At Monday night’s City Council meeting, Ald. (and newly-announced mayoral candidate) Dave Schmidt (1st Ward) disclosed that at the December 1, 2008, meeting he will propose a resolution seeking the Council’s approval of putting the following issue to an advisory referendum of Park Ridge voters at the April 7, 2009 election:

Should the City of Park Ridge replace its current police facility with a new, larger structure at a cost of at least $16 million plus additional, but currently unknown, costs for land acquisition and bond interest?

By passing such a resolution, the City Council could give the voters their say on this issue, but without binding the Council to follow the voters’ advice.  In other words, the Council could find out what thousands of Park Ridge voters think about such an expensive public works project, yet the aldermen would remain free to accept or reject that advice.  What’s not to like?

Plenty, if you’re Mayor Howard “Let’s Make A Deal” Frimark and his Alderpuppets.  Which is why it didn’t take Frimark and Alderpuppet Rich DiPietro (2nd Ward) long to start badmouthing the idea.

Frimark, who has spent the last two years secretly wheeling and dealing for the City to buy private property for a new cop shop – most recently the shuttered auto dealership of his buddy and campaign contributor Bill Napleton – pronounced the Alderpuppet party line on such a referendum with his comments to the Park Ridge Journal: “I’m not big on these advisory referendums…[because]…[t]he aldermen were elected to make these decisions.”

Similar comments came from DiPietro, who parroted Frimark in insisting that the aldermen are elected to make these decisions but then blustered: “[A]nd the people have the right to elect someone else if they don’t like the decisions.”

Spoken like someone who doesn’t have to run for re-election until 2011; and who, it’s rumored, won’t even be running then but will hand his seat over to one of two Frimark favorites – Nick Milissis (current Park Board commissioner whom Frimark has appointed to the City’s Civil Service and Fair Housing Commissions) or Rich Brendza (former one-term Dist. 64 board member).

We have checked all of the information we could find on the April 2007 aldermanic elections, and we were unable to discover even one candidate for alderman (including all seven members of the current Council) who campaigned on a platform of borrowing and/or spending at least $16 million (not including interest) on a new police station.  The same goes for Frimark’s 2005 mayoral campaign.  So nobody truly elected them to make this decision at all, especially without consulting the voters via referendum.

Don’t expect any of the other full-time Alderpuppets to cut their strings to Puppeteer Frimark on this one, however, including semi-independant Ald. Frank Wsol (7th Ward), who gladly drank the new cop shop Kool-Aid when he was facing a tough re-election challenge from Frimark puppet (and former cop) Bob Kristie in April 2007 and now can’t turn back.

But the real dishonesty on this matter can be attributed to Frimark, naturally, who insists that a multi-million cop shop will be “tax-neutral for citizens” because the 20-plus year cop shop bonds will simply replace the 10-year Public Works Building bonds, thereby keeping the city paying roughly the same annual debt service until around 2029.

Frimark conveniently (or deceitfully?) ignores the fact that 20-year bonds increase the total interest cost to the taxpayers by millions over what they paid on the Public Works Building’s 10-year bonds; and extending that level of debt service for another 20 years will also tie the hands of future City Councils as to what they can spend on what are truly infrastructure needs, like relief sewers, street paving, etc.  Even more fundamentally, if this were purely a tax matter, wouldn’t the taxpayers be entitled to a tax reduction once the existing Public Works bonds are retired and the debt service abates? 

But “Let’s Make A Deal” and Richie D really think the taxpayers of Park Ridge are dumb enough to buy the big lie – that losing a potential tax reduction is “tax-neutral.” And that’s also why they are so smug and comfortable telling the taxpaying voters who might want a say on such a long-term spending boondoggle, effectively, to: “Pound sand!”