What do Ray Guy, Jerrel Wilson, Sean Landeta, Reggie Roby, Brad Maynard, Shane Lechler and Bobby Joe Green have in common with Park Ridge Alds. Joe Sweeney, Rich DiPietro, Don Bach, Jim Allegretti, Robert Ryan, Tom Carey and Frank Wsol?

They’re all punters.

The first seven gentlemen are, or were, notable NFL punters who specialized in kicking a football far downfield. The second seven currently are notable Park Ridge punters who specialize in kicking the accountability and fiscal-responsibility “can” down the political road.

The first seven perform(ed) before tens of thousands of spectators each week. The second seven generally perform their weekly activities before a few handfuls of Park Ridge residents and whomever else might eventually watch their attempts at impersonating responsible public officials on the meeting videos posted on the City’s website – compliments of the video-camera donated by Mayor Dave Schmidt and manned (on most nights) by the intrepid and indefatigable George Kirkland.

The first seven are/were paid a lot of money for their skill and/or longevity. The second seven are each paid $1,200/year for, it seems, their lack of skill at doing the City’s business. And like their political master/mentor, former mayor Howard P. Frimark, Allegretti, Bach, Carey and Ryan are leaving office after only one term – although Frimark lost his re-election bid, while his acolytes are throwing in the towel and just walking away.

For those of us who don’t gamble on pro football, however, the activities of the first seven on Sundays have had no economic effect on our lives. The second seven, on the other hand, have spent the past four years of Mondays (save for Sweeney, who has spent only two) running up multi-million dollar deficits while depleting the City’s reserves, raising our property taxes at a rate exceeding inflation, cutting City services, and effectively mis-managing the City’s finances to a point where calling them a “mess” would be praising with faint damns.

That’s why it came as no surprise to us here at PublicWatchdog that those City Council punters couldn’t even muster the integrity, the commitment, or the effort to vote on each and every one of the line-item vetoes Mayor Schmidt painstakingly cast – after consultation with City Staff – in order to cut $650,000 from yet another Council tax-and-spend budget.

And even though the guy who tries to pass himself off as the “elder statesman” of this body by virtue of his sixteen years at The Horseshoe, DiPietro, remarked that he may actually favor some of Schmidt’s line-item vetoes, he disingenuously made the motion to over-ride all 70 line-item vetoes in one fell swoop rather than giving each line-item the individual attention he acknowledged at least some of them deserved. But that’s the kind of political double-talk we’ve come to expect from Richie D.

Ditto for Wsol, who last year voted to over-ride Schmidt’s blanket veto because it wasn’t a line-item one: “I hate a lot of pieces of this budget. I hope the mayor will look to his ability to exercise veto in certain areas,” said Wsol back then.

What a difference a year makes, hey Frankie? Or are you practicing that politician-speak in preparation for when a certain area Republican finally decides to hang up her Springfield spikes?

So the incoming aldermen get to muck out the City’s financial stable they inherit from their craven predecessors, who will be out the door before final year-end figures reveal whether they presided over a fourth straight year of operating deficits totaling in the multi-millions. And, by law, the new guys will have only 30 days to get that job done – along with a growing “to do” list that includes looking into adopting some form of zero-based budgeting to break the dysfunctional cycle of simply looking at what was spent last year and then just tacking on some more.

Hopefully, the first order business for the new guys will be to come up with a clear definition of what constitutes a “balanced budget” for a City with one primary operating account (the “General Fund”) and a couple dozen other discrete funds, including certain “enterprise funds” whose use is strictly limited to specific types of expenditures. That should eliminate a lot of the fiscal game-playing that often resembles a confidence-man’s “shell game” – except with 20 shells.

But perhaps the most nauseating irony of this latest (and hopefully last) abdication of economic responsibility by the current occupants of The Horseshoe is that, while they happily dump $650,000 of bungled budget decisions into the laps of the new aldermen, those same current occupants rushed to give City Mgr. Jim Hock that ridiculous two-year, $200,000+/year (all in) contract because they claimed they didn’t want to leave that difficult task to the new Council.

We wish we could say we won’t miss that kind of dissembling with the new Council, but we can’t…if only because DiPietro and Sweeney will still be sitting there, presumably mouthing the same or similar prevarications.

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