That’s the front page headline of today’s Park Ridge Journal, and it appears to corroborate recent rumors that former Park Ridge Mayor Howard P. Frimark has been circulating announced mayoral candidate Larry Ryles’ nominating petitions. 

The taxpaying voters of Park Ridge should welcome this announcement because it adds some much-needed “meat” to the rather sparse “bones” of Ryles’ mayoral campaign to date – which had us asking “What Would Ryles Do” (“WWRD”) because the candidate had not articulated his views on current City policy and issues beyond the handful of warm and fuzzy tropes on his website.

According to the Journal article, Frimark is helping Ryles on his campaign because Frimark considers Ryles “a good man.” 

We don’t doubt that Ryles is “a good man” in the same sense that the vast majority of Park Ridge residents are “good” men and women.  But we also note that, historically, the term “a good man” has been a kind of political code in Crook County for “he’s an empty suit, but he’s our empty suit.”  The original “Boss” of Chicago, Richard J. Daley, used the embellishment “a good family man” to praise and eulogize his political lackeys – presumably because they were good at enriching their own families (and Daley’s) by helping the Boss shake the shekels out of the average Chicago taxpayer.

By branding Ryles “a good man,” Frimark also implies that his political nemesis, Mayor Dave Schmidt, is the converse: a “bad man.” 

In Frimark’s cockeyed view of City government, that’s probably true – going back to when then-ald. Schmidt repeatedly blew the whistle on, and publicly challenged, then-mayor Frimark’s brazen attempts at wasting multi-millions of tax dollars on buying land and building a new cop shop without a referendum, and at giving away millions of tax dollars to buddies like Bill Napleton even as Cadillac was closing down his dealership, and at exempting the PADS carpetbaggers from the City’s zoning ordinance, etc.

We’re also pretty sure that certain of Frimark’s (and Ryles’?) friends and acquaintances consider Schmidt a “bad man” for how he has frustrated all those private special interests who for so long had reaped the benefits of the perversion of the City’s power to squeeze involuntary tax-funded “donations” out of the same taxpayers from whom those special interests couldn’t coax voluntary contributions (Center of Concern, Meals on Wheels, Maine Center, etc.); or who had enjoyed lucrative no-bid monopolies on City events (Taste of Park Ridge NFP); or who had pocketed tax dollars for private property enhancement (through the façade improvement program and the Uptown underground parking garage). 

Knowing that Frimark is a Ryles campaign advisor, however, adds some clarity to Ryles’ heretofore vague and squishy “platform.”  It suggests that Ryles, no matter how he might spin it, is singing from the same “Let’s Make A Deal” political hymnal as Frimark – the one that gave us the financial black hole known as the Uptown TIF, and an overburdened but more easily-manipulated 7-person City Council, and several years of deficits totaling millions of dollars.

And Ryles already seems to be learning those tunes, as he demonstrated (according to another article in today’s Journal) by proclaiming the wasteful $300,000 “Phase I” of the planned $1.1 million cop shop upgrade as “an economical way to do it” – “it” being knocking down the City-owned house on Courtland and building a 1,500 square foot bike corral and evidence storage area.  Ryles went on to criticize Schmidt’s veto of that Phase I expense – which Schmidt based in large part on the current availability of over 6,000 square feet of existing City building space – as showing “a total lack of teamwork between the aldermen and the mayor” – “teamwork” apparently meaning mindlessly going-along-to-get-along.

Ryles’ also defended the cop shop upgrade plan recommended by the Police Chief’s Advisory Task Force, of which Ryles is a member, because “we worked really hard on this plan.”  “Working really hard” and similar terms (like “spending a lot of time” and “studying it at length”) are standard political code terms for “we know it’s a dumb idea, but give us props for our time and effort” – the government equivalent of a “participation” trophy.

Obviously, neither Ryles nor Frimark understand or subscribe to legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden’s maxim: “Don’t mistake activity for achievement.”  That’s just one of the reasons that the alliance of Frimark and Ryles portends an “interesting” mayoral campaign between now and April.

As in the Chinese wish: “May you live in interesting times”?

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