This week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate reports on the City’s proposed 2011-12 budget (“Property taxes, fees go up in proposed Park Ridge budget,” Feb. 1), which was formally presented to the City Council this past Monday night and will be the subject of a budget workshop tomorrow morning, beginning at 8:30 a.m. in the Council Chambers.

The new budget projects revenues of $58 million and expenditures of $59.4 million.  To you math and accounting majors, that yields a projected deficit of $1.4 million – which doesn’t look or sound like a “balanced” budget to us.

But sights and sounds can be deceiving when it comes to government budgets, even those of small local governmental bodies.  

In this case, the deception comes from the fact that the projected deficit cuts across all of the City’s 15 (yes, 15!) separate funds, some of which have produced surpluses over the past few years but will be drawn down for some planned expenditures which those funds are specifically intended to finance – like the $1,910,000 to be drawn from the Sewer Fund for the planned North Park/Burton flooding remediation project. 

You can be sure there will be a lot of nip-and-tucking of budget numbers between now and when that budget is formally approved at the end of April, right before at least 5 of the 7 current aldermen walk away from The Horseshoe for their last time.  And you can also be sure that there will be more verbal and mathematical misdirection before that occurs.

For example, in the H-A article, City Manager Jim Hock is quoted as having told the Council Monday night: “We’re proposing a 5-percent property-tax increase to meet the revenue goals we have.”

That sounds to us a lot like Hock’s way of saying that he’s proposing a 5% property tax increase to meet the spending goals he has.

This new 5% property tax increase comes on the heels of last year’s 5% increase, which followed two previous years of 3% increases. In other words, the City has raised its share of our property taxes by 16% over four years, or 4% per year on average – while the Consumer Price Index was increasing less than 8% during that same period of time!

Hopefully, one of our elected representatives at tomorrow’s work shop will ask Hock to explain – publicly for the record, and in substantial detail – why our property taxes are going up at more than double the CPI rate of increase, even as the City has cut a number of services and their related expenses.  We hope someone also will ask him to state – again, publicly for the record and in substantial detail – whether he and his staff have cut every last bit of fat out of the expense side of the ledger.

Being the suspicious sort, we also will be interested to see, as this budget process develops, what expense items end up looking like they were put in by Hock as mere place-holders or bargaining chips.  Take that $1.9 million for the North Park flooding remediation, for example, which is listed as serving “70 residents,” although we assume that means 70 residences.  Whatever, that still works out to $27,000+ per residence – which sure doesn’t sound cost-effective to us,

Frankly, we had hoped Hock would have gone to his department heads and demanded – new Cook County Board president Toni Preckwinkle-style – that they each come up with a plan to trim their departments’ budgets by 10%.  Then we could have seen what the people who purportedly have the most knowledge about the operations of those departments think could be cut with the least adverse effects. 

But, instead, Hock took the easy way out for himself and his staff by simply proposing yet another 5% property tax hike. 

You know…in order to meet those new “revenue goals.”

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