Today we won’t be writing at length about this past Monday night’s City Council COW (Committee-of-the-Whole) meeting.

Oh sure, we could have had some fun with Ald. Tom Bernick’s (6th) accusations that Mayor Dave Schmidt was “playing politics” with how aldermanic liaisons (such as Bernick) to the City’s various boards and commissions were improperly injecting themselves into those groups’ proceedings – especially coming, as those accusations did, after City Attorney Everette “Buzz” Hill’s had advised that such conduct was “dangerous” and could even jeopardize their aldermanic office.  But you can get a taste of that for yourself by going to the meeting video on the City’s website and fast-forwarding to around the 2:16 point and continuing about 10 minutes to the 2:35 point.   

We also could have written about the attention the Council is finally paying to the cost of legal services, which rose to $468,382.23 in FY 2010-11 and is projected to rise again, to $561,595.48, in the current fiscal year.  That’s despite having an outside law firm (Klein, Thorpe & Jenkins) on a $6,250 monthly retainer that is intended to cover routine work by KTJ attorneys Hill and Kathleen Henn.   Among the causes of those higher costs: litigation, which is not covered by the retainer and which can drive up legal expenses dramatically – as shown by the $175,600 in legal fees the City incurred in connection with the police brutality suit that it ended up settling with a $185,000 payment to the victim.

Or we could have discussed the $7.5 million in bonds the Council approved: $2.1 million to fund an early-retirement incentive program and to fill a pension under-funding gap, and $5.4 for Phase I of the long-term sewer and flooding project.  Going into debt to fund early retirement of City employees sounds wrong-headed to us, but that’s more likely a function of over-promising and mismanagement by past Councils.  Moving ahead on long-neglected sewer repair/replacement and flood control, on the other hand, seems to makes sense. 

But instead of those topics, we’re going to focus on an article that appears in today’s Park Ridge Journal, titled “Suburban Poverty.”  It reports that the U.S. Census Bureau has released data from 2010 indicating that 5,033 out of 40,304 residents within the boundaries of Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District 64 – almost 12.50 percent – live at or below the poverty line; and 377 of them are school-aged children.

As regular readers of this blog know, we have consistently opposed the City’s practice of making “charitable” donations of arbitrary amounts of tax dollars to a select few private not-for-profit corporations, without any restrictions on how that money is used or any accounting of what specific services that money provides to Park Ridge residents.  Such donations appear to violate the mandate of both the Illinois Constitution and Park Ridge City Council Policy No. 6 that public funds be used only for public purposes, not given away to private entities.

We stand by that opposition.  Unless the City Council expressly determines what specific services it believes the City should be providing its residents, confirms that those services aren’t being provided by any other governmental body serving our community, and then contracts with private corporations for those services on a dollar-per-unit-of-service basis that can be verified by the City, such services do not satisfy the “public purpose” test. 

That doesn’t mean, however, that the recipients of those services should be ignored.  This is where that thing called charity comes in. 

As Charles Dickens wrote in his novel, Martin Chuzzlewhit (1844):      “[C]harity begins at home” – a concept that may actually have originated with Chapter 5 of St. Paul’s first letter to Timothy, in which Paul instructs: “But if any widow have children or nephews, let them first to shew piety at home, and to requite their parents.”  

Don’t assume that we’re engaging in religious proselytizing here, however: our message is purely a secular, governmental one.  And it’s directed to those aldermen – Sweeney, DiPietro, Smith, Raspanti, Bernick and Maloney – who so eagerly have thrown City tax dollars at three favored not-for-profit corporations without even a shred of hard evidence or any credible accounting as to exactly how much of that money actually goes to help Park Ridge residents like the 5,033 who are battling poverty. 

Gentlemen, maybe you can’t identify and help every one of those 5,033 residents, but it’s time you did more to make sure the City is getting the biggest bang for those bucks you keep donating, ostensibly on the taxpayers’ behalf but without asking them, to your favored private “charities.”   

And while you’re at it, why not also reach out to those constituents you claim support what you’re doing, and ask them to cut back on their donations for things like libraries in Tanzania and protecting spotted owl sanctuaries in Mexico?  Instead, why not ask them to send that money to Center of Concern, Meals on Wheels and Maine Center for Mental Health?

Maybe, that way, those corporations might become more attracted to traditional fund-raising and not so enamored with how easy it is to wet their beaks in the taxpayer-funded City trough.

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