I was struck by the comment Mr. Hamilton made about taxpayers paying attention to what their representatives are doing and wanted to put a thought out there.

I’m a former resident of Park Ridge, although my parents still live here. I remember when talk of the Uptown Development was at white heat, and there were residents stating in newspapers and at city meetings that they were adamantly opposed to what was being proposed. When all was said and done and the development went ahead anyway, there was a sense that those intent on having the project approved simply listened with blank faces and then went ahead and did what they wanted anyway.

I recently experienced a similar situation in the gated community where I currently live. This past summer, the Master Board and most of presidents of the individual condo associations proposed having an expensive new rec center built. There were at least three Master Board meetings jammed with angry residents insisting they didn’t want it. Residents also wrote and lobbied their condo board presidents. The project was approved anyway, with amazing speed.

It’s bad enough when representatives in the nation’s capitol act like they don’t have to answer to anybody — but one expects local governments to care about what their people think.

In the end it’s hard for the average person who’s working, raising a family, and trying to get through the day to day to shake off the feeling that some kind of insane hubris has taken over the people we trust to lead. I do pay attention to what they do and try to be involved as much as I can (not always easy to do as a single parent of a small child). I make phone calls and write letters.

Nevertheless, it often feels like it doesn’t make a difference. Is this the plan? Chip away at the peasants’ faith in the process until they give up trying to change anything?

Please know I’m not trying to make excuses for myself — just curious what you think.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We have local governments run on a day-to-day basis by bureaucrats making 6-figure salaries for full-time employment directly answerable only to very part-time elected officials, many of whom come to their positions wholly unprepared for the task and with the naive belief that those bureaucrats they are overseeing are altruistic, Mother Teresa-types who would never look for personal gain from their positions or take advantage of the elected officials’ inexperience and naivete to manipulate their decision-making.

Combine that with the fact that so many of our elected officials are “pleasers” who just want to be liked and, for the first time in their lives, have the power to make people like them by spending bundles of money that isn’t theirs, and you’ve got a highly-volatile and inherently unstable mixture of interests, attitudes and abilities that tends to produce what we keep getting.

And every time the “peasants” let themselves get tap-danced or stonewalled by either the bureaucrats or their elected officials, the system becomes more stacked in favor of the same old same old.

Conceptually, the Uptown TIF may not have been a bad deal. However, add in special interest, inept aldermen & mayor at the time along with a fundamentally WRONG design and implementation and we have a disaster. All TIF’s are not harmful.
To say they are is, a complete lie.

So, let’s assess where we are today.
* There has been no refinancing
* There has been no productive talks with other government entities
* There has been no effort to *increase* value to lessen the burden on taxpayers
* There has been no ideas implemented from the dedicated economic development task force.

So Yes, the Uptown TIF was a disaster, but the Mayor and pretty much his hand-picked council are now what 6 years in and nothing.

Every elected official starts with a problem, so are they solving it, or just complaining about it?

I appreciate Alderman Knight’s letter. It’s great having elected officials want to be transparent and speak to his constituents.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Conceptually, the Uptown TIF was wrong from the start because the TIF property did not satisfy the “but for” test; i.e., “but for” the TIF, that area would not be redeveloped. It was a “Richie Daley”-style buddy-TIF deal.

It also was wrong because the City bailed out Bredemann by over-paying for his Uptown car dealership properties when his manufacturers were telling him those properties didn’t suit their needs and he was going to have to relocate. Then the City underpriced the property it sold to developer PRC. And because overpaying and underpricing just weren’t quite enough stupidity, the City agreed to contribute too many millions of dollars to the development with no practical ability to recoup it or profit from it.

Assessing where we are today:
* There has been no refinancing because the first wave of the General Obligation bonds only recently became refinanceable on a one-time basis, but (according to the former finance director, and not controverted by others) the recent uptick in interest rates reduced the economic incentive for refinancing them at this time;
* There have been no productive talks with other government entities because those other entities have no incentive to cut a deal with the City to take less than what they’re entitled to under their respective contracts;
* There has been no effort to *increase* value to lessen the burden on taxpayers because you can’t increase the value of that now-developed property other than by tearing it down and starting over;
* There have been no ideas implemented from the dedicated economic development task force because, as we wrote in our 02.26.13 post, https://publicwatchdog.org/archives/2013/02/26/meet-the-new-retail-same-as-the-old-retail/, they came up with no ideas worth implementing.

Some problems are solveable only at some unacceptable cost; e.g., Citywide flooding. Add to that list the Uptown TIF and the projected $20 million deficit by 2027.

Speaking of tax levies and paying attention to what your legislators are doing, the State Senate just passed a bill sponsored by MY state senator, John Mulroe, and supported by Dan Kotowski, which takes away from the City the right to determine how many firefighters it needs. That decision is now ultimately in the hands of an unelected arbitrator. So if and when that unelected arbitrator tells us we need to hire a few extra firemen we don’t want or need at a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars a year, and we have to raise property taxes to pay for that unfunded mandate foisted on us by those two and their pals in Springfield, you will know whom to thank.

EDITOR’S NOTE: You can’t expect either of those gold-dust twins not to deliver the “quo” for the “quid” they already got from the firefighters union.

p.s. this just adds insult to injury, because we already had to raise taxes to help pay for increased police and fire pensions, ANOTHER unfunded mandate care of Springfield.

Just drove by city hall a few minutes ago. There is a large inflatable rat by the side entrance along Cortland. Now there is something ya don’t see every day!!!!

EDITOR’S NOTE: That’s Local 150’s protest rat. They stick them in front of places where they have a beef with the owners or tenants.

Solutions?…waitng for your response.
You can’t make chicken soup out of chicken shit man.

EDITOR’S NOTE: How profound. Did you come up with that all by yourself?

OK ‘Dog, point taken… the chicken reference wasn’t the best.

That said, Solutions? writes as if there is some magic wand hidden away that if found can solve all of the TIF issues. And that’s just not true.

You responded in a very concise and logical manner.

I just wonder if Solutions? has a response to you. Because if he/she does I’d love to hear it.

Should the City Council and the City Manager and staff keep looking for ways to minimize the hurt the TIF puts on the City? For sure.

And my impression as an infrequent attendee to meetings, but as one who pays some attention, is that they are doing that. Can they all move faster… again, for sure.

That said, the City is contractually stuck with a crappy TIF and set of intergovernmental agreements that it can’t just walk away from. And the long run cost will be in the range of the $25 million that’s been talked about.

Refinancing debt, efforts to “increase” value (whatever that means) and econ dev will be nibbling at the edges of the total long run cost of the TIF.

Minimizing the cost is something to be pursued by all means. Eliminating them in any really meaningful fashion is pretty well impossible.

EDITOR’S NOTE: That’s just about it in a nutshell.

Meanwhile, the boobs, rubes and rascals that put all this Uptown TIF nonsense together and locked the City into all these bad deals have vanished without a trace – other than when they rose out of the mist, Brigadoon-like, for one brief moment last year to give their 100-years-of-government-mopery endorsement of Schmidt’s opponent.

We suspect that a few of them try to get their licks in with occasional snarky anonymous comments on this blog, but so long as they aren’t in local government any longer the taxpayers are way ahead of the game.

Ald. Knight is to be commended for taking the time and effort to help inform the City’s taxpayers in greater detail about why the tax levy is going up. This goes to show how bad decisions with long term consequences (the construction of permanent structures, the issuance of long-term debt/bonds) hog-tie elected officials many years later, after the people who did these deeds are long gone from office and treating those decisions as orphans.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Yes, it’s interesting, although not at all surprising, that the self-exiled Ron Wietecha and his still-in-residence successors, Mike Marous and Howard Frimark, don’t show up at any City Council meetings to explain or defend their support for the boneheaded Uptown TIF “investment” into which they and their Council accomplices locked the City and its taxpayers; or to offer THEIR “solutions” to the messes they caused.

Mr. Mayor. you preach on transparency and honesty. You need to get your facts straight before you do so:

HB5485 doesn’t automatically make an arbitrator make the city hire more fire personnel, it simply makes it a mandatory subject or bargaining. In other words, if a fire union wants to talk about it at the table, management just can’t say no anymore. If you would have listened and comprehended what Ald. Sweeney said last night rather than just blow off all his comments like you usually do, he gave a clear explanation.

Also, the pension crisis was not created by police officers and firefighters. It was created by elected officials years ago failing to make pension payments. Have you ever heard of a police or firefighter missing or skipping a pension payment. I think not.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Yes, the pension crisis WAS created by police officers and firefighters – and teachers, administrators and everyone else who pays public-sector union dues and empowers their public-sector union leadership to collude and horse-trade political contributions and other favors with the corrupt, almost entirely Democratic politicians who have underfunded those pensions because they are constitutionally guaranteed, so that they can use that money to pay higher wages and/or provide better benefits that aren’t constitutionally guaranteed.

And the pension crisis also WAS created by a corrupt and collusive pension program that enables public employees – including police officers and firefighters – to pay in just a tiny fraction of the benefits they expect to receive over their retired lifetimes, dwarfing what ALL private sector employees will get from Social Security and what MOST of them will get from their non-guaranteed 401(k)s. E.g., many/most public employees can/will get back the equivalent of their LIFETIME pension contributions in just the first couple of years of retirement.

You have written about how our officials should tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It sounds like Ald. Knight, unlike most of his predecessors who brought us these various messes, it taking that advice to heart. Good for him, and good for us.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As best as we can tell, Ald. Knight is the first Council finance chair to do anything like this, just like Mayor Schmidt was the first mayor to veto stupid, profligate and/or wasteful Council legislation.

Of course, that ticks off the tax/borrow/spend-ers who would prefer to keep the taxpayers in a “mushroom” state: in the dark and covered with manure.

Mr/Ms Get Your Facts…

You should take your own advice.

Please go back and read what I said. I said the law would take the right to decide fire department staffing levels away from the city…TRUE. I said that the decision is ultimately in the hands of an unelected arbitrator…TRUE. I said that IF an unelected arbitrator forced us to hire more personnel than what we decided was necessary, then we would have to raise property taxes to pay for it…SADLY AND EMPHATICALLY TRUE. And I said (although in fewer words) that IF that happens, I hope the taxpayers who have to pay the freight for this unholy alliance between the public employee unions and the people we elected to represent us, not them, will be held accountable…ABSOLUTELY TRUE.

Regarding what Alderman Sweeney said, I believe he offered this little tidbit: no arbitrator has ordered a municipality to hire firefighters it did not think were necessary. OK. Does anybody see the problem with that statement? Anyone?

Here is the problem: the State Senate voted to CHANGE the law. Before the law (assuming Quinn signs it), the arbitrator did not have that power. Now he/she will. I am at a loss as to why I have to explain that.

EDITOR’S NOTE: You have to explain that, Mr. Mayor, because the special interests that currently are collecting salaries comparable to the MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME of the people who are paying those salaries, and who will be collecting in the $2-3 million range of constitutionally-guaranteed pension benefits, don’t like to have their sweet-deal salaries, benefits, pensions and/or STAFFING publicized or questioned.

I was actually wondering why I had to explain Sweeney’s comment. He said an arbitrator had never done it before. And I had to explain to “Get Your Facts” that was because the old law would not have allowed it. The new law will. It is pretty simple; it is not a Common Core math problem.

I think it is also appropriate to point out that every single major newspaper (that I know of) and every single organization of municipalities in this State urged the Senate to defeat this bill because it was bad for the taxpayers and was no more than a gift to one of the their biggest campaign contributors, the firefighters union.

But since you prefer people to stay on topic, I will relate it back to your post. For too long, elected officials on all levels have forgotten who put them there, the taxpayers. Once in office, an unfortunately high percentage of elected officials shift their focus primarily to getting reelected. And that means their attention shifts primarily to the needs and wants of special interest groups, political contributors, friends, business associates, etc. That was going on in Park Ridge for many many years, culminating in the Uptown TIF fiasco, and it is still going on in Springfield…on steroids.

And whether it is the TIF or the long list of unfunded mandates handed to us by Springfield, it is the taxpayers who end up being the big losers.

There, now we are back to the original post.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Don’t forget those elected officials, more on the local level than on the Springfield level, who so desperately want/need to be liked that they will wasted boatloads of taxpayer dollars just to get their heads patted and their bellies scratched by those special interests.

Anon 9:37,

I assume when “Solutions?” says “there has been no effort to *increase* value” [of the TIF] he/she is operating under the assumption that the city can somehow control the free market (possibly by doing something as misguided as hiring an Economic Development position with a six-figure salary?)

It’s ridiculous, but I talk to plenty of people who buy into this logic and say things like “THEY should have gotten a bar to open there instead of Charles Schwab!”, as if the problem was simply that the city didn’t try hard enough. Not that the second best option was a mattress company with sales tax generation projected to be even lower than the $26K guarantee from Schwab, due to the fact than an existing tenant (most likely Houlihans) has a stipulation built into their lease preventing any new “American restaurant and bar” concepts from opening in the development.

What guys like Ald. Knight, Mayor Schmidt, Trizna all get is that this should have always been a private sector problem from the start. The city should have sold the land to a developer for a fair price, used the proceeds to shore up the General Fund, and let them put their private-equity skin in the game for a couple decades. At least when Glenview botched their “Glen” TIF district in they same fashion, they were either smart or lucky enough to save some undeveloped land until well after 2007 and sell it to Willow Creek Church and a housing developer recently, which allowed them to drastically pay down the debt and save millions in interest. Park Ridge is not so lucky and really, austerity is the best we can do now.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As one of the folks you name as “get[ting]” how Uptown should have been developed, this editor can assure you that getting it isn’t all that tough – so long as you’re not looking to enrich some cronies and/or looking to play some third-rate quid pro quo semi/quasi-partisan politics.

Alderman Knight is an excellent marketing strategist: Leading with the utterly terrifying 23% increase and then, after half the population has stroked out, clarified that he didn’t mean that your tax bill will go up 23% but that it will go up some micro-percentage that results in a $12,000 bill (not par for most small, frame, senior-owned houses) increasing a whopping $330 a year. Yes, $330 is real money. But c’mon. What possible benefit can there be in casting this as The End Times? As for the long-lamented TIF, it clearly has enormous political value to the current City elected officials as the excuses for doing nothing to reduce the impact are as lame as lame can be. You say that because refinancing won’t result in as compelling a savings as a few years ago, it’s not worth doing. You who rejoices at every dollar scrimped off of City expenses would NEVER say that under any other circumstances. You say that there have been no productive talks with D64, D207 or the Park District because it’s not in their interest to negotiate with the City. But the Park District has offered several times to “horsetrade” unused/unneeded City properties and other neglected assets in exchange for the TIF obligation, and the Mayor immediately and indignantly pronounced that “blackmail.” End of negotiation. I’m sure things went equally well with the school districts. And the cherry on top of this horsemanure sundae of yours? The extensive work of a large and varied team of unpaid private sector experts who served at the Mayor’s pleasure on the Economic Development Advisory Task Force produced “nothing” of value — altho their careful and extensive recommendations are SOP with far more financially functional entities, private and public. So Park Ridge goes it alone again, bereft of all help but whatever the handful of johnny one-notes in office and their mediocre staff can come up with. Let the word go out: Keep the “failed” TIF a failure as long as possible!

EDITOR’S NOTE: The truth is what it is, and a 23% increase – whether it totals $330 or some other amount – is the truth. And Ald. Knight told it, unlike previous City officials who tried to hide or ignore it; and many Park District officials who can’t even explain multi-million dollar cost overruns on a project (the Youth Campus Park) that doesn’t even have its permits yet.

As we understand it the General Obligation bonds can only be refinanced once, so the City Council is wise in not blowing that one shot at refi when the current markets are such that the City won’t save enough to make it worthwhile. Of course, were it not for the boneheaded Uptown TIF that people like you defend despite its being indefensibly stupid or indefensibly dishonest, neither we nor the Council would be having these discussions.

Finally, the folly of the Economic Development Advisory Task Force (“EDATF”) was dealt with by our 05.17.12, 05.21.12 and 02.26.13 posts (the last embedded with a copy of the pathetically lame report rehashing tried-and-failed ideas). So nothing else need be said about that group and that effort – except to remind readers that many of those EDATF members were so totally out to lunch that they ripped the City Council for not paying the eleventh-hour, multi-million dollar tax-sharing bribe the Whole Foods property developer demanded – before dropping it when the City didn’t fold the way the EDATF members wanted.

Meanwhile, we await the first appearance at a City Council meeting by any of the mayors and aldermen who gave us the Uptown TIF, or of those EDATF members responsible for that half-baked report and advice, to provide a defense of their stupidity and/or malfeasance. But we’re not holding our breath because those kinds of folks only show up for praise and awards, not accountability for failure.

More horse pucks. You are simply and incontrovertibly wrong. Show us where the ideas put forth by the EDATF were retreads of “failed” previously tried ideas. Au contraire, they were only “failed” because they were decided to be so in advance of Park Ridge even making the faintest effort toward proven, standard economic development processes. Funding is nice, but if your immovable position is that there’s no point trying, then, yeah. “Failed” is the right word for the policy, the perspective, and the politics of it all.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Those EDATF folks who ripped on the Council for not paying Chody’s bribe demand gave up any and all credibility with that boneheaded move alone.

But if that’s not enough for you, try their attempt at resurrecting the uber-stupid facade-improvement program (scores of thousands of tax dollars given to private building owners to improve their buildings, but with nothing to show for it; see, e.g., the former Pines bldg.), and the just-plain stupid $100K-plus economic development director position that produced less than the employee cost, just for starters.

Oh, yeah, and the two most significant businesses to open in Park Ridge in decades – Whole Foods and Mariano’s – needed NONE of the EDATF’s suggestions.

I give up. You’re using the invisible cat defense again; the fact that you can’t see the cat proves that it’s there. We got two grocery stores without having to offer sweeteners, and that’s wonderful. Clearly Park Ridge has something to offer somebody running a retail sales-tax producing business. You know that the Mariano’s decision was personal payback to the Dominick’s fam, right? And Whole Foods got a wonderful location right….wait for it…UPTOWN. So the question then becomes for some of us, how many more retailers could we have attracted if we’d had a non-embarrassing website with useful talking points for businesses, a handout for prospects, testimonials from retailers who are making it here against all odds, etc. etc.? Not to mention if we’d implemented any of the other basics you find ridiculous from the Econ Devel Task Force’s work?
Of course your — aka the City’s — answer is, “none!” But every operation has competition and asking for the order is pretty basic. And we emphatically don’t, because it might cost us $50 at Kinko’s.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Fact: We got two big-time grocery stores – that kick the living crap out of Trader Joe’s, we’d bet – without offering ANYTHING, despite what the morons on the Economic Development Advisory Task Force were demanding.

As for “the Mariano’s decision” being “personal payback to the Dominick’s fam,” is Luca Brasi sleeping with the fishes again? Is somebody making the peace with the Tinaglias…uh, we mean the Tattaglias? Does Satriale’s still have the best hot gabagole (capicola)?

The taxpayers of Park Ridge were paying over $100,000 a year for a City employee whose job was to do nothing but gin up retail in Park Ridge and what did she get? Bupkus, and that was WITH stupid facade improvement giveaways. Read the EDATF’s report: it’s pathetic, something that probably couldn’t get a college marketing student a “B” as a term paper.

As Whole Foods and Mariano’s (“Sleeps with the fishes”) have proved, the right retailer who sees an opportunity to make a buck in Park Ridge will come here – without bribes. And all the bribe money in the world won’t lure solid businesses who DON’T see opportunity here.

Anon 12:13/2:50,

I don’t know all the members of the EDATF, but I do know about 1/3 personally and I would not call them “private sector experts” by any means. They are local business owners/management/CoC members who had a personal interest in suggesting measures that could benefit their own businesses (as well as the CoC) without having to work any of the costs into their own private marketing budgets.

The fundamental problem that they (and you) failed to consider is that due to the city only receiving a couple cents for every dollar spent on food/beverage and retail in PR, every dollar spent to promote ED needs to generate over 50-100x that amount in sales just to produce a net gain for the taxpayer. So that $50 you want to spend at Kinko’s has to create at least $2,500 in new retail sales or $5,000 of food/beverage sales. The $25,000 that was suggested in the EDATF report for improving the city’s website had better produce $1.25 million in new retail sales or $2.5 million in food sales. And it just goes up from there… you can run the multiples on a full-time ED coordinator position with benefits if you want (and remember that this wouldn’t be a one-time expense, but a yearly one!)

Really, the main thing the EDATF seemed qualified to discuss and report on was their own collective experiences opening and running businesses and how that process could be improved in the future when dealing with the bureaucrats in local government. In the report you will notice that this discussion was, not surprisingly, pushed to the very bottom of the last page (page 14, under the title “Review Process”) and is the only section in the report that has a $0 budget request. Whoa…who would have guessed that simple requests for more accommodating policies would be cheaper and therefore much less fashionable than subsidies!?

EDITOR’S NOTE: You are exactly right about what appears to be the personal economic interests of many of the members of the EDATF and the lack of private sector expertise beyond those personal economic interests.

You also are exactly right about what kind of ROI the City needs from these “investments” in retail, etc. We have made that argument in the past, however – most recently in connection with fees for Library computers and programs, in response to the parasites’/apologists’ arguments that the City will lose money now that when the parasites who no longer come to the Library for $3 worth of free computer usage won’t be spending the necessary $30 at Starbucks/Hallmark/Pickwick/Fannie Mae.

The well coordinated effort by the elite MTRRP crew to fix it so 1. The Park District deal went through, then 2. the Library scam and finally 3. the huge city dump on the property tax increase all points to the same direction; the PR clique still runs the show from behinds the scenes. Well planned. Yet, now you have played out your hand. Maybe we do need to elect those folks who do listen and can lead us. The three amigos aka – Metra rough riders have been planning these back room deals for sometime.
One thing is for sure….you can’t blame the other party for your disaster. Enjoy your Christmas tax package people.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Youth Campus Park project and the Library tax increase were based on referendum votes by the taxpayers, so you would have to be borderline demented to call them “back room deals.” But the reference the “the elite MTRRP crew” and the “you can’t blame the other party for your disaster” is a clue to who you are: Gene, fess up!