Back on March 9 of last year, we published our post: “A Stump Is Not A Tree, A Shed Is Not A House.”

On February 9, Circuit Court Judge Celia Gamrath effectively agreed in upholding the decision of the City of Park Ridge Zoning Board of Appeals that the stumphouse at 916 N. Western Avenue doesn’t pass muster under the City’s Zoning Code. And she did so without even providing an Architectural Digest critique.

Although the City was victorious, neither side covered itself in glory.

The two City Building Department employees whose greasy fingerprints are all over this debacle – then-Building Administrator Lonnie Spires and then-Zoning Coordinator Ed Cage – would have been hard pressed to screw this up more than they did, assuming their mishandling of the situation was the product of mere negligence rather than some form of Chicago-style winking-and-nodding.

Fortunately, they departed the City for public-sector sinecures in other communities shortly after their Laurel & Hardy act here, so they’re somebody else’s problem now. And their asleep-at-the-wheel superior, Community Preservation & Development Director Jim Testin, followed about a year later. Call it addition by subtraction.

As we pointed out a year ago, this situation identified several flaws in the City’s permitting process that, hopefully, will be corrected under new CP&D chief Jim Brown – who should not wait for direction from the City Council before doing a forensic analysis of what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again – starting with a BIG BOLD WARNING on every application for a building permit that says something along the lines of: “If it’s not in writing and signed by the appropriate City official it is not authorized or permitted.”

And it might not hurt to re-examine the Zoning Code’s definitions of terms like “deck,” “deck addition,” and any others that might have given aid, comfort or credibility to any of the stumphouse owners’ arguments. Because whether it cost $26,000 or $2.60, the stumphouse would have been an eyesore at even half its elevation – unless it was gracing the backyard of some hillbilly mansion down in Stickney or McCook.

Not surprisingly, the perpetrators of the stumphouse insist they did nothing wrong and that they were just innocently taking their cues from Laurel & Hardy. They also claim to be considering further legal options.

Whatever.

Meanwhile, we’d like to end this post with a Watchdog bark-out to Planner/Zoning Coordinator Howard Coppari, who was hired after Laurel (Spire) & Hardy (Cage) departed. Instead of chalking up this fiasco to their errors and looking the other way, Coppari investigated the stumphouse like a starving dog getting after a t-bone.

We normally don’t applaud people for just doing their jobs, but Coppari stepped up and did his after 3 others failed to do theirs.

Well done, Mr. Coppari!

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