Friday’s post about Mayor Schmidt’s “State of the City” address provoked some spirited comments (51 so far), which is a good thing. 

That’s because how well the City handles its current financial challenges may very well determine whether Park Ridge will remain a highly-desirable, inner-ring residential community – or whether it will decline into an over-taxed, under-serviced backwater.

As we noted in Friday’s post, the central point of the mayor’s address was his statement about the upcoming 2010-11 budget: “Everything except essential City services must be on the table.”

The devil being in the details, however, it will be incumbent on the City Manager, City Staff and, ultimately, the City Council, to determine exactly what constitutes an “essential City service.”  And we look forward to that debate.

But to put our two cents in early, what services are not “essential” are those provided by the various private and quasi-private “community groups” – whether by one of our favorites like the Center of Concern, or our least favorite, the arrogantly secretive Taste of Park Ridge NFP (a/k/a, “Taste Inc.”) – that sucked approximately $271,000 out of the City’s coffers this fiscal year, thereby contributing that same amount to the City’s roughly $2 million deficit.

We are mindful of the disingenuous alibis given by Alder-spendthrifts Don Bach, Robert Ryan and Frank Wsol as they merrily added to the deficit, first by appropriating even more of our tax dollars to those community groups and then by over-riding Mayor Schmidt’s veto of their irresponsibility.  We remember how they puffed and blustered about how those organizations purportedly return $6-8 in services for every dollar they take in.

Back then we challenged Wsol to “put up or shut up” on the details of that bogus claim.  Since then, we’ve heard nothing from Wsol (or Bach or Ryan) on that challenge.  No surprise there, but that challenge still stands – to them or to anyone else who thinks that public funds should be handed over willy-nilly to private organizations which have no legal requirement to account to the taxpayers and voters about how they are spending our money to run their operations.

The bottom line – and we use that term intentionally, because the City’s consistent failure to apply sound business decision-making has contributed the lion’s share of its current financial problems – is that, notwithstanding the gushing accolades heaped on those organizations by their supporters and apologists both inside and outside City government, the City has no legal or ethical obligation to spend our money that way.

How do we know?

Because if those services truly were “essential,” then the City itself would be mandated to provide them directly through some City department or other, using City facilities, equipment and employees (and volunteers, if needed) under the supervision of the City Manager and the City Council, all of whom would be accountable to the taxpaying voters.

Or the City would contract out for those services with the private organization providers – and be specifically invoiced for them rather than be asked for annual arbitrary “contributions” unrelated to the dollar value of the actual services provided. 

And if a majority of our taxpaying residents really thought the services provided by those organizations truly were “essential,” they would be making enough voluntary contributions to provide directly the money those organizations are now obtaining indirectly by tapping the residents’ pocketbooks via the City treasury.

Admittedly, $270,000 is only 13.5% of the $2 million deficit.  But it’s also the annual cost of about 3 cops or firemen, or about an average year and one-half of road salt.  And, like it or not, these are the kinds of this-over-that decisions that City Staff and our elected representatives on the City Council will need to make in order to balance the budget without a big tax increase.  

Meanwhile, let the wailing and gnashing of teeth by those special interest community groups, whose oxen we have just gored, begin!