A headline in yesterday’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate caught our attention, and not because it was a good one: “No profit for city of Park Ridge as Shops of Uptown goes up for sale” is how it read. 

The accompanying story reported on how the profit-sharing element of the City’s January 2005 “Redevelopment Agreement” with PRC Partners, LLC – a “partnership” of Mid-America Asset Management (the “retail” partner), Edward R. James Homes (the “residential” partner) and Valenti Builders, Inc. (the “construction” partner) – would not be yielding any cash to the City, once touted as the “government” partner of this venture because of all the money and bonded debt it was going to be “investing” – that’s government code for “giving away.”

Who was doing that touting? 

Back then the Uptown bandwagon was pretty crowded with Uptown merchants and many of the people who then ran the City of Park Ridge: Acting Mayor Mike Marous; Alds. Mike Tinaglia and Don Crampton (1st), Rich DiPietro and John Benka (2nd), Sue Bell and Andrea Bateman (3rd), Sue Beaumont and Howard Frimark (4th), Dawn Disher and Mark Anderson (5th), Frank DePaul and Rex Parker (6th) and Frank Bartolone and Larry Friel (7th); City Treasurer Betty Henneman; City Treasurer Carl Brauweiller; and City Manager Tim Schuenke. 

By then, what had begun in 1999 (and continued through the 2003 formation of the TIF district) as a retail-driven project already had defaulted into a predominantly-residential one; and the advertised 70,402 square feet of retail space became the “tail” on the 189 residences “dog.”  Nevertheless, Uptown redevelopment was hailed as ushering in the dawn of a new era in Park Ridge: like Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich with the promise of “peace in our time,” many of those City officials waxed glowingly about “the largest redevelopment effort in generations” that would inject “vibrancy” – “vibrant” and every possible variant thereof being the unofficial watchword of the project – into a moribund Uptown retail district.

Those officials, seduced by predictions (including some of their own) of how certainly and quickly the City would recoup its expenditures, voted to “invest” multi-millions of dollars in cash and bonded debt to acquire a so-called “partnership” and “profit sharing” relationship with PRC.  The City sunk $5.25 million into just the parking garage alone, and we doubt even the City itself has an accurate fix on its entire, to-date cost of Uptown Redevelopment; or what that cost will be when the last of the bonds are retired.

But once again this fiscal year the City will make a $2.9 million payment on that TIF-related bonded debt.  And because the TIF/Uptown project is still in such a deep financial hole, it appears that the City has paid none of the $1 million it owes the Park District in consideration of the millions of dollars the Park District saved the City by permitting the construction of the Uptown reservoir in Hinkley Park rather than at the former City Garage property at Greenwood and Elm.

Upon reading the H-A article, we checked the Council’s 09.26.11 meeting packet on the City’s website and discovered a Sept. 26, 2011, Agenda Cover Memorandum  and an August 12, 2011, letter from the City’s Uptown Redevelopment “consultant” – the former blithely recommending (without any meaningful reason) the Council’s acceptance of the consultant’s profit-sharing analysis; and the latter providing a collection of unsubstantiated conclusions about how the City is entitled to nada from PRC.  We have provided some redlined annotations to the consultant’s letter highlighting some of the inadequacies of that report which, on its face, assumes that the City and its taxpayers should take Mr. Friedman analysis as gospel.

Apparently “trust, but verify” isn’t a favored concept of our City officials, past or present.  And, once again, it looks like the City is taking it in the economic shorts from the Uptown Redevelopment project.

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