Happy 2014!
As one year ends and another begins, it’s time to try to learn some lessons from the past and also look with hope and expectation to the future. This post will provide the retrospective, with the next post providing the prospective.
The single most significant local event in 2013 was the April election, and that election was dominated by two referendums – the first a referendum on Mayor Dave Schmidt’s first term, the second the Park District’s Youth Campus Park (“YCP”) referendum.
Both won, with Schmidt getting 62.06% (5,614 votes) and the YCP 55.89% (5,118) “yes” votes. But credit must be given where credit is due: the proponents of the YCP referendum passed the first multi-million dollar parks project in at least the past 30 years.
The more important of those two Election 2013 stories, however, is Schmidt’s – because of its potential long-term significance on City government.
Schmidt’s victory bested both his percentage and his vote total (56.3% and 4,897) achieved in his 2009 victory over then-incumbent Howard Frimark, ironically a strong backer of Schmidt’s 2013 opponent, Larry Ryles. That suggests Schmidt’s candid “Mayor No” approach touched a responsive chord in the average taxpaying voter.
Schmidt’s win was all the more noteworthy because Ryles was openly backed by the City’s three living former mayors (Ron Wietecha, Mike Marous and Howard Frimark) and by twenty-five former aldermen, purportedly representing 100 years of Council experience. Interestingly enough, one of those mayors and several of those aldermen actually supported Schmidt 4 years ago, although that support may have been primarily anti-Frimark.
Their support of Ryles appeared to be a mix of anti-Schmidt sentiment and “old way” nostalgia, with Ryles seemingly a poster boy for the social network-style “old way” – when he wasn’t a mere afterthought, as he was in those officials’ full-page ad in the March 27, 2013 issue of the Park Ridge Journal, where Ryles’ name wasn’t even mentioned until the very last of the ad’s 10 paragraphs.
Not surprisingly, those former City officials happened to be the perpetrators of the very messes – from infrastructure neglect to million dollar deficits and that financial white elephant (for the City’s taxpayers), the Uptown TIF – that Schmidt inherited. They clearly disliked Schmidt’s pointing out to the taxpayers all the shortcomings of their stewardship as he attempted to galvanize the public will into support for the reality checks and belt tightening needed to address all the problems those previous administrations had so effectively swept under the carpet.
Additional opposition came from something called the “Citizens for Non-Partisan Local Elections” (the “CNPLE”), the red-headed stepchild of the once-proud Homeowners Party founded by Marty Butler in the 1960s that cratered several years after Butler’s death. CNPLE dumped $10,000 of the $15,000 it inherited from the Homeowners’ war chest into the Ryles Campaign, to no effect.
Other significant opponents of Schmidt’s re-election were the City’s employee unions, one of which – the Operating Engineers representing the City’s Public Works employees – made what we understand to be the first-ever union political contribution to a City candidate: $1,000 to the Ryles Campaign.
Whether Schmidt’s lopsided re-election in the face of that kind of “political” opposition represents a paradigm shift away from the “old way” of Park Ridge government (Ryles referred to it, variously, as “hearts and hugs” and “hugs and handshakes”) driven by business and social relationships rather than any shared principles and policies of local governance, still remains to be seen.
But the fact that Schmidt won every single precinct but one in the face of such pointed opposition from those particular factions suggests that Schmidt’s “what does it cost, what is it worth, and do we really need it” approach to City government might be becoming institutionalized. And the prospect of the new Whole Foods and Mariano’s further rejuvenating the City’s moribund retail base doesn’t hurt, either.
The next three years should prove more than a little interesting.
To read or post comments click on title.