Mayor Dave Schmidt is quoted in this week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“Mayor vows to vote against sign proposal,” January 5) as saying he will vote “no” on the zoning code text amendment to permit billboards in Park Ridge: “As far as I’m concerned, when Planning and Zoning votes unanimously on something, that sends a pretty strong message that it’s how the community at large feels.”
In case you’ve been in a coma for the past several weeks, what Schmidt is talking about is the four billboards Generation Group, Inc. (“GGI”) wants the City to approve for the Renaissance office complex at the northwest corner of Park Ridge, a request that has been aggressively advanced by Fourth Ward Ald. Jim “Billboards” Allegretti’s ever since GGI contacted him several months ago to enlist his aid in getting the City’s blessing to inflict billboard blight on our community.
There is nothing attractive about a billboard, irrespective of whatever message is splayed across it – except to the people who make a bundle on them. But we don’t exactly know who those people are, because Allegretti got Alds. Robert Ryan and Frank Wsol to join him in voting to have the City of Park Ridge be the applicant for the zoning code text amendment needed for the billboards.
That means neither GGI nor the owners of the Renaissance complex (who likely will be getting a nice piece of change as “rent” for providing the billboard location) had to comply with the City’s ethics ordinance, which requires applicants for things like zoning text amendments to disclose their principals, partners, shareholders, officers and directors. In other words, Allegretti, Ryan and Wsol made sure that the owners and operators of GGI and Renaissance folks got a free pass from public scrutiny on this deal.
Why doesn’t that surprise us?
Allegretti continues to try to lead the cattle drive on this billboards deal, arguing that the proposed one-time payment by GGI of $400,000 represents a windfall of 20% of the reported 2009-10 budget deficit. But even if that payment is legal – which the City Attorney thinks it isn’t – it is still just a one-time payment, not a $400,000 annuity. Which means that if Allegretti and his fellow alderdopes keep spending millions more than the City takes in while depleting the City’s fund balances in the process, the economic benefits of that billboard deal will be a distant memory while the billboards continue to stand guard over Park Ridge.
That’s why it is even more suspicious that flyers promoting GGI’s billboards [pdf], and containing several factual inaccuracies, have turned up at Morningfields Market in South Park, a business owned by prominent local attorney and legal colleague of Allegretti’s, Frank DiFranco. The flyers claim that the City is being irresponsible if it turns away the billboard money, which coincidentally is the same argument DiFranco made at the City Council’s December 21, 2009 meeting.
But where was DiFranco for the past few years when the administration of former-mayor Howard P. Frimark – with Allegretti as Frimark’s favorite lap-dog alderman – was passing all these deficit budgets that have left the City in such a precarious condition? Where was DiFranco’s law partner, Jeff Wilson, another pro-billboard take-the-money speaker on December 21?
Will the next Morningfields’ flyers explain those absences?