Right before Wednesday night’s City Council meeting, Mayor Dave Schmidt gave what is believed to be the first-ever mayoral “State of the City” address.  The picture he presented was not pretty.

As he promised, Schmidt didn’t mince words.  He stated that we have been “misled for years about [the City’s] financial health” and that “the budget process has been a shell game.”

That comes as no surprise to anyone who observed former city manager Tim Schuenke produce a “balanced” budget by seemingly fabricating whatever revenue numbers were needed to equal expenses.  And it explains why the City posted deficits when reality inevitably intruded on Schuenke’s fantasies. 

The departed Schuenke may have been deceptive, but the City’s current financial mess required him to have accomplices: our mayors and aldermen, who provided us with only one non-deficit fiscal year during the past decade – in 2006-07 but, even then, only with the help of the one-time $6 million+ sale of the City property on which the Uptown development now sits.

Current City Manager Jim Hock didn’t distinguish himself with his first budget, which he pronounced as “balanced” even as it dripped $2 million of red ink.  Since then, Hock has ignored Schmidt’s call for the expedited production of a decent discussion-draft budget to start the process earlier and avoid the last-minute scrambling of years past, making himself more problem than solution.

Perhaps that’s because Hock basically serves at the pleasure of the City Council, not the mayor.  Which means that his continued employment depends upon keeping the Council, not the major, happy.  And this Council, with the exception of newcomer Joe Sweeney (1st Ward), seems happiest when budgets are in deficit and spending remains un-examined and unquestioned.

But the most significant line in Schmidt’s address Wednesday night was one he repeated twice for emphasis: “Everything except essential City services must be on the table” and subject to being cut in order to avoid bigger tax hikes.

It’s about time somebody in government – at the federal, state, county, or local levels – had the courage to say that.

Let’s face it, folks…government has grown in size and expense not so much because of increases in the cost of “essential” services, but because of all the non-essential amenities and frills that the special interests and their pandering politician allies have layered on over the years – almost all of which are so non-essential and cost-ineffective that the private sector won’t even touch them (for example, outdoor water parks in Northern Illinois).

That’s why we applauded Schmidt’s prior call for the implementation of zero-based budgeting (“ZBB”) that would force every City department to wipe the slate clean and justify each and every function and task it performs in order to warrant its appropriation of tax dollars.  But Hock and City bureaucrats rejected ZBB; and the Council – despite some disingenuous lip-service by Alds. Don Bach (3rd Ward) and Tom Carey (6th Ward) that is belied by their voting records – has done nothing to move ZBB forward.

Schmidt’s address Wednesday night sounded the alarm, and it also provided some practical suggestions for turning around the City’s irresponsible budgeting and spending practices.  Unfortunately, a majority of the Council is comprised of Schmidt’s political opponents who seem indifferent, if not outright obstructionist, to any of the fiscal reforms the mayor has proposed. 

Which is why we predict his address will be met, if at all, not with competing ideas from the alder-dwarfs but by petty personal criticisms of the mayor and his “confrontational” style of leadership.

But that comes with the territory when one speaks truth to The People…and the opposition has no ideas of its own.

Monday night the District 207 Board of Education unanimously said “No” to the Maine Teachers Association, a/k/a the teachers union, when it voted to go ahead with its plan to cut 137 jobs, including 75 teaching jobs.

That was the fiscally responsible decision, and we applaud it – even though Board member Eric Leys was visibly uncomfortable bucking the teachers, and Board member Sean Sullivan sent yet another clear signal of the Board’s pliability when he noted that this decision could be rescinded later this month if there were “negotiations.”

For those of you who haven’t been paying attention to the fiscal buffoonery of our local governments – especially our two school boards – over the past couple of decades, Sullivan’s comments mean that the Board is eager to roll over and dip into the District’s reserves in response to virtually any “concession” the teachers union might offer.

That’s because the management tradition of both the District 207 Board and the District 64 Board (members of whom are hand-picked by the District 64 & District 207 School Caucus, then rubber stamped by the voters in uncontested elections) is one of weakness and fuzzy thinking, when they think at all.  So it’s easy for them to ignore the fact that the teachers (especially the more senior ones) and most of the administrators are already overcompensated, thanks to years of mindless giveaways by teachers in “administrator” clothing and go-along-to-get-along board members.

Want proof of the weakness and fuzzy thinking? 

Just look at the “compromise” District 207 has already offered the union.  Despite saying how important it was not to dip further into the District’s reserve fund, the Board nevertheless offered to do just that – in an unspecified amount – if the union would agree to lower the pay increases that the Board foolishly gave away in the last contract negotiation, and also agree to a one-year freeze on the cost-of-living increase.

In other words, because the District 207 Board previously gave away the store, it is now begging the teachers to return a can of corn.

That’s just plain spineless, and it explains why the union responded so shamelessly, with union president Emma Visee promptly demanding that the District throw its “compromise” money (from the reserve fund) into the pot, irrespective of whether the union agrees to any concessions.

“If you have identified $2 million you can spend for the students, then do so,” said Visee.

Give a mouse a cookie, and he’ll want a glass of milk. 

Except in the case of the teachers union, the mouse is more of a gorilla.  And as we’ve seen time and time again, it’s not going to settle for just a glass of milk.

So kudos for now, District 207 Board. But we’re still sticking with our prediction that you will sell out the taxpayers, once again, before this is over.

One of our favorite quotes, often attributed to Julian Bond, is: “In a contest between the shameless and the spineless, the shameless always win.”  And nowhere does that seem to be proved more frequently than in local government, where bumbling bureaucrats and feckless elected officials combine to mismanage our institutions and our tax dollars.

Tonight at 7:00 p.m., the District 207 School Board will be meeting at the Maine South H.S. auditorium to discuss what is looking like the latest spineless maneuver by the Board to appease its lord and master: the Maine Teachers Association, a/k/a, the teachers’ union.

As we reported in the 1/30/10 Update to our 1/26/10 post, “When The Inmates Run The Asylum,” District 207 is now planning to dip into its reserves when, just a couple of weeks ago, it was saying that it could not prudently do so.  That kind of flip flop reminds us of the classic courtroom cross examination question: “Are you lying now, or were you lying then?”

But with teachers playing administrators/businesspersons, and elected officials playing politicians, lying and ignorant incompetence are hard to separate.

Whether the District 207 Board and administration is lying, incompetent or just plain gutless, however, is beside the point: The teachers’ union is shameless, and has been so for at least the past decade.  That’s why teachers are getting paid sizeable annual salaries for only 2/3 or 3/4 of an actual work year, depending on how you count and consider vacation days, holidays, sick days, paid leave days, teacher institute (snicker) days, etc.

And they continue to receive something so wonderful, and so costly, that it has become virtually extinct in the real, private-sector world in which most of us toil: the defined benefit pension.  And let’s not forget tenure, and a job which has positively no chance of being relocated to another state or country.

Fed up with teachers’ union greed?  One of our readers, Kenneth Butterly, is.  And he sent us a copy of his letter [pdf] to District 207 and the case study [pdf] he refers to in his letter, along with the permission to publish both of them. 

Just to show we’re not unfair, however, we are also providing the MTA’s “Myth vs. Reality” propaganda sheet [pdf], which we obtained from its website and which focuses primarily on criticizing bad budgeting, accounting and management by the District’s administration and Board. 

We can’t disagree with that.  But that alone doesn’t mean the teachers aren’t greedy and unreasonable, especially when the District’s mismanagement consists in no small measure of constantly caving in to the teachers’ demands. 

Tonight we will see whether the School Board has a spine of steel or of mush. 

We hope we’re wrong, but we’re betting on the latter.  Because we know that, once again, the teachers union will be shameless.

Faux fiscal conservative Ald. Frank Wsol (7th Ward) continues to lead the fight to keep Park Ridge water usage rates artificially (and irresponsibly) low by refusing to pass through to water users the full cost the City pays for the water it buys from the City of Chicago.  Wsol wants property taxpayers to continue subsidizing water users, an unsound policy even if judged solely (no pun intended) on economic grounds.

But where it becomes borderline insane is when you actually realize who are the primary beneficiaries of this manipulation of water economics: the City’s Top Ten biggest water users [pdf].

Which means that under Wsol’s subsidy plan, all you senior citizens, all you middle-aged empty nesters, all you single-person households, and all you water conservationists continue to pay a portion of your property taxes so that Lutheran General Hospital, the Park Ridge Park District, School Districts 207 and 64, and Resurrection Nursing Home don’t have to pay the full cost of all the water they use. 

And guess what’s even worse, folks?  Those five entities don’t pay property taxes!

At this past Monday night’s City Council meeting, Wsol smugly questioned whether any previous City Council (including the ones that Wsol has been sitting on since 2005 and which have produced deficit budgets every year except one) “[has] voted on how much of a surplus we should accumulate in the water fund of taxpayer money?” – knowing full well it had not. 

But even if that’s the case, so what, Frankie? 

That question is about as worthless as Ald. Robert Ryan’s customary “What do other municipalities do?” whenever he’s confronted by an issue which brings that quizzical-to-blank expression to his face signaling the same condition as the flashing “vacancy” sign in front of a cheap motel.  Let’s get this straight once and for all: what other municipalities’ collections of plodding bureaucrats and rubber-stamp elected officials do has yet to be proved the “magic bullet” of fiscally-responsible municipal governance. 

While Wsol actually gets something right when he notes that the water fund, an “enterprise” fund which exists to provide a defined payment source for water, currently has an approximately $3 million surplus, that observation deserves another “So what?”  Suggesting that a water fund surplus provides a good reason for not charging water users the full cost of that water is an apples-to-oranges analysis, and one that’s intellectually dishonest to boot.

It also disregards the fact, as reported by former City Finance Director Diane Lembesis on a couple of occasions within the past year, that cash from the water fund has been needed to cover the City’s payroll, thereby saving the City from incurring the cost of having to borrow that money from outside sources.  So depleting the already-dwindling water fund surplus is bad management on yet another level.

Unfortunately, Wsol is not alone in this folly.  Ald. Don Bach (3rd Ward) is so clueless he actually attempted to justify his opposition to full-cost water rates by stating that he “would not like to see the average 65-year-old homeowner have to pay a couple more cents a gallon.”  Hey, Don…wake up!  That’s what’s already happening, except that your average 65-year-old homeowner is also helping pay for the water being used by the likes of Lutheran General, the Park Ridge Country Club, and even Dominick’s. 

At this point, only Mayor Dave Schmidt seems to “get it.”  And he’s not even entitled to vote on the budget, barring the unlikely event of a Council deadlock over its approval.

Try as we might, we can’t see even one good reason why all Park Ridge water users should not pay the full cost to the City of the water they use, or why anybody’s water usage should be subsidized by the City’s property taxpayers.  Such a policy is both penny and pound foolish, with not an ounce of wisdom to be found.

Maybe it’s because we live in the State of Corruption, County of Crook that when we see something as ridiculous as Wsol’s and Bach’s water subsidy, we find ourselves asking whether the motive behind it is stupid or just plain crooked.  

And, in this case, we also find ourselves asking: “Just whose water are you carrying, Ald. Wsol?”

If you’re one of the thousands of District 207 taxpayers who don’t have any children currently enrolled in, or soon to be enrolled in, one of the District’s high schools, you probably didn’t attend last Wednesday’s budget meeting at Maine East H.S.  That’s because those kinds of meetings aren’t made for you.

They’re made for demonstrations like the one the tearful students staged to save the jobs of approximately 75 non-tenured teachers who may be cut from the payroll to help fill what is looking more and more like a $19 million hole in the District’s 2010-11 budget.  

Never mind that such a “spontaneous” outpouring of student sentiment appears to have been orchestrated by the teachers’ union – it’s still great theater.  And great theater provides an easy “human interest” story for a superficial news media, which explains why the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate devoted an entire story to reporting student comments (“District 207: ‘We are a family here to fight against you’”) in addition to featuring student comments in its only other story on the meeting (“District 207 board hears impassioned pleas to spare teachers’ jobs”).

After all, why should our local papers struggle to analyze tough issues – like why so many individual teachers are making more than the annual Park Ridge median household income despite working only 8 months a year in jobs that can’t be outsourced or relocated, with pensions and benefits better than what are enjoyed by most of the folks paying their salaries – when its reporters can interview a few teenagers and write a warm-and-fuzzy about losing their favorite teachers or coaches because other teachers wouldn’t forego their raises this year?   

Those meetings are also made for the parents of those tearful students to show up and complain that they pay taxes and, consequently, their children deserve every educational benefit imaginable no matter what the cost – and no matter that their annual tax payments to District 207 barely make a dent in the actual cost of educating just one of their children.

After all, as Maine East science teacher Dana Nixon stated at the meeting: “A quality education is more than reading, writing and arithmetic.”  Indeed it is, which is why teachers and administrators can make a case for including Mandarin Chinese, fencing, cloisonné, field trips to Machu Pichu and even embalming among the offerings of a “complete” high school curriculum.

And those meetings are made for the school administrators to put on their concerned faces and act like they know what they’re doing, even though all of them are former teachers’ union members who retain the union entitlement mindset and who lack the formal business education or experience needed to run a successful card-table lemonade stand, much less the $100+ million a year business that is District 207.

The bottom line is that, if you are the average District 207 taxpayer, there are only two things standing between you and District 207’s (and District 64’s) pillaging of your pocketbook: tax caps and your elected members school board members.

The District 207 board members may be fine people, but what proven business education or experience do they have to act as directors of a $100+ million business, especially when they are overseeing a CEO (a/k/a, the superintendant) and operations officers (a/k/a, staff) who themselves are functionally clueless when it comes to business theory and strategy? 

According to the District 207 website, three of those board members (Margaret McGrath, Edward Mueller and Sean Sullivan) are attorneys, the last of whom is also the vice-president of business affairs (whatever that entails) at Triton College; two of them (Eldon Burk and Donna Pellar) are retired teachers, one of whom (Pellar) has a masters degree in “School Administration” (whatever that entails); one of them (Joann Braam) has a masters degree in social science; and one of them (Eric Leys) doesn’t even list any college education or an occupation. 

That’s it.  No MBAs and no demonstrated private sector experience running even a small business.  Just a bunch of business-“blind” union-sympathizing teacher/administrators leading a bunch of business-“blind” school board members.  No wonder the teachers’ union runs things…and why teachers’ raises appear to be outpacing the rate of inflation even during a recession.

So don’t be surprised if all those non-business types running District 207 come up with a “solution” that will involve dipping into the District’s reserves and further jeopardizing its long-term financial future for a quick and easy “fix” today.

When will this insanity stop? 

Not until somebody stops the inmates from running the asylum.

Update 1/30/10.  According to a statement issued by the District 207 administration, it is proposing a plan to “save” 40-45 of the approx. 75 teaching jobs scheduled to be cut – by…wait for it…”‘tap[ping] deeper into its fund balance reserve and commit[ting] up to an additional $2 million in deficit spending’ over the next two fiscal years.” (“New offer by District 207 could spare 45 teachers,” Jan. 29) 

We’d like to take a bow for calling that shot but, after years of watching shameless teachers’ unions and spineless/clueless school administrations, that kind of prediction is like shooting fish in a barrel. 

And, not surprisingly for spineless school administrators and their clueless school board overseers, the District 207 statement does not say just how deeply it will be dipping into those reserves, even as it disclosed that the teachers would still be receiving their “step” pay increases and their 3.5% cost-of-living increase (which appears to triple-plus the actual increase in the cost of living!) for the upcoming school year – in return for giving up only their 3.2% COLA the following year. 

Looks like yet another tower of jello negotiation strategy by District 207. 

We did get a kick, however, out of Supt. Ken Wallace’s mealy-mouthed, public relations propaganda statement touting this proposal:

“While this doesn’t solve our financial situation, it buys us some time to do long-term planning with various stakeholders to be in better position ourselves to deal with these difficult economic times going forward.  In light of the difficult economic times that our communities are experiencing, we hope this proposal is a win-win.”

Yes, Ken…a “win-win” for the teachers’ union, as in: “Heads the teachers’ union wins, tails the taxpayers lose.”

Brilliant!

Recently we had some kind words for the District 207 teachers when it sounded as if they were going to hold the District to its contract but kick back enough of their pay increases to save the jobs of their non-tenured teachers union members who were otherwise going to be chopped to help the District fill the gaping $19 million budget hole for the coming year.

Well, the teachers union sure fooled us.

Wednesday night at Maine East High School, union brotherhood/sisterhood went the way of common sense, fiscal responsibility and basic altruism, as union officials and tenured teachers demanded that the District draw down its reserve fund in order to keep everybody – except the taxpayers – fully employed, properly enriched and reasonably happy. 

In the process, the teachers union and its supporters appear to have callously exploited their well-meaning but naïve students, who we understand were “encouraged” to attend the meeting and voice their opposition to the District’s belated recognition of fiscal reality.  After all, it’s common knowledge that weeping teenagers are even better than puppies and kittens for tugging at heartstrings and interfering with clear-headed thinking.

Just because the union and its backers were shameless, however, doesn’t mean that that the District’s board didn’t show it could be spineless.

To the contrary, Board president Ed Mueller sounded like a typical politician when he seemingly blamed every external force except the Haitian earthquake for the District’s deficit, while making sure that not a hint of blame or accountability fell on him or his board.  Amazingly enough, after blaming tax caps for contributing to the District’s revenue shortfalls, Mueller bizarrely announced that the board has ruled out any referendum to exceed the tax caps – a position supported by Supt. Ken Wallace, who said it would “not be responsible” to ask the taxpayers to vote to bail out the district.

In other words, folks, what they’re telling us is that, if not for those darn tax caps, they could have gone ahead and raised our taxes to fill the budget hole without having to get our permission via referendum and without having to cut anything. 

That sounds like Exhibit A to the case for why we need tax caps!

But if revenues really are such a problem, why not at least ask the voters if they want to lift the caps to send more bucks to District 207 – before it turns into a real crisis, like the one District 64’s board caused during the first half of the last decade, when it foolishly refused to go to referendum until its finances were so shaky that the State Board of Education was reportedly considering taking over their management? 

Are Mueller and Wallace afraid a huge “no” vote might seem too much like a referendum on the board’s stewardship of District 207?  Is the teachers union afraid such a vote might be perceived as an indictment of the teachers’ greed?  Or are both sides afraid that such a vote might make it more difficult for them to tap into those District 207 reserves, which we’re still betting will end up being the dirty little deal that gets done before the final curtain falls on this particular drama.

One voice of reason did stand out above the grumbling and caterwauling, however.  Mike Bender, a Maine East teacher and softball coach who is on the chopping block, publicly asked his union to reopen negotiations with the District.  

We know virtually nothing about Mr. Bender, but he gets a Watchdog bark-out for having the courage to make such a request, albeit self-serving, in what he had to know was a hostile forum.  Not surprisingly, his request was openly mocked by his union brethren (and sistren?), who already had shown that they have no reservations about “playing chicken” with the District over the jobs of non-tenured teachers like Bender, or the long-term financial soundness of the District.  

Bender will be lucky if mockery is the only consequence of his speaking truth to power.  That’s because when it comes to our public schools, the teachers unions hold all the power.  And when it comes to their wallets, they have no use for truth.  

Monday night the Park Ridge City Council ended its 7-month flirtation with billboards, at least for the time being, when Ald. Jim “Billboards” Allegretti led the effort to deprive Park Ridge residents of a final Council vote on whether or not to uphold the 9-0 decision of the City’s Planning & Zoning Commission (“P&Z”) against permitting billboards in Park Ridge.

After shamelessly serving as chief Council lackey for Joseph Loss’ Generation Group, Inc. (“GGI”) in its effort to get permits for four billboards at Renaissance Office Plaza by using the City as its unofficial agent, Allegretti took the coward’s way out: with the help of Alds. Don Bach, Tom Carey and Robert Ryan, he successfully substituted his motion to withdraw the City’s zoning change application for the pending tactical motion of Ald. Joe Sweeney to overturn the P&Z ruling. 

Sweeney’s motion was “tactical” because it would have required a supermajority of six votes, something Sweeney’s and Ald. Rich DiPietro’s expected “no” votes would have prevented.   

What Allegretti has up his sleeve with this latest ploy isn’t immediately clear, but with a little luck we won’t have to watch City government waste further time and effort on a billboards proposal that, even if it had been approved by P&Z or the Council, likely could have generated only a tiny fraction of the revenues Allegretti (and GGI) were promising.
 
The upshot of all this? 

Seven months of wasted time and attention by the Council, City Staff and the public on an initiative that didn’t deserve to get off the ground – and probably wouldn’t have, if not for the votes of Ryan and Ald. Frank Wsol at the August 17, 2009, Council meeting in support of Allegretti’s motion to make the City, rather than GGI, the zoning change applicant. 

With Bach and Carey absent that night, Ryan’s and Wsol’s votes were all Allegretti needed to overcome the opposition of Sweeney and DiPietro.  And once that happened, the unproductive chain of events that followed was set in motion.

The minutes of the August 17 meeting (sanitized for your protection by the City Clerk, as usual) say only that Allegretti “believes this case was important enough to allow the Council to have the final word” that it wouldn’t get if GGI were the applicant and P&Z denied its application; and there’s no mention of Ryan or Wsol speaking on the motion before voting to approve it.

Try as we might, however, we can’t think of one good “public policy” reason why this case was so “important” that the City had to carry the water for GGI.  Or why the Council needed to have “the final word” on it.  

Although it’s easy to think of several kinky reasons why Allegretti so shamelessly pushed the GGI agenda, we have to wonder what Ryan and Wsol could have been thinking when they signed onto Allegretti’s special deal for GGI.
 
So we pose the following question for Messrs. Ryan and Wsol:  Why did you vote to make the City the appllicant for the zoning ordinance amendments to permit billboards, especially where doing so allowed GGI to avoid the disclosure requirements of the City’s ethics ordinance that are designed to combat kinky deals? 

Gentlemen, feel free to submit your explanation(s) as comments to this post – we promise to publish them.  

Meanwhile, since we don’t really expect Ryan or Wsol to take us up on our offer, we invite our rank-and-file readers to offer their own explanations.

For any of you who were foolish enough to have expected billboard advocate/faux fiscal conservative Frank DiFranco to actually show up at last Saturday’s (Jan. 16) City Council budget workshop for the purpose of learning something about City finances, he didn’t. 

Yawn.

But the more interesting question will be whether DiFranco, or his law partner and fellow billboard advocate/faux fiscal conservative Jeff Wilson, or Generation Group, Inc. (“GGI”) attorney and consummate Park Ridge insider, Jack Owens, shows up at tonight’s City Council meeting, seeing as this might be GGI’s last stand.

That’s because City Attorney Everette M. “Buzz” Hill has now provided the Council with a formal opinion letter [pdf] stating that the “fee by agreement” GGI is offering the City appears to be unlawful and unenforceable either as an excessive impact or license fee (because it is disproportionate to the City’s cost of regulating the billboards), or as invalid “contract zoning.”  

And if that’s not bad enough for DiFranco and No. 1 billboards Alderlackey Jim Allegretti (4th Ward), Hill also has tendered an opinion letter [pdf] confirming Mayor Dave Schmidt’s ruling from the chair at the December 21, 2009, Council meeting that a supermajority of six votes will be needed for the Council to over-rule the decision of the Planning & Zoning Commission (“P&Z”) rejecting the City’s application for the zoning code text amendments necessary to permit the  billboards GGI seeks. 

As you may recall, the City – rather than GGI or the owner of the Renaissance office plaza property where the signs would go – became the applicant when Allegretti and Alds. Robert Ryan (5th Ward) and Frank Wsol (7th Ward) outvoted Alds. Joe Sweeney (1st Ward) and Rich DiPietro (2nd Ward) on that issue last summer.  So if a supermajority vote is required to trump P&Z’s decision, even the addition of Alds. Don Bach (3rd Ward) and Tom Carey (6th Ward) to the pro-billboards forces would not provide the six votes needed – assuming DiPietro and Ryan hang tough, and Mayor Schmidt keeps his word about voting “No.” 

But it could still be a lively discussion, given Allegretti’s mini-tirade at the December 21, 2009, Council meeting against the supermajority vote and the erroneous advice he claims to have received from the then-absent Hill.  As a result, the vote on the issue was deferred to tonight’s meeting. 

But if we’re lucky, when the smoke clears tonight we should be done with this ridiculous and malodorous billboard scheme that would be shameful, if only its proponents weren’t totally shameless.

And with this sideshow out of the way, the Council can start to focus on coming up with some real reforms to the way it has been mismanaging our tax dollars for the better part of the past decade.

As we noted in Wednesday’s post, tomorrow morning from 9:00 a.m. to noon the City Council will be holding its first “budget workshop” for the 2010-11 budget year. 

Although Mayor Dave Schmidt was instrumental in changing the customary “workshop” practice to permit citizen comment, if citizens don’t show up and speak their minds about how the City takes and spends our tax dollars we’re likely to get another year of business as usual – which, in the City’s case, means multi-million dollar deficits and insufficient funds to maintain the City’s infrastructure and essential services.

We can’t wait to see whether Frank DiFranco shows up to actually learn something about City finances to go with his simplistic, one-note “We need billboards” refrain.  If so, that would appear to be a first, as we don’t recall Frankie D ever publicly expressing any prior interest in the City’s finances, even as the City spent most of the past decade posting multi-million dollar operating deficits while at the same time depleting fund balances and running up more multi-millions in bonded debt. 

In fact, Frankie D’s only only involvement with City government our research disclosed is as a $2,100 contributor to Howard P. Frimark’s first mayoral campaign, and as the attorney defending Norwood Builders’ Bruce Adreani against charges he had a “Monica Lewinsky” moment with a temporary waitress in the Park Ridge Country Club’s men’s locker room in July 2007. 

But now he’s writing to the Herald-Advocate about how “[o]ur taxes are going up. City services are being cut. Police raises are not being paid even though the city was contractually obligated to pay them.”

Good points all, which is why it’s up to the average citizen to start letting it be known, in no uncertain terms, that the City’s business-as-usual financial mismanagement will no longer be tolerated. 

So will we see you at City Hall tomorrow morning, Franki D?

How about the rest of you Park Ridge taxpayers? 

The Park Ridge Herald-Advocate has just published its “wish list” for the City of Park Ridge (“Editorial: Greatest wish for 2010? Forget about past decade,” Jan. 11) that contains one “wish” we wholeheartedly endorse:

• aldermen educating themselves on municipal finance and the city’s budget situation. Since taking office nearly three years ago, more than one elected official has admitted to having limited knowledge of municipal finance. Such decision-making is one of the most important of aldermanic responsibilities and should be treated accordingly.

The H-A apparently didn’t believe its readers deserved to know the names of each of those elected officials who have admitted that they can’t (or just don’t want to do the work necessary to) figure out how City finances work to the extent necessary to cast an informed vote on budget matters.

But one of that hapless group is Ald. Robert Ryan (5th Ward), who admitted his fiscal ineptitude at the Council’s December 7, 2009, meeting.  Ryan’s solution to this particular shortcoming, however, wasn’t to promise to hit the books and educate himself, or to demand that City Staff provide financial reports and explanations that Ryan and everybody else, including the average resident, can understand.  Instead, he suggested the formation of another citizens task force – this time for the purpose of advising the Council on financial matters.

Brilliant!  Let appointed residents effectively make decisions for those public officials who were elected to make those decisions for us.

When Ryan – reportedly with the encouragement of then-mayor Howard Frimark – chose to run for alderman back in 2007, didn’t somebody tell him that perhaps his most important duties would be to guard the taxpayers’ hard-earned tax dollars and keep in check the often profligate spending of the bureaucrats who run City government on a day-to-day basis?  Or is it that he just didn’t care?

In contrast to Ryan, Third Ward Ald. Don Bach repeatedly has talked the talk about balanced budgets and fiscal responsibility.  Unfortunately for City residents, however, he has totally failed to walk the walk, as evidenced by his being one of the five aldermen (along with Alds. Allegretti, Ryan, Carey and Wsol) who voted to over-ride Mayor Schmidt’s historic veto last June of the Council’s giveaway of even more tax dollars to private community organizations run by folks not elected by or accountable to the taxpayers for those tax dollars. 

And although Bach has flapped his gums about drastic cuts in City personnel, he has offered little-to-nothing specific for Staff or the Council even to consider.  No surprise there.

Allegretti and Wsol wanted to hang about $1 million a year of extra debt service on the City to finance their new police station (thank you, Joe Egan, for your referendum that put the kibosh on that insanity), so we shouldn’t expect much fiscal responsibility from them – although it hasn’t escaped our sense of perverse humor that Wsol and Allegretti opposed the pass-through of water rate increases that would have netted the City approximately the same $400,000 of additional revenue – albeit for only one year – that Allegretti wants from his billboard deal (assuming that deal is even lawful, which the City Attorney disputes).   

This Saturday (Jan. 16) from 9:00 a.m. until noon, the City Council will be holding its first “budget workshop” for the 2010-11 fiscal year.  This session will be a crucial first step in a process that recently has produced million dollar-plus deficits that have put the City in an extremely precarious financial position. 

We understand that this year, unlike for past budget workshops, residents will be permitted and even encouraged to share their views about the budget and City finances.  That’s an encouraging change, instigated by Mayor Schmidt, although its practical value will depend on how many residents make the time and effort to show up, listen, and speak meaningfully to the issues.

But be forewarned: the spendthrift bureaucrats and elected officials who have proposed and presided over the recent deficit budgets and a good deal of indiscriminate spending will not embrace fiscal responsibility quietly or willingly.  In the past they relied on treating the taxpayers like mushrooms: keeping us in the dark and feeding us manure.

Now with the lights switched on (but with manure still at the ready), expect them to try to make this financial stuff sound as complicated and intractable as possible; and expect to hear about far more problems than solutions intended to discourage meaningful change and preserve the status quo with which they are all too comfortable. 

But if we fall for those tactics, we have only ourselves to blame.