Tonight’s Park Ridge City Council Committee of the Whole (“COW”) meeting has a few interesting agenda items, if only because all of them have the the ability to raise additional questions about how credibly and competently the City makes decisions on basic management matters.

The first of those items is a revision to City Council Policy No. 43, which governs how the City manages its litigation.  According to City Manager Jim Hock’s Agenda Cover Memorandum, the City has used two law firms for its litigation despite there never having been “an official Council action designating those firms to represent the City in litigation, so staff added some proposed language regarding the issue” for the Council’s consideration.

The lack of any “official Council action” on selecting law firms is especially troubling in light of the fact that the City spent in excess of $400,000 on attorneys’ fees during FY2010-11. 

Unfortunately, this situation had to be raised by the Council – in this case, Ald. Jim Smith (3rd) – because City staff, starting with the City Mgr., apparently didn’t seem to realize there even was any problem.  Equally unfortunately, there’s nothing in the proposed new policy that requires the City to utilize an RFP process to see how good a deal it can get on legal services from firms other than the two who have enjoyed their no-bid monopoly on City business all these years.  

Even more problematic is that the new policy still seems to contemplate the City’s using more than one law firm, with Hock making the decision on which firm to use – despite no evidence Hock has any expertise whatsoever in that regard, and despite the lack of any express, objective criteria in the policy for selecting the firm(s) who will be assigned what work. 

Let’s call that a big mistake and a bad idea.   

The second item of interest is an oldie but not so goodie: the approval of more payments of public funds to private corporations for various poorly-described services at undisclosed prices.

According to Hock’s Agenda Cover Memorandum, he “requested information from each of the groups identifying the number of Park Ridge residents served by [these] organizations thus far this year.”  That’s a typical half-baked Hock game plan, and it got a typical response from those private groups who seem more concerned about getting public funds from the City trough than about actually delivering provable cost-effective results to provable Park Ridge residents – as demonstrated by even a cursory look at the information those organizations provided, which fails miserably when it comes to providing the City with the information necessary to determining exactly what services Park Ridge residents are getting and what the City is paying for each type and delivery of those services.

The Maine Center for Mental Health claims that it treated 398 Park Ridge residents for a variety of maladies, 144 of which are for something called “Other conditions that may be the focus of treatment” and 87 of which are “Other/not classified in database.”  In other words, the Maine Center wants the City to continue committing thousands of tax dollars to pay for some undisclosed treatment of undefined conditions allegedly suffered by unidentified Park Ridge residents.  Brilliant!

Not to be outdone, Advocate Health Center’s meals-on-wheels program claims to be serving “25-30 people daily in the Park Ridge area.”  Not necessarily in Park Ridge itself but just in the “Park Ridge area” – which could mean unincorporated Maine Township, Des Plaines or Niles.  Consequently, the meals-on-wheels program doesn’t provide the necessary information by which the City can conclusively determine how many meals are going to Park Ridge residents and what the City is actually paying per meal.

That leaves the Center of Concern, which claims to have provided a variety of services – including “Income Tax Preparation,” “Employment Counseling,” “Financial Counseling,” “Will Preparation” and “Legal Counseling” – to yet more alleged-but-unidentified Park Ridge residents, at no particular identifiable cost per service.

This is no way to responsibly fund services that only a vocal minority appears to consider “essential City services.”  Not only is it irresponsible, but it doesn’t even comply with City Council Policy No. 6, which imposes stringent requirements on the expenditure of public funds for private services that the Council never has satisfied when giving away hundreds of thousands of dollars to these organizations over the past several years. 

But, then again, why should the aldermen worry about adhering to the requirements of a Council policy when it’s so much fun to give away taxpayer money to private organizations without any meaningful accountability?

The third agenda item of interest is the RFP for the Taste of Park Ridge (“TOPR”), on which action was deferred by the COW two weeks ago because the matter was not posted on the agenda as an “action item” and, therefore, not appropriate for a COW decision on Hock’s and his compliant staff’s “done deal” giveaway of TOPR to the incumbent Taste of Park Ridge NFP (“Taste Inc.”) despite Taste Inc.’s proposal not being objectively as that of competitor Absolute Production Services (“Absolute”).

After the two-week hiatus, Hock and staff are still recommending Taste Inc. over Absolute even though neither proposal satisfied the City’s RFP requirements, and even though Taste Inc.’s proposal: (a) does not unequivocally agree to reimburse the City for all of the City’s approximately $20,000 of direct and indirect costs, unlike Absolute’s; (b) provides only a $20,000 bond instead of the $100,000 bond the RFP required, and which Absolute offers; and (c) provides a revenue-sharing proposal of a 50/50 split of net revenue, but only after Taste Inc. achieves its $20,000 contribution to its current $80,000 “event perpetuation fund,” a threshold which Taste Inc.’s Mel Thillens (in an e-mail to Hock back on December 29 which Hock may have kept secret even from the Council until now) admits is unlikely to be reached.

In other words, folks, this RFP process – as drawn up and administered by Hock – looks like a charade bordering on a fraud, with Taste Inc. as the “chosen” beneficiary notwithstanding the various shortcomings of its response to the City’s RFP when compared to Absolute’s, which itself is inadequate. 

If this were a legitimate process, all three proposals would be rejected as non-conforming;  the RFP would be revised to make it perfectly clear as to what terms are required and in what form; and it would be re-published with the mandate that any non-conformity will disqualify the respondent.   

But at 505 Butler Place, “legitimate” is a very subjective term.  And, as always, subjective terms rarely, if ever, benefit the taxpayers.

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