

The main reason the PCATF was created was to provide a group of citizens to help the Police Department implement changes suggested in the 2008 Audit of the PRPD by attorney Terry Ekl (the “Ekl Report), especially improvement in police-community relations in the wake of several troubling incidents – like the wrongful and deceptive arrest of resident Jayne Reardon, and the police brutality claim by a 15-year old allegedly roughed up by an off-duty police officer after the youth had been arrested and handcuffed.  That latter incident cost the City a $185,000 settlement, plus the attorneys’ fees incurred in defending the case prior to settlement.

But simply helping with community relations must have been too pedestrian a task for the PCATF members who, almost immediately following the PCATF’s creation, turned it into a hammer in search of more nails.

It became the chief instigator and cheerleader for over $1 million of “improvements” to the police station–a collection of “wants” rather than “needs” which became a priority only after the PRPD’s grand plan for building a big new $16-20 million cop shop crashed and burned via an April 2009 referendum.  That cop shop improvement program encouraged further PCATF “mission creep” into many other areas of police activities – which it got away with largely because neither the Mayor nor the City Council was paying close attention while they grappled with more pressing financial problems.

With that mission creep came claims of achievements that, not surprisingly, could not be objectively measured or otherwise supported by hard data – other than the brick-and-mortar of the aforementioned cop shop improvements.   That lack of hard data, however, didn’t stop Mr. G-M and several other PCATF members from acting like the proverbial rooster taking credit for the dawn, taking bows for all sorts of real and imagined “successes” running the gamut from the purported curtailment of underage drinking to “coping with the budgetary stresses experienced by governmental bodies.”

Yes, that’s what Mr. G-M claimed – on the sixth page of what became the PCATF’s final Report to the Mayor and the Council.

That Report and last year’s PCATF meeting minutes suggest that the PCATF already had identified the next big thing for it to jump into.

Mental health.

The Report contains (by our count) 23 references to “mental health” (or its permutations), easily outdistancing the 13 references to “underage drinking” (and its permutations).  It also contains a gratuitous yet opportunistic reference to “Sandy Hook” that displays  a heat-over-light strategy for stampeding chronically skittish and analytically-challenged residents into unquestioning support for giving the PCATF an even broader role in City government going forward.

But that was before Schmidt and the Council decided that three years of the PCATF was enough.

So Mr. G-M showed up at the July 8 City Council meeting to recommend the Council create a “Public Safety Commission” as a replacement for the PCATF – with 20-members, 14 of whom would be specific former PCATF members whose appointments would be exempt from the normal screening by the Mayor’s Advisory Board, comprised of the chairmen of the City Council’s four standing committees.

But where Mr. G-M distinguished himself as the front-runner for a first-ever chutzpah award was his recommendation that the new commission’s chairman be…wait for it…Mr. G-M, himself.  And his appointment also would be without any Mayor’s Advisory Board screening, naturally.

Fortunately, the City Council seemed unimpressed by both the idea of a Public Safety Commission and Mr. G-M’s recommended staffing of it.  That reaction suggests the formation of such a commission is unlikely, which seems to be the right decision.

The Police Department issues targeted by the Ekl Report appear to have been addressed, thanks in large part to the management and leadership of Chief Frank Kaminski.  To the extent the PCATF may have contributed to improved community relations, we’ll toss them a bone for that even though we see and hear far more anecdotes than evidence in that regard.

But although Chief K is rightly concerned about continuing to build public trust in the Police Department and its officers through “constant interactions” between police and citizens, we don’t think either the PCATF or a Public Safety Commission is the best way to accomplish this, given the improvements we’ve observed in the 5 years since the Ekl Report and four years into Chief K’s tenure.  Further improvement in that regard would appear to require more internal, organic development within the department itself.

Chief K warns that “[t]he more you isolate the department from the community, the more problems you are going to have.”  We agree wholeheartedly.  And since Chief K clearly appreciates the problem, we trust his decades of police experience and his Kellogg (Northwestern) MBA in management make him equal to the task of solving it.

As for Mr. G-M and his PCATF alums, assuming they really are serious about dealing with mental health and underage drinking, they should check out the City’s Community Health Commission.  The City’s website indicates that 5 seats will be opening up in September, although we assume the appointment process will require Mayor’s Advisory Board screening.  No exemptions.

And, Mr. G-M, you probably shouldn’t expect to be anointed chairman of the CHC should you apply for and get an appointment.

Unless you really are shooting for that chutzpah award.

To read or post comments, click on title.