Only two of the four City aldermanic races are contested: incumbent Alds. Dan Knight (5th Ward) and Marty Maloney (7th Ward) are running unopposed, although we heartily endorse their re-elections and trust they will continue the solid efforts that characterized their first terms…and even take them up a notch to compensate for the loss of Mayor Dave Schmidt’s leadership.

In the First Ward relative newcomer Andrea Cline is facing off with longtime resident John Moran to fill the seat being vacated by Ald. Joe Sweeney, while business consultant Bob Wilkening is running against teacher Rick Van Roeyen in what we believe to be the first contested race the moribund Third Ward has seen in perhaps two decades.

All four of them are personable folks who seem sincere when proclaiming their interest in improving the community. But personality and sincerity should never be enough when it comes to the public trust inherent in the offices they seek. And it’s even less satisfactory when those offices require dealing with problems that have built up through two decades (1990-2009) of neglect and mismanagement by their equally personable and seemingly sincere predecessors.

We’ll start with the Third Ward race by noting that it’s basically one hand clapping – with that hand belonging to Wilkening. If Van Roeyen’s campaign were a military jet, most radar screens couldn’t even “ping” it.

Van Roeyen’s website states that, “[i]f elected, [he] would create a form…that would be used to poll the 3rd Ward to gain insight into the true will of the citizens [he] would be representing.” That sounds a whole lot like finger-to-the-wind politics of the worst kind: reliance on subjective surveys and questionnaires instead of objectively verifiable referendum votes. And if Van Roeyen really wanted constituent input, he should have created and circulated such a form as soon as he filed his nominating petitions months ago.

Wilkening, on the other hand, appears to have one principle focus: flooding. As he said in his candidate profile in the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“Q&A: Park Ridge’s 3rd Ward Candidates,” March 24) in response to the question of why he was running: “Because Park Ridge is now facing serious challenges as it struggles to deal with an aging and undersized sewer system.” And his website bears that out.

Combine that with his belief that “the City Council and staff spend far too much time talking about subjects that they should find ways to resolve more rapidly,” however, and it might not be too much of a stretch to wonder whether he will adopt a “ready, fire, aim” approach to flood control – especially since his endorsement of long-term debt to pay for it is not accompanied by an endorsement of referendum(s) to measure public support and to legitimize whatever multi-million dollar projects and/or programs might be undertaken.

Notwithstanding these concerns, however, Wilkening is running the far more active campaign and gets our endorsement.

Our toughest endorsement decision this election cycle, by far, is the First Ward aldermanic race. That’s why we have waited and watched this race play out on almost a daily basis over the past several weeks as the candidates’ positions have continued to evolve from the vanilla-vs.-vanilla match-up of a mere six or eight weeks ago.

That battle seems to have effectively morphed into a contest between flooding (Cline) v. money (Moran).

Cline brings technical expertise as a “Stormwater Management Professional” (per her website) for the Lake County Stormwater Management Commission. We’d venture a guess that she has forgotten more about stormwater management than Moran and the seven guys currently sitting around The Horseshoe, cumulatively, have ever known. She and her supporters – especially in the flood-impacted areas of Park Ridge both within and without the First Ward – tout that expertise and experience as her principal qualification.

If Park Ridge’s flooding problem were just a collection of technical engineering challenges, Cline’s specialized knowledge might very well make her the better choice. But like so many of Park Ridge’s problems, flooding is far more a money problem than a technical engineering one.

Christopher B. Burke Engineering (“Burke”), for whom Cline once worked, has already come up with several alternatives for the three most significant problem areas. Per Burke’s 2013 plan, 100-year flood protection for 23 Mayfield Estates properties would cost $3.3 million, or $143,000 per property. The 418 properties in the Northwest Park area could get 100-year protection for $16.6 million, or approximately $40,000 per property. But the 680 properties in the Country Club area would get only 10-year protection at a cost of $48.7 million, or approximately $72,000 per property.

That’s around $70 million, not counting debt service, to protect roughly 1,100 out of over 14,000 Park Ridge households – with no guarantees that those projects will actually solve those three problems, or not exacerbate flooding problems elsewhere in the City.

And once that $70 million of bonded debt is locked in, how long should the other 13,000 households have to hang fire on their own flooding while the City pays off that $70 million?

Cline claims to have obtained in excess of $2.5 million of grants, and she suggests we can pay for these projects with federal, state and county grants, as well as low-interest loans. But she hasn’t even begun to spell out with any specificity what kind of grants she’s talking about (e.g., would they be matching grants requiring the City’s taxpayers to cough up an equal amount of funding?), their availability, the criteria for getting them, and how soon they might be forthcoming.  Meanwhile, the City already has applied for $27 million of such grants, but we have yet to hear the jingle-jangle of grant-generated OPM pouring into the City treasury.

So Cline’s funding plans, such as they are, sound a little too much like politician-style pie-in-the-sky.

Moran, on the other hand, has been talking on his website about “cost-sharing” funding arrangements, while also suggesting at campaign stops and on social media that SSAs (Special Service Areas) and referendums could play a role in the kind of bonded debt that would be needed if those grant windfalls don’t arrive – and maybe even if they do. Given the financial condition of our state and Crook County, we believe Moran’s approach is the far more practical and realistic one.

And it’s also the more courageous one, as evidenced by the barbecuing he is getting from the folks in those three affected areas who would derive the most direct and substantial economic benefit, through increased property values, if the City were to mortgage its future – Uptown TIF-style – to undertake those projects, especially if it did so without a referendum.

Dealing with our City-wide flooding problem is going to be a painful, frustrating and very expensive proposition. It will demand a unified purpose and an iron-clad City-wide commitment, the likes of which most of us have not seen in our lifetimes. Appeasing special interests or down-playing the substantial long-term costs to the City’s taxpayers is not the way to build the support needed.

That’s why we believe John Moran to be the better choice for 1st Ward alderman.

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Four years ago we endorsed Mel Thillens, Mary Wynn Ryan and Jim O’Brien (collectively, “TRO”) over a slate of candidates sponsored by Local 73 of the Service Employees International Union (“SEIU”) – because we didn’t, and still don’t, believe it’s any healthier to vote employee union lackeys onto the Park Board than it is to vote teachers union lackeys onto our school boards.

TRO won handily. And now they’re up for re-election against one challenger: Cindy Grau. So just like in the D-64 race, the only question about this Park Board race is: who will be the odd man/woman out?

In a number of respects TRO have done a good job overseeing the day-to-day management of the Park District. The facilities generally appear to be well-maintained. And the District has followed the City’s lead in reducing the number those damnable closed sessions where cowardly public officials try to hide their activities from scrutiny by the people who elected them.

We also have to give a big Watchdog bark-out to the District’s having become increasingly self-sufficient, with fees and other earned revenue increasingly replacing property tax revenue. That suggests the “marketplace – i.e., the consumer – believes the District’s facilities and programs provide good value for the price. That’s very good.

But in a stretch of less than six months, TRO and the rest of their Board buried the District in approximately $20 million of long-term debt, $6.3 million of which went to build a third-rate Centennial water park usable for only 3 months a year without even an advisory referendum. And, worse yet, that involved a dishonest bait-and-switch: the District cut what reportedly was the most desired feature of the design – a “lazy river” – because it apparently lacked sufficient non-referendum debt to build it.

Why did TRO support incurring so much debt on such a cut-rate facility? Because they were too contemptuous of the taxpayers, and also too cowardly, to do what every park board since 1992 had done: ask the voters for approval of such a major debt-funded capital expenditure through a referendum.

So the taxpayers are now saddled with that water park debt which, along with the voter-approved Youth Campus/Prospect Park debt, will hogtie the District economically for the next decade and beyond. By then, however, TRO will certainly be gone from the Board. And we wouldn’t be surprised if one or more of them will have left town altogether.

That brings us back to the present and Tuesday’s election…and the question of who should be left without a seat when the music stops.

Frankly, TRO’s contempt for the taxpayers – in our book, the No. 1 sin among the 7 deadly sins of local government – curbs our enthusiasm for any of them. That contempt suggests they possess the typical politicians’ cynical view that taxpayers/voters are just pawns and dupes – to be exploited for their votes for candidates like TRO, but to be deprived of a vote on such major projects, expenditures and debt as the water park.

But we also can’t endorse Grau.

From everything we can gather from her website and articles about her in the local press, she would actually work to reverse the positive economic trend (save for that aforementioned $20 million water park bonded debt boondoggle) at the Park District. Although she makes the token one-time reference to her being “fiscally responsible,” both newspapers have reported her recent complaints about the very user fees that have made the District more economically self-sufficient and less dependent on the taxpayers.

She was critical of the fact that “[w]e make the users pay for camps and programming” (Keeping Costs Down Key To Park Ridge Park Candidates,” Park Ridge Journal, April 1) and she “could agree to a freeze in program costs” that would shift the burden of increasing program expenses onto the taxpayers. (“Park Ridge Park District candidates talk taxes, fees and flood-relief,” Herald-Advocate, March 31).

In other words, she would become the newest Park Board BFF to those special interest folks who don’t mind higher taxes for everybody (instead of user fees) so long as they can use the facilities and services enough to exhaust their tax share AND burn up the Other People’s Money (“OPM”) contributed by the vast majority of taxpayers who under-use Park District facilities and programs.

Which makes her a gold-dust twin of Ms. Wynn Ryan.

Notwithstanding WR’s flier trumpeting her “cost-effective” and “bang for the buck” attitude, she has never seen a local government that couldn’t be bigger, do more, and spend as much OPM as she can get her hands on – whether during her two years on the City Council (2005-07), during her eight years on the Park Board (2007-15), or as a member of the City’s Economic Development Task Force.

For her first four years on the Park Board (2007-2011) she led the fight to keep Oakton Pool open and, in the process, burned off about $300,000 of taxpayer money in operating losses. She also can be counted on to support annual property-tax-to-the-max levies like that 5.97% for 2012, even though she had a last-minute change of heart – most certainly campaign-related – and ended up voting against this year’s max levy. And the same H-A article that reported Grau’s complaints about fees, Ryan brags about “increasing the number and variety of free programs,” which she tries to spin into a kind of loss-leader marketing ploy.

And just today, campaigning on the Park Ridge Citizens Online Facebook page, Wynn Ryan shamelessly pandered to one of our community’s premier entitlement queens, Kathy Panattoni Meade, by saying she (Wynn Ryan) is “doing what [she] can” to reduce the price of the District’s “Beyond the Bell” child-care/babysitting service.

So coming at this race from the perspective of a non-endorsement based on who could do the most economic damage to the Park District in the next four years, that dubious distinction comes down to a classic Hobson’s Choice of Wynn Ryan or Grau. Neither one of them seems to have an intuitive grasp of the fact that government HAS NO MONEY other than what it takes from the taxpayers.

Unfortunately, one of them has to win.

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