We rarely comment about what the governments of neighboring communities are doing, in large part because the bureaucrats and politicians who run most local governments sing from the same hymn book of non-transparent, unaccountable and often just plain incompetent tax/borrow/spend management as do our own.

But we were especially struck by two blatantly stupid ideas that appeared in the September 7th issue of the Daily-Herald: Des Plaines’ generator rebate program (“Des Plaines approves generator rebate program,” Section 1, Page 4) and Arlington Heights’ overhead sewer rebate program (“Village hall overflows with flood stories,” Section 1, Page 1).  And the reasons we were struck by them is that they both represent the exact same bad public policy of using public money for purely private benefit.

The Des Plaines program would use $22,500 of public funds to reimburse residents for 50% of the cost – up to $250 – of the price of a portable generator.  According to Des Plaines acting City Mgr. Jason Slowinski, the goal of that program is getting as many generators into the hands of residents who don’t currently have them.

What’s wrong with that picture?  In the first place, when did it become the job of local government to promote the sales of portable generators?  More objectionably, it effectively forces somebody who doesn’t want to buy a generator of his own to help pay for the generators of others who do – with any benefits being purely personal to the generator purchasers rather than to the public at large.  And by addressing a symptom rather than the root problem (an inadequate electric infrastructure), it simply kicks that can down the road.

The Arlington Heights program is an even bigger money pit, with the Village paying up to $5,000 per household toward the installation of overhead sewers – which, if they operate as intended, simply diverts one home’s flooding/backup to other homes and/or the public streets and alleys.

Brilliant!

Both of these programs are the kind of warm-and-fuzzy, feel-good expenditures of public funds (or “OPM,” as in “other people’s money”) that bureaucrats and politicians love so much, in large part because it lets them further expand their local governments and play Santa Claus at the same time, with little to no cost to themselves.   And it’s the kind of pork-barrel politics that has put so many local governments in financial distress, and the State of Illinois in an economic iron lung.

Under the Illinois Constitution, public funds are supposed to be expended only where their primary objective is some clearly identified public purpose and where there is a reasonable expectation that the expenditure will substantially achieve that purpose; i.e., the City’s spending $100,000 on Powerball tickets probably wouldn’t satisfy the “reasonable expectation” test.

But those programs by Des Plaines and Arlington Heights aren’t just bad public policy.  They’re the equivalent of putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound, seemingly intended to mask the bureaucrats’ and politicians’ inability to effectively address the underlying problems without having to publicly admit to that inability.

In other words, it’s a kind of fraud on taxpayers.

And it teaches us one other important lesson: when Park Ridge is faced with a problem, looking at what neighboring communities are doing is no substitute for doing the heavy lifting of thinking through our own solution.

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