This week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate contains a story (“Planning for Park Ridge Parks’ property-tax referendum has costs, too.”) about how the Park Ridge Recreation & Park District will be spending approximately $76,000 in connection with what should be a free referendum process.

As most sentient Park Ridge residents already know, the Park District is planning an April 2013 referendum seeking voter approval of the District’s issuing of as much as $13 million in bonds for the acquisition and conversion of the Park Ridge Youth Campus property into a parks and recreation complex.  That referendum process is essentially free: the Park Board simply has to pass a resolution prior to January 18, 2013, and the referendum issue will be part of the regularly-scheduled local election ballot on April 9.

But the Park District apparently isn’t waiting for voter approval to start spending money on this project.  According to the H-A article, the District already is buying a variety of project development services, such as architectural services “to develop conceptual design plans” for that 11.35 acre property.  Count on those plans being used as a sales/marketing tool to help convince voters that this is a wonderful project deserving of their votes…and their tax dollars.

We think that’s just plain wrong.

Merely by putting this project and its funding to a popular vote via referendum, the Park District is expressing its endorsement of the project.  That’s all it should do, both legally and ethically.  Spending money on the project before the referendum passes isn’t good government, although it most definitely is political – something public bodies often try to legitimize by tying the expenditures to the underlying project rather than to the political referendum campaign.

In this case, the District claims those expenditures are for “necessary steps we have to go through,” according to a quote by Executive Director Gayle Mountcastle, as reported in the H-A article.  The H-A article also listed structural studies of the existing Youth Campus buildings, the District’s review of environmental studies, and informational materials.

We don’t see how any of those expenses are “necessary” prior to the referendum’s passage.  So long as the referendum language simply authorizes the District to issue bonds but doesn’t commit it to do so, all of these “necessary” steps should be able to be done after the referendum passes – if it does, indeed, pass.

The politics and the marketing should be left to those private supporters of the project, like the “Our Parks Legacy” organization – which has been organized solely for the purpose of selling this referendum to the voters using private funds, not public tax dollars. That organization already is raising funds and has started both a website and a Facebook page .    

But if “conceptual design plans” are needed to sell the project to the voters, Our Parks Legacy is the organization to provide them, using…wait for it…private funds.

Frankly, if the Park Board and District Staff already haven’t been able to come up with a reasonable conceptual design plan for this property on their own, we have to question the “ready, fire, aim” process on which the District seems to have embarked.  Spending money on architects and other development costs when the voters have yet to approve the project’s bonded-debt financing is inviting the waste of that money – unless, of course, those costs are really intended to “sell” the project to the voters.

Back in the early 1990s, a previous Park Board and and the District’s then-executive director Steve Meyer spent over $100,000 on professional services for the design of a water park to replace Centennial Pool.  Those plans, assuming they ever ended up being delivered, presumably are still collecting dust on some shelf after the voters overwhelmingly rejected the project’s bond-financing via referendum.

We’re not saying that will happen here.  But why take the chance, unless $76,000 doesn’t matter all that much to the Park District?

Actually, that sounds like the District’s attitude, judging by a quote from Park Board member Jim O’Brien reported in the H-A article: “This isn’t board worthy” – apparently in reference to the $20,000-per-individual-expenditure discretionary authority Mountcastle has been given by the Board.   By comparison, the Park Ridge City Manager only has discretionary authority for $10,000 per individual expenditure.  Such limitations, however, can still be circumvented by breaking down aggregate “project” expenditures into smaller components.

Interestingly enough, this process has enabled individual Park Board members to escape direct accountability for these expenditures.  According to Mountcastle: “[The Board] gave consensus for me to expend these dollars.”

Consensus, noun: the cowardly politicians’ way of avoiding individual accountability by avoiding a roll-call vote.

With the Park District already committed to the $7.1 million first phase of a two-phase replacement of the Centennial pools with an aquatics complex that will consume almost all of the District’s non-referendum bonding power, the District doesn’t have any margin of error for the Youth Campus project: either the referendum passes, or the project dies.

And the Park District is betting $76,000 of our money on that outcome.

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