To hear Park Ridge City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton tell it, he and his staff have been asking Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District 64 since January for information the City needs to verify and confirm the amounts D-64 claims the City owes for the outstanding annual TIF payment (a/k/a the “TIF Bribe”) before it will pay this year’s bill.

To hear D-64 Board president Tony Borrelli and D-64 attorney (and former D-64 board president) Dean Krone tell it, D-64’s staff has reached out to the City 11 times since January to help the City figure out exactly what the City owes.

Either somebody’s lying, or somebody’s incompetent. Oh, wait…maybe it’s both.

It shouldn’t take four months to get data from D-64, especially since it appears to be data D-64 itself actually needed to calculate what it claims the City owes it for this year’s TIF Bribe. So either City staff is lying about the legitimacy of its requests and the diligence of its efforts, or D-64 is lying about the promptness and completeness of its responses.

Or maybe both.

But there’s one simple way to resolve that issue: a joint meeting of the City Council and D-64 Board, with senior staff present.

Hold it at City Hall next Thursday night – so as not to conflict with a possible Game 5 in the Blackhawks’ conference final series with the LA Kings – and let the respective sides explain their positions and make their arguments face-to-face, in public and on television, with the press scribbling away.

Let Hamilton look right at Supt. Phil Bender and tell him what he needs and why. Let Bender tell Hamilton when it was produced, or when it will be produced, or why it won’t.

Let City Finance Director Kent Oliven go toe-to-toe with D-64’s Rebecca Allard on the completeness or incompleteness of the financial data that’s already been exchanged, if any, and the relevance of what’s still missing.

Let City attorneys Everette “Buzz” Hill and TIF-expert Matthew Welch debate the legal issues of this dispute with their D-64 counterparts, Dean Krone and Ares Dalianis.

And then let Mayor Dave Schmidt and the City Council discuss with Board President Tony Borrelli and the D-64 Board, then and there, how this dispute is going to be resolved with the least aggravation and expense to their collective taxpayers.

All of it in public, on television and video-recorded for posterity. No back-room deals, no closed-door sessions, no behind-the-scenes whispering, no he-said-she-said silliness, no sound bites, no spin, no propaganda.

That means D-64’s minister of propaganda and spin, Bernadette Tramm, can stay home – because the City has no equivalent taxpayer-paid public relations flak with whom she can spar about the “message” of the meeting.

It’s way past time for cutting through all the posturing and other nonsense that seems to have plagued this effort since at least January and has pushed the respective governmental bodies closer to stupid litigation than to wise resolution. That means more light and less heat.

Which brings us to Board Pres. Borrelli’s e-blast Monday afternoon about the TIF dispute.

We think highly of Borrelli. We endorsed his election to the Board three years ago, and we have praised many of the initiatives he has brought to that previously-opaque and unaccountable backwater body – although we harshly criticized the way he and “his” Board mishandled the process of hiring the new superintendent, including the closed session discussions of how much to pay her.

Unfortunately, Borrelli’s blast seems to have borrowed liberally from the Bernadette Tramm playbook of political tactics, misdirection and obfuscation. It responds to the detailed points of City Mgr. Hamilton’s 5-page April 7, 2014 letter not with specific counter-points but with D-64 – aggrandizing bloviation that, distilled to its essence, demands that the City keep on making what may be TIF Bribe overpayments simply because it has done so without question for the past 11 years:

“We would describe the April 7 letter from the City as an emphatic ‘no’ to our simple and reasonable request that the City live up to its financial obligations – as it has done routinely each year since 2003. Certainly, the April 7 letter was not an invitation for further dialogue and compromise.”

If you can’t see B. Tramm’s fingerprints all over statements like that, you really haven’t been paying attention to the propaganda being churned out by D-64 the last few years to cover up mediocre performance at premium prices.

Eliminating, or at least reducing, that kind of propaganda is yet another reason why the taxpayers deserve a face-to-face joint City and D-64 meeting about this TIF dispute immediately, as in next Thursday, May 29.

And remember: Ms. Tramm isn’t invited.

UPDATE (05.23.14) Instead of the very public meeting we suggested in this post, we understand that there was a meeting this morning between the City’s bureaucrats and D-64s bureaucrats, along with their respective legal counsel.  And, disappointingly, it was not a “public” meeting; i.e., neither the public nor the press were invited to attend.

Of course, that’s just the way the bureaucrats like it.  Public scrutiny, or “sunshine,” is about as welcomed by bureaucrats as it is by vampires.

Nevertheless, we can only hope that the same bureaucrats who have so ineptly handled this situation over the past several months have somehow become enlightened and will be able to make some serious progress toward getting this situation resolved. But the fact that it’s being done behind closed doors makes us wonder just how much the taxpayers are being sold down the river.

Judging by City Mgr. Shawn Hamilton’s latest missive to D-64 Supt. Phil Bender, a May 22, 2014 letter, we’re still not sure.

The letter points out some of the boneheaded terms of the existing intergovernmental agreement between the City and D-64 which our City officials back in 2003-04 were only too happy to sign off on in order to lock in the TIF Bribe – which it sounds like the City is trying to renegotiate.

But one idea that we hadn’t heard discussed all that vigorously by the Council until now is actually being presented in Hamilton’s letter as a proposal: “The City requests the taxing districts to cooperate in the legislative extension of the TIF term by 12 years.”

We’ll have to go back to the Kane McKenna report to look into all the pluses and minuses of such a 12-year extension.

But from our knowledge of TIFs, that’s never a good thing.

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