How many times have we heard some resident, when addressing a situation or condition that doesn’t meet his/her expectations, insist that “This is Park Ridge!” – with an almost palpable curl of the lip that adds the implicit rejoinder: “With the taxes we pay, this should be taken care of”?

That was one of the takeaways from the alley-paving portion of last Monday (June 7) City Council COW meeting, beginning at around the 2:01 mark of the meeting video.

The City has 53 gravel alleys remaining, which we understand to mean 53 blocks of such alleys. The City’s Public Works Dept. maintains those alleys by re-grading the gravel surfaces, generally without adding gravel so as not to build up the alley elevation.

For a number of years the City would pave 2 or 3 of these gravel alleys a year, with paving including a relief/storm sewer down the middle of the alley. That program was done via the creation of Special Service Areas (“SSA”s) voted on by the affected residents, with the City initially covering half the costs and the homeowner of the affected blocks paying the other half, over time, by an additional charge to their property taxes. That split later shifted to 75% City, 25% residents.

But the program was stopped altogether, along with a number of other non-essential expenses, once Mayor Dave Schmidt was elected and the City Council finally realized just how adversely the Uptown TIF albatross was affecting City finances.

But now some residents whose homes abut those alleys want them paved. And they are making variations of the “this is Park Ridge” argument in support of the City’s paving them – even though they bought their homes with the gravel alleys and, as best as we can tell, never received any firm commitment from the City to pave them.

And as is often the case with these long-delayed projects, some of the residents are now calling the paving of these alleys “needs” rather than wants.

Why are we not surprised?

Public Works director Wayne Zingsheim guestimates that each block of alley (with relief sewer) will cost around $400,000 to pave. That comes to around $21 million, which just happens to be one of the figures (albeit one of the lower ones) bandied about as the cost to provide flood relief for Mayfield Estates and the Northwest Park area. And that would be for paving those alleys with plain old non-permeable concrete. That new environmentally-friendlier permeable pavement that has been used in places like Chicago and Highland Park would be significantly more expensive.

Even if those alley residents approved SSAs for their respective blocks, the cost to the rest of the City’s taxpayers would be $15.75 million at a 75%-25% cost split; or $10.5 million if the split would be 50%-50%. With that 50/50 split, the average resident on those affected blocks could be expected to pay around $10,000, not including interest, as his/her share of the project, presumably over several years.

Fortunately, Acting-Mayor Marty Maloney asked the right questions: “How do we pay for it, and what does it do to the flooding problem we have in the City?”

The first of those questions should be asked about EVERY project, big and small. Because that’s the question that politicians and bureaucrats rarely ask. And when they do, they also often answer it with whatever they think they can sell to a gullible public.

We look forward to seeing what City Staff comes back to the Council with in August, when this matter returns to the Council’s agenda. And then we’ll also see how much the residents with those gravel alleys are willing to pay for their paving “needs.”

Or how quickly those “needs” become mere “wants.”

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