We’re starting this post out with one tiny bit of good news: the Park Ridge City Council sustained one of Mayor Dave Schmidt’s vetoes last Monday night – nixing higher wage ranges for non-union City employees – by a 6-1 vote (Ald. Jim Smith dissenting).  

City Mgr. Jim Hock requested those higher ranges to accommodate the 3% across-the-board raises the Council approved – on Hock’s recommendation – by passing the amended 2011-12 budget back on May 25th by a 5-2 vote (Schmidt and Ald. Dan Knight dissenting, Ald. Joe Sweeney absent), and then locked in by over-riding Schmidt’s veto on June 20th by a 6-1 vote (Knight dissenting).  The Council rubber-stamped Hock’s higher wage ceilings on August 15th by yet another 6-1 vote (Knight again dissenting) which Schmidt vetoed on August 29th, setting the stage for the veto-sustaining vote. 

The worst part of these raises (and the raises for unionized City employees) is that they come with basically no articulated rationale other than that those employees have gone 2-3 years without raises.  That’s it: no discussion of improved performance, no analysis of greater efficiencies, no attempt to differentiate among the various employees.  Just a blanket, everybody’s-entitled, 3% increase tacked onto whatever those non-union employees already had been making.

What were Alds. Sweeney (1st), Rich DiPietro (2nd), Jim Smith (3rd), Sal Raspanti (4th), Tom Bernick (6th) and Marty Maloney (7th) thinking when they voted for these raises?  Who knows, because they’re not saying: apparently they don’t believe they owe the taxpayers any explanation when giving away significant amounts of public funds.

Although the Council’s veto-sustaining vote didn’t repeal those raises that will cost the taxpayers $185,766 this year alone, by preventing increases in the wage ceilings it thereby capped those raises at those ceilings – with the balances of the would-be raises paid out in lump sum-like bonuses that, as we understand it, are not considered for purposes of pension benefit determinations. 

Whether by blind squirrel theory or the law of unintended consequences, this Council appears to have done a good thing for Park Ridge taxpayers.  And even if it provides only a small savings this year, a much bigger benefit may result if these lump-sum payments become an alternative to those arbitrary salary increases that carry the extra baggage of increases in pension liability. 

So we’re calling this one small step for Schmidt, even if it’s no giant leap for the Council’s spending lemmings – unless, of course, they can stiffen their spines enough to start saying “no” to raises and “yes” to bonuses based on productivity and merit instead of across-the-board donations.

Which leads us to Monday night’s over-ride of the mayor’s veto of the first $15,444 installment payment to the City’s private community groups – not including the Youth Commission, which is a City (i.e., “public”) commission rather than a “private” organization.  

Schmidt vetoed this installment on October 3, 2011, noting that these donations of completely arbitrary amounts of tax dollars that are budgeted to total $61,776 this year not only violate Article VIII of the Illinois Constitution and the City Council’s own Policy No. 6, but also represent bad management – as Schmidt’s veto message pointed out:

Furthermore, if the City is to expend public funds on these privately-performed services, it should not do so in the form of donations of arbitrary funding amounts, but in the same manner that it purchases any other services from private vendors: under a written contract that identifies each service provided, to whom it is being provided, and the charge for each such service; and that also requires that the City be furnished with the information necessary for it to objectively determine whether all the services for which it is being billed have, in fact, been rendered to Park Ridge residents.

Unfortunately, don’t expect this Council – with the exception of Ald. Knight – to “get” these concepts.  Our tongue-tied aldermen seem to enjoy playing Santa Claus with our money far too much to concern themselves with something as mundane as requiring contracts from these private organizations that expressly limit their receipt of City funding to: (a) specific services to be provided to Park Ridge residents at specific unit prices; and (b) the City’s receiving a detailed accounting confirming that those services have, in fact, been provided at those prices.

What’s wrong with that, one might ask?  It would make the people running those private organizations unhappy.

And one thing we’ve learned about these spendthrift aldermen is that they don’t like to make anybody feeding at the public trough unhappy.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Within the past couple of weeks, the heretofore unthinkable happened.

The new mayor of that political cesspool known as Chicago, and the almost-new president of the Crook County board, both announced that their respective branches of government were going to get salaries under control or there would be more layoffs – in excess of 1,000 at the county level, along with furloughs and the loss of paid holidays; and more than 500 in Chicago, along with eliminating almost 800 vacant positions.

But here in Park Ridge, our public officials not only keep giving out raises without a care in the world, but they also sweeten the pot with additional benefits like the no-layoff provision contained in the new firefighters union contract – presumably to prevent themselves from correcting their mistake at a later date should their judgment ever return.

Monday night, by a 6-1 vote (Ald. Dan Knight dissenting), the Council over-rode Mayor Dave Schmidt’s veto of the contract between the City and the firefighters union – in an empty Council chambers as the clock worked its way toward midnight, after a closed-session discussion orchestrated by the City’s highly-paid “labor attorney” Dina Kapernekas, whose hiring and compensation arrangement we still haven’t been able to find memorialized in any of the Council meeting minutes.

Such 11th-hour maneuvering is a slap in the face of anybody who believes in transparent government.  That’s even more true when the maneuvering endorses a contract that was negotiated under a public-information blackout agreed to by Fire Chief Mike Zywanski without the good sense of consulting with the mayor or the Council prior to agreeing to it; and without the integrity of admitting to what he did when the mayor first asked about it at the May 2nd meeting – unless his initial silence was intended to buy time for him and certain other City employees to get their stories straight and persuade Chief Z to wear the jacket?

Not surprisingly, four of the six aldermen casting over-ride votes (Alds. Sweeney, DiPietro, Raspanti and Maloney) Monday night didn’t even feel any obligation to publicly explain the reason(s) for those votes, limiting themselves to a simple “no” when they were polled on the motion to sustain the veto.  Apparently they don’t care whether or how the firefighters are supposed to actually earn their 2% bump in 2012-13 and their 3% bump in 2013-14.  2-3% quicker response times on fire calls?  2-3% greater success rate on paramedic resuscitations?  2-3% reductions in fire damages?  2-3% more cats removed from trees?

Or is the real point of their sphinx-like silence that they truly believe City employees do not need to actually earn their raises in this madcap world of public-sector unionized employment?  Or in the equally madcap public-sector non-unionized employment, for that matter – as we saw from this same merry band’s approval of an amended 2011-12 budget back in May that included 3% across-the-board raises for the City’s non-union employees – with only Schmidt and Knight dissenting?

Only Alds. Tom Bernick (6th) and Jim Smith (3rd) gave any clue to their reasons for their veto over-ride votes, and Smith’s was little more than a call to “move on.”

Bernick, on the other hand, called it “a very good contract” despite being unable to articulate anything “good” about it other than that it would eliminate any chance of the union demanding costly arbitration.  In fact, Bernick sounds so terrified of arbitration that he may have crowned himself the Council’s new “Chicken Little,” title vacated by former Ald. Jim Allegretti – especially in light of Kapernekas’ admission that the City’s turning down the contract didn’t make arbitration a certainty because the City and the union still could agree to resume negotiations over those two points on which Schmidt based his veto: the 3% year-three raise and the no-layoff provision.

Bernick’s expressed arbitration-phobia and the “sphinx”-aldermen’s unexplained over-ride votes become far more problematic, however, is in how these bad contract terms affect future negotiations and contracts. 

As Schmidt correctly noted in his comments immediately prior to the over-ride vote, by agreeing to these terms the City is effectively setting a new baseline for subsequent negotiations…and any subsequent arbitration award.  In other words, by agreeing to the 3% year-three raise and the no-layoff provision, the City has now given the firefighters union (and every other City-employee union?) carte blanche to treat those terms as an entitlement in future negotiations…and has given any arbitrator carte blanche to award those terms in any future arbitration.

What this vote (and the prior vote to adopt this flawed contract) also does is effectively announce that these aldermen, save for one, are pushovers: six Neville Chamberlain wannabes going belly up for the union and then proudly waving this contract above their heads while proclaiming labor “peace in our time.”  

Can you say “entitlement,” Alds. Sweeney, DiPietro, Smith, Raspanti, Bernick and Maloney? 

We knew you could.

Now, how about “appeasement”?

To read or post comments, click on title.

Anybody who has been reading this blog for the past several months knows that we have been critical of across-the-board salary increases recently given out by the Park Ridge City Council (to both union and non-union employees) and by Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 (to non-union administrators).   Such increases, lacking any basis in merit or productivity, are bad public policy on several levels; and bad management of limited resources. 

We were highly critical of City Manager Jim Hock’s apparent abdication of responsibility for the firefighters contract negotiations to senior Fire Dept. staff (the “Fire Guys”).  As part of the firefighter “fraternity,” they couldn’t be expected to negotiate aggressively with their “frat brothers”; and they never should have been put in such positions of likely failure.  That bit of bad management is on Hock.

Nevertheless, Fire Chief Mike Zywanski made a bad situation much worse by agreeing (beyond his authority, and without even discussing it with the mayor or City Council) to a set of negotiating “Ground Rules” that gagged our elected officials and kept the public in the dark about the terms being negotiated.  He then compounded that gaffe by sitting silently at the May 2, 2011 Council Meeting and refusing to answer Mayor Dave Schmidt’s questions about who committed the City to those “Ground Rules.”  That’s entirely on Chief Z…and on the City Council that approved the resulting ill-advised contract.

But now the taxpayers are facing yet another opportunity to be fleeced by their public employees, this time courtesy of the negotiations between District 64 and the Park Ridge Education Association, a/k/a, the teachers union – the folks who never miss an opportunity to portray themselves as selfless “professionals” who use the slogan “it’s for the kids” as a talisman to ward off accountability and any form of criticism. 

Unlike some residents who get upset when public employees ask for more money, however, we see nothing wrong with public employees asking for higher wages and better benefits.  That’s the “labor” side of the capitalism equation.

Where the problem arises is when feckless elected and appointed officials can’t or won’t say “no” to those requests.  And, as we recently saw when the D-64 Board rubber-stamped 3% across-the-board raises for administrators hashed out in closed session on June 27, 2011, only Board member Anthony Borrelli was willing to say “no.”  That bodes ill for Park Ridge taxpayers who already pay approximately 1/3 of their ever-increasing property tax bills to D-64.

Which is why we are concerned that the District’s teachers contract “negotiating team” reportedly is being led by Board President John Heyde and Board member Pat Fioretto, neither of whom will ever be accused of being fiscal conservatives, even as that term has become increasingly diluted by those who loudly proclaim themselves as such but then quietly ignore all that being it entails. 

Heyde’s imprint on the D-64 Board has been one of secrecy – or the “lack of transparency,” if you prefer – about D-64’s operations, as we’ve previously written in posts such as: “Some ‘Over-The-Transom’ Info About District 64’s Under-The-Radar Activities” (07.06.11); “Secret Pay Raises At School District 64?” (06.30.11); “D-64 Board Stealthily Picks Architect of Record” (05.13.11); “More Of The ‘Culture of Secrecy” At District 64” (09.16.10); “Arrogant And Disrespectful, Or Simply Petty And Juvenile?” (04.07.10); and “Concealing The Details Of A ‘Fair’ Contract Raises Questions” (09.14.09).

Any wonder that the teachers union contract signed by Heyde and Eric Uhlig back in 2009 includes a provision that keeps those negotiations…wait for it…secret from the public, unless both sides agree otherwise?

But Fioretto’s role in the union negotiations might be even more problematic than Heyde’s, primarily because Fioretto makes his living as a labor and employment attorney representing unions, albeit private sector unions.  As his law firm’s website advertises:

Baum Sigman Auerbach & Neuman, Ltd. was founded in 1963, making it one of the oldest law firms in Chicago specializing in the representation of Unions and Taft-Hartley employee benefit funds. For over forty years, we have maintained our commitment to working men and women who comprise organized labor and their employers. We strive to protect the benefits earned by the labor movement as they relate to unions, Taft-Hartley employee benefit funds, and the individual worker.

While we take no exception to Fioretto’s (or his firm’s) avocation or its inherent duties, they generally tend to require the kind of pro-union “fraternal” mind-set that does not readily lend itself to aggressively arguing the “management” position during contract negotiations with other unions, as the Fire Guys recently demonstrated in the botched City firefighters contract negotiations.

While Fioretto’s position on D-64’s negotiating team might not be a classic conflict of interest, it carries the aroma, if not the actual appearance, of impropriety.  Does anybody outside of the D-64 administration and Board – and, of course, those PREA negotiators trying to stifle their grins – reasonably believe that Fioretto should be leading D-64’s negotiating team any more than the Fire Guys should have been leading the City’s firefighters contract negotiating team?

Whether this is simply a big mistake or whether it’s an inherently bad idea is irrelevant.  What is relevant, however, is that this appears to be another case of the wrong men for an important job.

And that’s why, once again, we’ll all end up paying the ever-rising costs of Heyde’s and Fioretto’s unpaid “volunteer” service.

To read or post comments, click on title.

Monday night (Oct. 3) Mayor Dave Schmidt vetoed the 3-year firefighters union contract that was approved by the City Council on September  19.  In his veto message, he criticized the new contract for only two reasons: the 3% increase in the contract’s third year, which he wants to subject to a re-opener (re-negotiation) if economic conditions warrant it; and the new no-layoff provision, which he wants to eliminate. 

We were disappointed that the City Council passed a contract containing those very significant flaws by a 6-0 vote (Seventh Ward Ald. Marty Maloney was absent) – especially when the minutes of that September 19, 2011 meeting show that only Alds. Dan Knight (5th) and Tom Bernick (6th), along with Schmidt, asked any meaningful questions about the contract’s terms during what passed for Council “debate.”  Across-the-board increases unrelated to improved performance and productivity are hallmarks of bad management, whether in the public or the private sector.

But the most important reason why the mayor’s veto should be sustained is the no-layoff provision.  And if you doubt just how important it is for the City to retain its unfettered right to lay off employees in order to manage expenditures, look no further than the editorial in yesterday’s (Oct. 4) Chicago Tribune, titled “Selling out Illinois.”

That editorial justifiably rips Illinois’ latest ethically-challenged governor, Pat Quinn, for selling out the state’s taxpayers one year ago by…wait for it…cutting a no-layoff deal for state employees.  Now he’s trying to back out of that deal because…wait for it…the state can’t afford all those employees.   The editorial also notes that, in exchange for that no-layoff promise, “the union made some minor cost concessions” – kind of like our firefighters union agreeing to no wage increase this year as the proverbial carrot for a 2% increase next year and the 3% increase the year after that.  

But unlike the governor, who cut his deal with the state’s largest employees union to gain its endorsement of his election bid, we don’t see any evidence of a similar quid pro quo sell-out by the City Council members who approved the firefighters deal.   It seems as if they just decided to give away across-the-board, non-merit based increases and a no-layoff guaranty because the City’s “negotiating team” and its labor attorney recommended it, or they think such raises and guaranties are what government is supposed to do.

Unfortunately, it’s looking more and more like the City’s “negotiating team” was the sell-out.  

As we understand it, that “team” was nominally headed by City Mgr. Jim Hock, although he purportedly delegated his primary responsibility to Fire Chief Mike Zywanski, Dep. Chief Jeff Sorensen, and one or more unidentified Battalion Chiefs (the “Fire Guys”).  Hock apparently was oblivious to the risks of letting the Fire Guys – long-time firefighters union members before accepting their promotions to “management” – run contract negotiations with their former “frat brothers.”    

We can only wonder if the Fire Guys showed Hock their fraternity’s secret handshake as part of the deal. 

What else but a sell-out would explain why the City got stuck with a set of negotiation “Ground Rules” requiring that all demands, offers and other such details of the negotiations be kept totally secret and not reported to the public.  And if that doesn’t sound kinky enough, consider that not only did the Fire Guys lack the legal authority to bind the City to those Ground Rules, but they did so without even telling the mayor or the Council.  And then they kept the Ground Rules secret for months afterwards. 

Accrording to the minutes of the May 2, 2011, Council meeting, “[t]he origination of the Ground Rules agreement remained questionable” to that point, in large part because both Hock and Chief Z, despite being present that night, apparently lacked whatever virtues it would have taken for them to stand up and tell the truth then and there – something Chief Z finally got around to doing at the May 16 meeting, when he belatedly admitted (according to that meeting’s minutes) to “presenting the ‘Ground Rules’ to the union” after checking “with a labor attorney and Human Resources” personnel whom he conveniently failed to identify. 

What makes things even more interesting is that, as also reported in the Sept. 19 Council minutes, the City’s bill for those secret negotiations is “approximately $40,000 thus far, non-inclusive of staff time.”  Could the “labor attorney” with whom Chief Z claims to have consulted also be the recipient of that astounding expense?  And could that attorney be Dina Kapernekas, even though we cannot find the minutes of the Council meeting at which her retention by the City for this purpose was approved? 

It should be noted that Schmidt’s latest veto is consistent with his previous veto of a 3% across-the-board increase for non-union City employees.  The Council’s vote on sustaining or over-riding that earlier veto was to have occurred at Monday night’s meeting, but it was postponed by the Council in order to give Hock and City staff a chance to prepare a comparative analysis of other municipalities’ salary structures.

Why wasn’t that kind of analysis prepared before Hock and staff recommended those 3% increases, and before the Council’s original vote that Schmidt vetoed?  Could it be because such comparisons would show that the City’s employees are already better paid than their counterparts in other communities?

We agree with the Tribune that Illinois taxpayers continue to be sold-out by Gov. Quinn.  And it looks to us like Park Ridge taxpayers are being sold-out by some of our City employees, with both this firefighters contract and the non-union raises serving as two of the most recent examples.

Will our elected officials do something about it, or will they just look the other way and rubber-stamp the results?

To read or make a comment, click on the title.

A headline in yesterday’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate caught our attention, and not because it was a good one: “No profit for city of Park Ridge as Shops of Uptown goes up for sale” is how it read. 

The accompanying story reported on how the profit-sharing element of the City’s January 2005 “Redevelopment Agreement” with PRC Partners, LLC – a “partnership” of Mid-America Asset Management (the “retail” partner), Edward R. James Homes (the “residential” partner) and Valenti Builders, Inc. (the “construction” partner) – would not be yielding any cash to the City, once touted as the “government” partner of this venture because of all the money and bonded debt it was going to be “investing” – that’s government code for “giving away.”

Who was doing that touting? 

Back then the Uptown bandwagon was pretty crowded with Uptown merchants and many of the people who then ran the City of Park Ridge: Acting Mayor Mike Marous; Alds. Mike Tinaglia and Don Crampton (1st), Rich DiPietro and John Benka (2nd), Sue Bell and Andrea Bateman (3rd), Sue Beaumont and Howard Frimark (4th), Dawn Disher and Mark Anderson (5th), Frank DePaul and Rex Parker (6th) and Frank Bartolone and Larry Friel (7th); City Treasurer Betty Henneman; City Treasurer Carl Brauweiller; and City Manager Tim Schuenke. 

By then, what had begun in 1999 (and continued through the 2003 formation of the TIF district) as a retail-driven project already had defaulted into a predominantly-residential one; and the advertised 70,402 square feet of retail space became the “tail” on the 189 residences “dog.”  Nevertheless, Uptown redevelopment was hailed as ushering in the dawn of a new era in Park Ridge: like Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich with the promise of “peace in our time,” many of those City officials waxed glowingly about “the largest redevelopment effort in generations” that would inject “vibrancy” – “vibrant” and every possible variant thereof being the unofficial watchword of the project – into a moribund Uptown retail district.

Those officials, seduced by predictions (including some of their own) of how certainly and quickly the City would recoup its expenditures, voted to “invest” multi-millions of dollars in cash and bonded debt to acquire a so-called “partnership” and “profit sharing” relationship with PRC.  The City sunk $5.25 million into just the parking garage alone, and we doubt even the City itself has an accurate fix on its entire, to-date cost of Uptown Redevelopment; or what that cost will be when the last of the bonds are retired.

But once again this fiscal year the City will make a $2.9 million payment on that TIF-related bonded debt.  And because the TIF/Uptown project is still in such a deep financial hole, it appears that the City has paid none of the $1 million it owes the Park District in consideration of the millions of dollars the Park District saved the City by permitting the construction of the Uptown reservoir in Hinkley Park rather than at the former City Garage property at Greenwood and Elm.

Upon reading the H-A article, we checked the Council’s 09.26.11 meeting packet on the City’s website and discovered a Sept. 26, 2011, Agenda Cover Memorandum  and an August 12, 2011, letter from the City’s Uptown Redevelopment “consultant” – the former blithely recommending (without any meaningful reason) the Council’s acceptance of the consultant’s profit-sharing analysis; and the latter providing a collection of unsubstantiated conclusions about how the City is entitled to nada from PRC.  We have provided some redlined annotations to the consultant’s letter highlighting some of the inadequacies of that report which, on its face, assumes that the City and its taxpayers should take Mr. Friedman analysis as gospel.

Apparently “trust, but verify” isn’t a favored concept of our City officials, past or present.  And, once again, it looks like the City is taking it in the economic shorts from the Uptown Redevelopment project.

To read or post comments, click on title.

No alderman took us up on the invitation in our Sept. 21 post to explain their “yes” vote on the new 3-year, 5%, no-layoffs firefighters union contract.  But a number of readers commented on that post. 

The following is one of those comments that we thought deserved “guest essay” status:

                         *                    *                    *                                 

I was directed to this site by someone who said I might learn some things about School District 64 here.  After reading up on D64 I read this post and your other ones on the firefighters contract, including the comments, and want to add a comment myself.

Let me say right off that I’ve got nothing against firefighters or teachers.  My mother was an elementary school teacher, and I attended nothing but public schools all the way through my MBA.  My personal appreciation for firemen goes back fourteen years, when a brigade of volunteer firemen in Medway, Ohio, saved my house from a fire that burned down most of my next door neighbor’s house. 

I moved my family from Ohio to Park Ridge almost ten years ago to take a job after my employer went out of business, owing me over ten thousand dollars in commissions that I was never able to collect.  Since then I have had three jobs, only one of which was in my chosen field, and I have been unemployed (“between jobs” ) a total of almost two of those ten years.  Because I make less in my current job than I made when I moved here, my wife has taken a part-time job despite our youngest child is still in D64 and could use a stay at home mom.  And my 401k, like many other people’s, has gone down from investment decline and from a withdrawal to get us past one of my unemployed periods.

But we aren’t complaing.  Unlike some other people we know, we are all still healthy, we still have a little equity in our home, and we probably look “normal” to anybody who doesn’t know about our check-to-check financial struggles.

The problem I have with the firefighters (and the teachers) demands stems from what they don’t have to do.  Almost none of them have to work a full year in the sense most of us in the private sector do.  None of them have to worry about their employer going bankrupt, closing down, or moving to another state or country or continent.  None of them have to worry about having their salaries reduced, or having to actually get results (make sales) to earn their paychecks.  None of them have to worry about managing their retirement fund so they might retire at 65 because none of them will have to wait that long to retire.

Maybe years ago firefighters (and teachers) were not treated as well as they should have been.  But that doesn’t justify the demands they are making today, in a terrible recession with a lot of people holding on by their fingernails.  As somebody pointed out, they can make even more extreme demands without any consequences because of the secret bargaining sessions that the public never hears about.  You compared the aldermen to the sheriff in Blazing Saddles, but I would compare the union’s attitude to Paulie’s in the movie Goodfellas, when he gets a piece of that tiki restaurant and drives the original owner bankrupt. “Business bad? F*** you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? F*** you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning, huh? F*** you, pay me.” 

I don’t care if the city gives the firefighters a three year contract if the compensation piece can be negotiated every year to adjust to economic conditions.  Who knows, maybe it could work to the firefighters’ benefit at some point?

I hope the aldermen will take up your invitation and explain why they gave in to a bad deal for the taxpayers.

Thank you.

To understand that the firefighters contract passed by the Park Ridge City Council Monday (Sept. 19) night is bad for the taxpayers, all one needs to do is read the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate’s article about it (“Park Ridge firefighters get contract but veto likely, “ Sept. 20). 

After reading that story twice, the only arguable benefit we can see the new 3-year contract providing for the City (and, hence, its taxpayers) appears to be that it saves the costs of negotiating a new contract every year – although that’s coming from the City’s labor attorney, Dina Kopernekas, who also trudged out the old reliable we’ve-always-done-it-that-way justification for another 3-year deal, while demonstrating her value-add by re-naming that alibi the City’s “historical norm.”

Actually, from the way the H-A story describes Monday night’s proceedings and quotes Ms. Kopernekas, one might think she was the union’s negotiator instead of the City’s. 

We don’t know how much Ms. Kopernekas’ services cost the City, but we sure wish the mayor or one of the six aldermen who voted to approve this latest exercise in bad public policy – Ald. Marty Maloney (7th) was absent, so his fingerprints aren’t on it, yet – would have asked her and/or the City negotiating team members (City Mgr. Jim Hock, Deputy City Mgr. Julianna Maller and Fire Chief Mike Zywanski) to itemize and explain each of the benefits the City is supposed to be getting from the “new” contract terms, and especially the no-layoff provision. 

That utterly foolish provision is straight out of the political playbook of Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn, which he employed last year in all its pandering squalor to lock in the re-election support of the state’s largest public employee union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (“AFSCME”).   Not surprisingly, however, the insipid Quinn now is trying to welsh on his no-layoff bet, recently announcing layoffs of approximately 2,000 AFSCME members while blaming state lawmakers for not appropriating enough money for him to make his political payoffs.  

But at least Quinn may have an escape clause: a state law that makes all state contracts “subject to appropriations.”

Does the City have one of those?  Not one of our elected officials gathered around The Horseshoe Monday night asked about it, and neither attorney Kopernekas nor the City’s negotiating team members mentioned it.  So we’re betting on “no.” 

Alds. Joe Sweeney (1st), Rich DiPietro (2nd), Jim Smith (3rd), Sal Raspanti (4th) and Tom Bernick (6th) also didn’t see the wisdom of either Ald. Dan Knight’s (5th) suggestion of only a 1 or 2 year contract, or Mayor Schmidt’s suggestion that any 3-year deal include a “wage re-opener” that would give the  City the right to re-negotiate just the compensation piece of the contract for that final year, to reflect whatever the economic conditions might be at that time.

Ironically, all six of the aldermen who approved this contract claim to be “fiscal conservatives” which, in light of their votes, may have further debased the meaning of that term.  And none of them, save for Bernick, gave much of an explanation for his vote, although Bernick’s explanation was uber-lame:  if the City didn’t approve the contract, the union could demand arbitration that would take the decision out of the City’s hands and cost the City even more legal fees.

That’s the kind of spineless attitude public officials employ to hold themselves hostage to shameless demands, whether from the public employee unions or the business community.  And it reminds us, in a pathetic rather than humorous way, of the scene in the movie “Blazing Saddles” where the black sheriff holds a gun to his own head and warns all the lily-white citizens of Rock Ridge, sotto voce: “Next man makes a move, the nigger gets it!”

Worse yet, by voting for the no-layoff provision, Bernick and his fellow aldermen actually gave away their primary weapon for dealing with an extreme award by a rogue/union-biased arbitrator: layoffs of union personnel to free up the money to pay the increased wages and benefits.  Neither he nor his colleagues seem to grasp Albert Einstein’s maxim: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”  

Which is even more amazing, considering that all six aldermen who voted “yes” on that contract could be characterized as “business people.” 

Do any of them have 3-year employment contracts?  Do any of them have guaranteed wages and guaranteed increases in those wages?  Do any of them have defined benefit retirement plans?  Do any of them have the Civil Service and contractual job protections they once again gave the firefighters?  Do any of them provide this array of benefits to their own employees or subordinates in the private sector?  We’re guessing “no.”

Fortunately, because Mayor Schmidt has indicated he will veto this contract, those six aldermen and Maloney will get another opportunity to vote on this issue.

So, in anticipation of that veto vote, we’re extending the following invitation to all of those aldermen:  Send us your explanations for your votes on the firefighters contract by 5:00 p.m. next Tuesday (Sept. 27) and we will publish them in their entirety (other than for any per se libelous content) as the featured text of next Wednesday’s post (and, if you prefer, also as comments to this post). 

Be forewarned, however, that we reserve the right to comment on your explanations, although that should not deter you if you truly believe your reasoning is sound.

Let’s hear from you guys!

To read or post comments, click on title.

Because there are some “hot” items on the agenda’s of both the Park Ridge City Council and Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 Board who are meeting TONIGHT, we’ve got our quick takes on a few of them for your consideration:

City Firefighters’ Contract: On tonight’s City Council agenda is approval of a new 3-year firefighters’ union contract.  As we’ve said before, we believe multi-year contracts that effectively try to predict future local and national economic conditions by locking-in increases in compensation and/or benefits are foolish; and across-the-board compensation increases not based on greater productivity or other merit are idiotic.   Worse yet, in a separate memorandum (“Appendix E”) attached to the proposed agreement, the City is being asked to give up its right to lay off any current firefighters for the three years the contract is in effect, until April 30, 2014.  That means that, should the economy take a turn for the worse during the next three years, the City will be contractually forbidden from laying off firefighters irrespective of its financial circumstances!

This is bad economics and bad government, but what can you expect from a contract that was negotiated in secret because the union requested secrecy, and City Mgr. Jim Hock and Fire Chief Mike Zywanski agreed to that secrecy without even consulting the mayor or the Council?  That secrecy in the negotiating process becomes even more troubling when you look at the red-lined version of the proposed contract on the City’s website and see a number of changes from the previous agreement, the reasons for most of which are not apparent on their face and are not explained anywhere in that document or otherwise.  That’s just more bad government by the bureaucrats (Hock, Zywanski, et al.) for a special interest (the firefighters’ union). 

Under these circumstances, any alderman who votes to approve such an irresponsible and anti-taxpayer agreement should have the decency to accompany his vote with either a public admission that he is not being fiscally responsible, and/or a public confession that he doesn’t even understand what being “fiscally responsible” means.

Washington Ave. Assisted-Living:  Also on the City Council’s agenda is another episode of “How the Group Homes Turns,” the continuing saga of developer Mark Elliott’s attempt to turn his bad investment in 3 single-home lots into three group homes, purportedly for “frail elderly…who can no longer live on their own without assistance from a care giver” according to Elliott’s most recent “Updated Application Statement” – even though Elliott insists that these homes are not “assisted living” facilities for purposes of City licensing and zoning.

It is becoming clearer as this saga continues that our Zoning Code, despite an extensive (and not inexpensive) re-write several years ago, is ill-equipped to deal directly and efficiently with issues such as are presented by this type of group home concept.  Which is why, if Elliott’s Updated Application Statement is factually accurate and truthful, it would appear that what he is trying to do with his property is lawful, albeit undesirable to many residents in that neighborhood who long have suffered from the anti-social behavior from residents of the adjacent Park Ridge Youth Campus.

What we need, at least for dealing with this current mess, is a formal and unequivocal legal opinion from the City Attorney stating whether the facts and the law support Elliott’s proposed use of his property or not.  If they do, then – like it or not – he has the right to do what he is trying to do with his own property; and he should be allowed to do so.  And then the City should get busy revising its Zoning Ordinance to correct what is looking more and more like the shoddy work product of our highly-paid zoning consultants (Camiros Ltd.) and the citizens who comprised our Zoning Re-Write Task Force.  

D-64 Budget Q & A: Over at Franklin School tonight, the Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 Board will hold its 2011-12 budget “Q & A” session, a week in advance of the planned approval of that budget next Monday night (Sept. 26).  Whether this Q & A session is legitimate or just a perfunctory attempt to create the illusion of transparency and accountability in the budget process remains to be seen.  But, given its 6:00 p.m. start time before many residents are even home from work, much less able to grab a quick bite to eat and head back out the door, we have our doubts.

Of course, the 93-page draft budget is a pretty impenetrable document, even to accountants and attorneys trained and accustomed to dealing with such financial matters; and it lacks detailed explanations of all of the differences between the 2010-11 revenues and expenses versus those in the 2011-12 proposed budget .  So exactly what kind of Qs might be asked from whoever shows up remains to be seen.  But one question that comes to mind is: What specific expenses have gone up over last year (and by how much) so that an almost  $6 million decrease in proposed “Capital Outlay” still leaves only a $2 million reduction in overall budgeted expenses? 

But if you have any questions about the proposed budget, you had better get there on time.  Because once the Board and Administration are done with any pesky questions from the taxpayers, they will be running into closed session to plan how they’re going to give away more of our money when they “negotiate” the District’s upcoming collective bargaining agreement with the teachers union – despite the appearance that the proposed budget already will be giving those teachers more than $3.2 million in salary and benefit increases during the coming budget year.  And, must we remind you, that’s for only 8-9 months of actual work?

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Perhaps one of these days the City and D-64 will put on their inter-governmental cooperation hats and agree to schedule their meetings so that they both don’t hold them on Mondays, thereby forcing interested taxpayers to have to choose which one to attend.  But we’re not going to hold our collective breath waiting for the D-64 Board to voluntarily do anything that might add to its transparency and accountability.

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If you are a responsible homeowner, chances are you have a reasonably good idea of the condition of your house, especially if you have lived in it for awhile.

You know, for example, approximately how old your roof is and whether it’s leaking or not.  You pretty much know whether your furnace is on its last legs, and whether your air conditioner should make it through another summer.  And if your windows need replacement because they’re still single-pane and the wind blowing through the sash tickles the curtains. 

Given the knowledge the ordinary homeowner has about the house he/she owns, the comment Park Ridge-Niles School Dist.64 president John Heyde made at this past Monday night ‘s (Sept. 12) meeting about the condition of the District’s buildings was, in a word, stunning.

As reported in a Park Ridge Herald-Advocate story by Tracy Gruen (“District 64 consultant to finish building needs study half-year early,” Sept. 13), during a “Roles, Goals and Controls” workshop run by representatives of D-64’s new architect-of-record, Fanning Howey Associates (“FHA”), Mr. Heyde – in response to ongoing demands by Carpenter and Field school parents for air conditioning at those schools – explained his board’s refusal to put A/C at the top of the project priority list:

“I don’t want to advance those projects to the front of the line only to find out there’s a roof that’s going to collapse somewhere.”

We’re going to give Mr. Heyde a couple of hyperbole points, if only because even we can’t quite force ourselves to believe such a Chicken Little comment was entirely serious.  

But unless it was utter nonsense, the thought that all those well-paid administrators and the seven people whom we’ve elected to be stewards of this community’s elementary education – which includes the condition of all the District’s school buildings – might not know with reasonable certainty the condition of those structures is troubling.  And even the merest suspicion that a dangerous condition might exist is just plain irresponsible.

We’ve been critical of D-64’s board and administration for figuratively fiddling while the District’s standardized test scores and other objective measures of achievement burn.  And we’ve been critical of the overcompensation of the District’s teachers and administrators, given the money the District spends on what appears by objective measures to be mediocre student achievement, despite all the subjective accolades and back-patting in which the District specializes. 

The science and art of educating children, however, is a far more complex endeavor than simply keeping tabs on the condition of buildings.  So we have to wonder just how clueless or outright negligent those administrators and school board members have been about repair and maintenance of those buildings over the past 5-10 years that Mr. Heyde might even think about something like a roof collapse? 

During that entire time period the District’s architect-of-record was the supposedly well-regarded Green Associates, which was brought in back in 1996 to help then-Supt. Fred Schroeder stampede gullible voters into replacing what was then the District’s newest school building, the “old” Emerson Junior High, with the “new” Emerson Middle Schoo; and to adopt the then-newly fashionable middle-school model of elementary education.  Almost 15 years later, neither that building nor that model appears to have measurably improved the quality of education, despite the $20 million-plus it cost the taxpayers.  

So why wasn’t the District using Green Associates’ services to keep abreast of the condition of all its facilities during that time?  Could it be that the board and the administration didn’t want to know about any facilities issues that might demand the expenditure of funds those school officials preferred spending on other things?

As we wrote in our post “D-64 Board Stealthily Picks Architect Of Record” (05.13.11), FHA seems to have been brought in as much for its referendum-facilitating expertise as for its architecture and engineering ability – not unlike Green Associates 15 years ago.  And from the looks and sounds of things so far, that’s exactly the direction in which this particular train is heading, with Heyde talking about roof collapses; his right-hand man, board vice-president Scott Zimmerman, claiming he wants to “understand the use of real estate across the district”; and FHA promoting the need to create “21^st century spaces” for students. 

As the notorious Illinois Secretary of State Paul Powell used to say, gleefully: “I can smell the meat a-cookin’.”

So can we, and it smells like a major (and expensive) facility repair, maintenance and renovation “master plan” that will be pushed with a crisis-like sense of urgency – but not until that “master plan” is presented in June 2013.  And those of you who have been paying attention might notice that June 2013 just happens to be about a year after the taxpayers’ representatives (chortle, chortle) on the school board will have conspired with the former teachers union members/now administrators to give the teachers another expectedly-sweet new multi-year contract.

Isn’t that an interesting coincidence?

Tonight begins Park Ridge-Niles School District 64’s two-week sprint towards adoption of a new budget.  And, in typical District 64 fashion, the average taxpayer/voter is once again being treated like a mushroom: kept in the dark and covered with manure.

The most notable example is that, as of 7:00 a.m. this morning, D-64 still had not posted on its website any “reports” for tonight’s planned 3 hour-plus meeting to be held in the Emerson Middle School multi-purpose room.   By keeping the meeting materials un-posted until the day of the meeting, the Board and administration ensures that most residents won’t have any meaningful time to review whatever materials the District may end up posting later today.   Which is exactly the way this Board – and its predecessor boards, for that matter – seems to like it.

(Contrast that with the City of Park Ridge, whose materials for tonight’s meeting were posted last Friday.)

We say “3 hour-plus meeting” because the first 3 hours of the evening (from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m.) will be dedicated to a catchy-sounding “Roles, Goals and Controls” workshop, followed by a “Final Budget Presentation” starting at 9:00 p.m.  For those who don’t yet understand D-64’s management tricks, these kinds of “workshops” are usually propaganda sessions – which would explain why the Board has scheduled this one for when any attendees are still wide awake, and puts off the real meat-and-potatoes part of the evening to when attendees either are heading for the exits or fatigued and half-asleep.  

We can’t even begin to imagine what kind of heifer-dust will be spread over the audience by the District’s new architect-of-record, who it appears will be in charge of the session designed to: (a) “expand community understanding of the [the District’s]master plan process” for maintaining, improving and/or increasing the District’s buildings and facilities (“D64 Plans Several Budget Meetings Next Month,” Journal, 8/31/11); and (b) explain “how plans for the future needs of our school buildings will be developed” (“District 64 board to talk finances, facilities at trio of meetings,” H-A, 9/8/11). 

But those hardy folks who can shovel their way through the opening 3 hours of shinola, or who choose to forego the propaganda and arrive bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for the 9:00 p.m. session, may likely find themselves watching the Board tap-dance around some less-than-wonderful information in the proposed 2011-12 budget.

According to the proposed budget’s “Comparison of Expenditures by Objects,” salaries, which represent 74.8% of the Education Fund balance, are expected to increase by 5.5%, or over $2.1 million – which appears to be the product of a 2.5% overall increase (per the terms of the teachers’ 3-year contract) plus additional teachers’ “step” (and “lane”?) increases.   Meanwhile, the benefits component of that same Education Fund’s expenditures is expected to increase 24.2%, or $1,153,668. 

If those one-year numbers aren’t sweet enough, those increases beginning with the 2008-09 budget year are $7,010,364 in salaries (a whopping 20.43% over 2008-09) and $1,392,672 in benefits (an even more whopping 30.74%). 

And that’s during the worst economic period since The Great Depression!

To help pay for these increases, the “Comparison of Revenues by Objects” projects property taxes rising by 4.4%, or $2,490,56, although total revenues for the new budget year are projected as decreasing $5,521,328 to reflect an even larger decrease in federal aid. 

Interestingly, the District’s projected total expenditures are down by $2,148,333 from 2010-11: from $72,663,447 to $70,485,114. 

Normally, we would applaud such a cut.  This one, however, appears to an illusion because it looks to be the result of an almost $6 million decrease in “Capital Outlay” – from the almost $9 million of “actual” capital expenditures that occurred in 2010-11 to to a shade under $3 million – even as the District is again refusing to budget for the heating and cooling needs of Carpenter and Field schools.

Can you say “Fun with numbers”? 

Given what we already have heard about the suspect condition of at least some of the District’s buildings and facilities, this looks and sounds almost like conscious neglect – which is one tactic for creating the kinds of crises conditions that are optimal for stampeding voters into more tax increases and/or bond issues.  And more revenue for the new architect of record, of course.

The 93-page proposed budget (updated as of 9/12/11), with all its schedules and numbers, sure is a lot for the taxpayers to comprehend (or even meaningfully inquire about) over the next 7 days until the District’s “final” budget Q-and-A on September 19; and over the next 14 days until the official “public hearing” on the budget and planned Board vote to adopt it on September 26.

One of the legendary labors of the mythical Hercules was his shoveling out the Augean Stables.  With no Hercules to clean up the mess that is D-64’s budget, however, that task is left to the mere mortals who pay one-third of their property taxes to the District.  And, historically, they have not been up to the task – which is why the cost of D-64’s schools keeps going up while its measurable academic achievements don’t. 

That means more shovelers are needed.  With bigger shovels.

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