Most people are familiar with the plaintive cry: “Don’t just stand there, do something.”
When it comes to government, that call often proves an irresistible Sirens’ song to the aim-to-please politicians and path-of-least-resistance bureaucrats. And when doing “something” can be accomplished with other people’s money (“OPM”), the sky is often the limit on how much OPM will be spent.
The City of Park Ridge currently is hearing the steady drum beat from certain residents who want “something” – anything – done about flooding. And we’re with them…to a point.
Since his election in April 2009, Mayor Dave Schmidt has pushed for some form of solution to at least the worst areas of our chronic flooding problem. He formed the Flood Control Task Force and staffed it with a number of knowledgeable volunteers who produced some solid work product, with the exception of a penny foolish, pound foolish mis-step: recommending that the City’s taxpayers subsidize individual homeowners for their installation of “private” flood control devices like overhead sewers and check valves.
Blame it on OPM intoxication.
The City Council also engaged Christopher B. Burke Engineering to study the flooding problem and devise a seemingly comprehensive flood remediation program. Unfortunately, it appears the entire Burke program would cost the City $100 million or more, which might make some kind of sense if it provided the entire City with protection from the 100-year floods we seem to be getting every year or so.
But it doesn’t.
Instead, it provides a handful or so of areas with protection against only 10-year floods. And, frankly, spending multi-millions of dollars on multi-year bonded debt merely for 10-year flood protection is, in a word, “irresponsible.” And if that word’s not enough for you, try “wasteful.” Or “stupid.”
Unfortunately, access to OPM often inspires ideas that fit those descriptions.
And for people with flooding problems, the only questions seem to be: “Why not?” and “How soon?”
Certain folks around The Horseshoe at 505 Butler Place have indicated their concern about spending that much money for what looks to be very little relief for a relatively few people. City staff promptly held its collective finger to the wind and then suggested that the City hire another engineering firm to “validate” the Burke report. Or, failing that, hire another engineering firm to provide a “second opinion” of the Burke report. Or simply decide to move forward on the Burke recommendations, costs be damned.
Fortunately for City taxpayers, this mayor and these aldermen – unlike so many of their predecessors – seem to understand that difficult problems needing expensive solutions require serious thought and sound judgment. That’s why we hold out hope that they won’t let themselves get stampeded by the folks who want to blow millions of tax dollars on half-baked flood control measures of dubious value.
Which includes any 10-year flood solution, for starters.
As best as we can figure it, the only ways to achieve meaningful flood control are to: (a) pump the water out of Park Ridge; or (b) safely store it in Park Ridge – what is commonly called “detention.”
Pumping it out of Park Ridge, however, requires a cooperative receiver of that water. And from what we’ve seen over the years, when flooding hits this area there seems to be a decided shortage of neighboring areas pleading: “Send us your run-off, your back-up, your stagnant ponding yearning to flow free.”
To the contrary, in almost every such situation the widespread suspicion among Park Ridge flooding victims is that somebody – the IEPA, the MWRD, the Army Corp of Engineers, or Satan himself – is actively preventing the evacuation of water from Park Ridge by every avenue.
That leaves detention as the most dependable way for Park Ridge to independently manage its flood water.
Under the Burke flood control program, two of the three main projects involve storm water detention: at Northwest Park and at the Park Ridge Country Club. And it might be part of the Mayfield Estates project, although that would require the City to acquire and demolish as many as 8 of the 23-homes in that neighborhood, at a cost of several million dollars.
Residents living west of the Park Ridge Country Club want the City to build a detention area on Country Club property. But that would cost at least $23 million and would only address 10-year floods for approximately 165 residences. Adding the splitting of sanitary and storm sewers to the Country Club detention area would benefit 680 properties, but would drive that cost up to almost $49 million and still protect against only 10-year floods.
That kind of money for merely 10-year flood protection should be considered D.O.A. by the Council…unless the residents of those affected areas would be willing to turn them into Special Service Areas (“SSA”s) that would be separately taxed to cover the cost of what appear to be expensive and incomplete solutions to localized flooding problems.
For those 165 properties west of the Country Club, 10-year flood protection would cost them around $140,000 each, while the amped-up $49 million project for 680 properties would cost a relatively bargain-basement $72,000 per property. That’s without debt service costs, of course.
We’re not sure of all the legal wrangling required to get these SSA referenda on an election ballot, but there’s no way all the details can be worked out and the language finalized before the filing deadline for putting them on this March’s primary ballot election. But there should be plenty of time to get that done between now and the filing deadline for next November’s general election.
Expect to hear a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth by the folks in those proposed SSAs if the Council starts moving in that direction. Expect to hear “Why not?” and “How soon?” replaced by: “We pay taxes so why should we have to pay extra to keep our basements dry?”
That’s the kind of changed tune you get when OPM becomes YOM:
“Your Own Money.”
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7 comments so far
Having lived in a home that had flooding issues, I can feel people’s pain. But instead of expecting the city where I lived to do anything about it, I kicked myself for not identifying the problem before I bought the house (actually the previous homeowner dishonestly didn’t disclose previous flooding) and then purchased expensive flood control. And when buying my current house in PR, one of my main criteria was finding a house that seemed unlikely to flood. But I also put in flood control measures just to be safe. It’s expensive but it’s not that hard — it’s called due diligence.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Hmmmm…exercising “due diligigence” before you make the single largest purchase most people ever make…wonder if that could ever catch on? But installing your own flood control using YOM rather than OPM…that’s positively revolutionary!
I would like to congratulate our elected officials Past, present, local, state and federal. As a group you have neglected and screwed up things sooooooo freakin’ bad that nowwhat qualifies as “infrastructure” becomes fodder for the OPM debate.
It actually would be a hell of a strategy. Simply neglect or avoid things for so long that they are just toooooo huge and unmanageable (pensions ring a bell???) and then just screw someone. A great strategy except as a group the are too inept to have actually planned it.
By the way,you stated the following.
” Unfortunately, it appears the entire Burke program would cost the City $100 million or more, which might make some kind of sense if it provided the entire City with protection from the 100-year floods we seem to be getting every year or so. But it doesn’t”………………duh!!!
There have been posts by me and others about how much would have to be spent to even make a dent in the flooding issues that have been ignored for decades. That anyone ever thought that the typical PR resident would have ever had the stomach for spending that kind of cash is a joke.
SO the Mayor and council have dances around for how many more years and paid Burke how much?? What are they going to do now?? NADA!
EDITOR’S NOTE: You really should come out of the “anon” closet and let all Park Ridge residents (or at least the readers of this blog) know the source of all these wonderful insights that you claim to have shared here, albeit only in reaction to posts by us and which you never shared in person with the Council. Time to stand up and take that bow you think you so richly deserve.
Lumping together “[p]ast, present, local, state and federal” officials as scapegoats for decades of stupidity and neglect is intellectually dishonest and outright moronic. Just focusing on Park Ridge, the current mayor has been in office only since May 2009, and he has been relentless in trying to get answers to (a) the condition of our infrastructure; (b) how it can be remedied and upgraded to address the problems we face; and (c) what it will cost. Unfortunately, City staff had virtually none of those answers until Schmidt and a few aldermen started asking them.
Had previous mayors and previous councils paid even a fraction of that attention for even a serious fraction of the time they were in office, we likely would have addressed these issues 5-10-15 years ago. Only one current alderman has been sitting on the Council for close to 5 years (Sweeney), so the rest of them did not contribute one lick to all the stupidity and neglect you are now beefing about.
Whether it turns out that “the typical PR resident” will have “the stomach for spending that kind of cash” for effective flood remediation remains to be seen. But until the flooding problem was seriously studied, both by a task force of residents and then by flood engineers, City government consisted of the blind leading the blind.
Finally, after 20 years or more of neglect, both the problems and the solutions have been identified so that informed decisions can be made.
I would also hope that the council and the public works department think long and hard on the subject before doing anything as my experience has been that consulting firm studies are always used so that someone can hide behind them, think finger in the wind.
The above comment comes from a long time resident who had never experienced flooding until it was decided to tie the Courtland street sewer line into the larger Glenlake avenue trunk line and then add the Peterson avenue sewer line and then add the Francis Parkway and the Granville sewer lines into the Glenlake trunk line and wonder of wonders now houses on Glenlake, including mine, get to share the flooding. How nice! Apparently not a lot of thought was given to maximum flow capacity of the Glenlake sewer line which is scary thought since most of those changes came about after Burke did the initial study.
Aside from my comments above the comment on OPM for flood control subsidy to individual home owners was initially the idea of the former public works director who was also backed by one of the other flood control panel members and that was coupled to a public relations fluff piece from the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate. Thankfully Mayor Dave correctly pointed out that Park Ridge does not have the tax base to support such subsidies and that thought helped killed the subsidy plan. Thanks goodness. OPM indeed!
If I recall correctly one of the issues with Park Ridge flooding is that the city is limited as to how much water it can pump out of Park Ridge, and into the Des Plaines river, by law, on a daily basis so therefore some form of retention is required during periods of heavy rain.
If the above is indeed so then it would seem that if some of the mentioned, big dollar, plans are to be put in play they should be funded by an SSA arrangement and not by those outside the areas.
The why do so from my point of view, and how selfish of me, is I’m already property taxed out and that basically none of what is proposed will help the area I live in. during the next so called 100 year rain storm.
EDITOR’S NOTE: We know nothing about tying/adding together all these sewer lines, but if it is as you describe it sounds like a recipe for disaster.
The SSA would appear to be the most fair way to deal with these problems, but we’re sure the freeloaders will turn out en masse when the Council votes on these various projects.
I don’t get water in my basement, other than seepage like many old homes. But North Prospect, from Cedar to Touhy, floods every time it rains heavily. It has done so for the past 30 yrs and PR claims that “there is nothing wrong” with the sewers there. The last heavy rain (May, I think) water went over the sidewalks and into many front yards. And yet, I didn’t see anyone’s sopped carpets and waterlogged items on the street come garbage day. How do those residents do it? Maybe on YOM.
Although it almost amusing at how many cars will attempt to drive through it, and get stuck (some people ruining their engines or flooding their cars), considering that Prospect is pretty much a major street at that point, you’d think that the city would do something about – or at least block it off.
Gotta love Park Ridge!
EDITOR’S NOTE: We think that the City should impose a qualifying requirement for anybody who wants to publicly advocate for City-paid flood control: proof that the speaker’s home has one of the two recognized types of “private” flood control installed, either overhead sewers or check valves. Anybody who has basement flooding problems and hasn’t installed such devices can be presumed to be too stupid or too cheap to have any kind of legitimate opinion.
$128 million or $78,000.00 per home under this proposal.
Out of the 1644 houses covered under this fix how many of them actually have flooding issues?
I would be guessing less than 10%. Hypothetically $775K per house for this project.
Is there a published # of people that applied for the state assistance during the last flood?
EDITOR’S NOTE: Good points and good questions.
Your response to 1:35 pm about not being allowed to complain about flood control unless you have installed your own private flood control system is exactly right. I’ve been at Council meetings where people stand up to complain about flooding but they don’t have overhead sewers or check valves, just sump pumps, like a sump pump (or two) won’t be overwhelmed by a 100-year flood.
Flooding is an issue close to my heart (2x times in 2013, and I have lived here a little over a year)….sooo…….
“We think that the City should impose a qualifying requirement for anybody who wants to publicly advocate for City-paid flood control: proof that the speaker’s home has one of the two recognized types of “private” flood control installed, either overhead sewers or check valves. Anybody who has basement flooding problems and hasn’t installed such devices can be presumed to be too stupid or too cheap to have any kind of legitimate opinion.”
I installed overhead sewers this summer. $17,000 and it required my basement floor to be dug up and gutted. Plus another $40 psf to refinish the basement to a minimal level of habitation. Dry rot from the 2008 flood activate from an improper remediation.
And I still think park ridge should spend the money to fix the flooding. this town floods for a variety of reasons in a variety of different areas. i had sewer backup. I know somebody who had flooding from water pressure from teh water table bursting through the concrete flooring in the basement and the sumps can’t keep up. There’s overland flooding, seepage, street flooding, you name it. It’s ridiculous and complex. This town has a reputation for flooding and it directly affects our property values. name one other town that gets sewer back up like Park Ridge. I can’t name any. even chicago isn’t as bad.
“Is there a published # of people that applied for the state assistance during the last flood?” I read some where, possibly something from the flood commission or whatever, that 1 out of 6 homes in Park Ridge have made a flood claim (federal assistance or private ins.) in the last 6 years. One of out six. That’s A LOT and is not typical. My sewer back insurance was raised by 50% this year. It’s over $1,100 a year for $10,000 in coverage. With a $1,000 deductible. And this is reasonably priced insurance. You do the math, and guess how often they expect my basement to flood.
EDITOR’S NOTE: If the City had embarked on the entire $100 million Burke “solution,” you still would have flooded 3-5 times during the past 5 years due to the fact that most of that “solution” only addresses 10-year flooding rather than the 100-year flooding we’ve repeatedly had. How does THAT “math” work for you?
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