This is our last post for 2015, so we’re looking back at the year that’s ending and forward to the year ahead – the former with profound sadness, the latter with perhaps unjustified hope.

The sadness of 2015 relates to the sudden death of Mayor Dave Schmidt on March 4.

Mayor Dave was a larger-than-life figure with an almost ferocious joie de vivre. He truly loved Park Ridge and being its mayor, whether it meant poring over draft ordinances at 1:00 a.m., attending his third or fourth charitable event of the week, cutting the ribbon for a new business, teaching a little City civics to 4th graders, or laughing at a giant inflatable rat with a “Time To Veto Dave Schmidt” sign in front of City Hall.

He was a man-child in the best sense of that term, able to throw a curled-lip glower or to crack an impish smile with equal ease. And he seemed as “at home” in a bare-knuckle political brawl as in his regular seat at Orchestra Hall listening to his beloved CSO.

More importantly, in his almost six years in the big chair at The Horseshoe he changed business-as-usual at City Hall – most definitely for the better, and hopefully for the long-term.

He won the office by articulating his philosophy of Honesty, Integrity, Transparency and Accountability (“HITA”); and by actually doing what his three predecessors (and so many other local elected officials) merely talked about: putting the taxpayers first..

That made him some enduring enemies – including those three predecessors and the few handfuls of former aldermen who also endorsed his last opponent, for whom “business as usual” pretty much maxed out both their interest level and abilities. But it made Mayor Dave even more friends and supporters – the proof of that being the increase in both his vote total (from 4,897 to 5,601) and his winning percentage (from 56.3% to 62.06%) from his 2009 election to his 2013 re-election, while at the same time generating a larger voter turnout.

Mayor Dave’s principled way of doing the City’s business also attracted a group of aldermen who shared his principles and his priorities. Consequently, his passing did not spark the petty partisan politicking, horse-trading and jockeying for position that followed Wietecha’s dark-of-night resignation in September 2003 and led to acting mayor Marous and his Uptown TIF boondoggle. Instead, these aldermen checked their egos at the door and unanimously chose Ald. Marty Maloney as acting mayor, an office Maloney accepted with the pledge to treat the next two years as “the rest of Mayor Dave’s term.”

And that’s the way it has been, a City government directed by principles and pragmatism instead of preening and profligacy.

So as the clock ticks down on 2015 we offer one last “ave atque vale” to Mayor Dave.

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Looking ahead to 2016, the one thing we hope to see more of is HITA.

And nowhere is that more needed than from those two Star Chambers masquerading as Park Ridge-Niles Elementary School District 64 and Maine Township High School District 207.

That’s because while the City will continue to struggle valiantly to overcome the weight of the Uptown TIF debt and the difficulties of coming up with a cost-effective solution to the flooding problem, the last thing we need is for what passes as “leadership” at D-64 and D-207 to continue to fiddle while their schools’ objectively-measurable performance and rankings continue to slide in comparison to those other affluent suburbs competing with Park Ridge for long-term home-owning residents.

Superintendents Laurie Heinz and Ken Wallace, respectively, know that controlling the flow of information to the public is the single best way to: (a) end-run HITA; (b) dominate their feckless school boards; (c) manipulate the parents of their students; and (d) bamboozle the taxpayers while avoiding any accountability for their own highly-paid-but-mediocre performances. And if Heinz’s and Wallace’s own instincts in that regard aren’t quite up to the obfuscation tasks at hand, they both have taxpayer-paid propaganda ministers to assist them in Bernadette Tramm (D-64) and Dave Beery (D-207).

So GFL getting the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth out of those spinmeisters.

Too bad truth will be even more important, and less likely, in 2016 when it comes to D-64’s expected closed-session “negotiation” of a new contract with the Park Ridge Education Association (“PREA”), a/k/a, the teachers union.

Four years ago, then-board members John Heyde and Pat Fioretto hid in secretive closed sessions while giving the PREA a sweetheart deal that included “step” (longevity) and “lane” (continuing education) increases unrelated to either individual teacher performance or student performance. That put the taxpayers on the hook for starting salaries that increased over the contract’s four-year term from $45,780 to $48,582 for total out-of-the-box newbies, and from $101,374 to $107,579 for the most experienced. You can see the 2015 salaries for teachers, by name, by clicking here.

And remember: that’s just for 8-9 months of work, with no chance of D-64 packing up and relocating to Indiana, Wisconsin, or Mexico.

And also remember that it comes with those constitutionally-guaranteed pensions that can kick in as early as age 55, with annual COLA increases that carry the possibility of generating more income for teachers in retirement than they made while actually teaching.

See how your Social Security and 401(k) compare to that!

Unfortunately, the current D-64 Board is only marginally better than the one that gave away that sweetheart deal four years ago: Hang a bell around Heinz’s neck and president Tony Borrelli, vice-president Scott Zimmerman, Secretary Vickie Lee, and Bob Johnson would follow her anywhere, with little more than an occasional “moo.”

Even among “veteran” Dathan Paterno and newcomers Mark Eggemann and Tom Sotos, only Eggemann has regularly displayed any measurable HITA – voting against most of the unnecessary closed sessions and being the only vote against the recently-increased tax levy that will enable D-64 to continue to spend about as much to educate 4,500 kids as the City of Park Ridge spends to run the whole city of 37,000+ people: approximately $70 million.

With creatures of the dark Borrelli and Zimmerman reportedly heading the D-64 negotiating team, you should bet the “over” for what kind of contract the PREA will be able to wheedle out of them in the…wait for it…closed-session negotiations. After all, it was in closed sessions that Borrelli and Zimmerman hashed out the one-year, $250,000 contract extension and raise for Heinz – based on allegedly outstanding mid-year and year-end “reviews” that not only weren’t published to the taxpayers before the deal was cooked, but which we understand weren’t even given to Eggemann or Sotos before they were asked to approve the deal.

And which still can’t be found anywhere in the public domain as best as we can tell.

With D-64 and D-207 grabbing almost 70% of our property tax bills, versus the City’s roughly 10%, we’re hoping taxpayers in 2016 finally will start figuring out where more of their limited attention should be paid, and where the most basic HITA is so sorely lacking.

Here’s hoping that situation can be substantially corrected in the coming year.

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