As we’ve written before (“The Culture Of Secrecy,” 12/17/07), secrecy is the tool of choice for politicians and bureaucrats who want to cover up the inefficiency, waste and corruption in the governmental bodies they run.  That’s why we favor that antidote to secrecy: transparency.

Unfortunately, all our local governmental bodies have a long way to go to achieve the kind of transparency that would make them an open book to the taxpayers and voters of our community, although the Park Ridge Park District deserves a round of polite applause for putting video recordings of its meetings on its website – at what we understand to be a tiny fraction of the box-car numbers the City Hall bureaucrats came up with for televising City Council meetings.

But just this past Tuesday (Feb. 3), the Culture of Secrecy engulfed two meetings that were held in the Mayor’s Conference Room at City Hall – by something called the “Intergovernmental Joint Review Board” – which purported to be the “Annual Meeting” for the “Dempster/Greenwood TIF” (the “new” Bredemann auto dealership property) and for the “Uptown TIF,” respectively.

We scoured the City’s website and could find nothing that identified what this review board does, or who is on it; and we fared no better when Googling it.  To a suspicious Watchdog, that’s the first sign that something may be amiss.

The second sign that something is amiss is that there were no posted background materials to accompany either the Dempster/Greenwood TIF agenda (pdf) or the Uptown TIF agenda (pdf), even though those agendas make reference to an “Annual TIF Report” for each TIF and to an “Update on TIF Status” for each.

And the third sign that something is amiss is that these meetings were scheduled for 1:30 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. on a Tuesday.  How many citizens could be expected to attend such a meeting in the middle of the work day…or could have attended previous ones on Tuesday, January 9, 2007, at 9:00 and 9:30 a.m.; or on Thursday, December 13, 2007, at 9:00 and 9:30 a.m.?

The City has sunk a ton of our tax dollars – and no small amount of debt, as we understand it – into the TIFs.  A detailed and easily understandable current accounting of the performance of those TIFs should be readily available on the City’s website for anybody who wants to check it.  But instead, not only can’t we find the “Annual TIF Report” for either of those TIFs, but we can’t even tell who is on the Intergovernmental Joint Review Commitee.

That’s just bad government, folks.  And, in a bad economy, it causes us to wonder even more about the state of City finances and what kind of decisions are being made based on information not readily available to the average citizen.