At its November 14 meeting, the Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 Board proposed a 4.73% overall increase (4.99% increase on those “capped” funds) in next year’s property tax levy over this current year’s levy, pushing its property tax request up to $62,306,681.  That levy will be the subject of a public hearing at the meeting on December 12, and is expected to be approved by the Board at its December 19 meeting.

That’s the Christmas gift the Board will be giving itself at the expense of us taxpayers, presumably so that it can give a belated Christmas gift – a new contract – to the teachers union sometime next year.   

Want to know how Board president John Heyde rationalizes this increase?

“No one expects we’ll actually receive that.” 

Which may be true because, thanks to the tax caps, D-64 is likely to get no bigger an increase than the rate of inflation, plus whatever additional taxes can be assessed on whatever “new construction” has become taxable in 2011.  That’s got District Business Manager Rebecca Allard predicting an overall 1.5% increase, plus that new-construction differential.

In fairness to the folks running D-64, the property tax process in Crook County is arcane at best.   But that doesn’t excuse the kind of shameless spending that has characterized D-64 for more than a decade – ever since it decided in 1997 to demolish its newest school building to make way for a newer $20 million Emerson Middle School that has never produced $20 million of educational quality, at least as measured by the ISAT scores that are commonly used to compare interscholastic educational quality.   

As can be seen from the District 64 tax collection history for the period 2000 to the present, the 2007 tax increase referendum gave D-64 an $8 million tax bump for the 2006 tax year, and another $7 million bump for the 2007 tax year.  But that $15 million wasn’t just two years of extra cash infusions to fill a hole created over the 10 previous years, as the District officials (and their “Citizens for Strong Schools” propaganda arm) sold it to the voters. 

Instead, that $15 million bump created a new tax “floor” for the future tax increases that have followed since then, which have helped enable D-64 to crank its budget up to a projected $70 million for the upcoming fiscal year.  Which might also help explain the 4th highest paid administrators and the 25th highest paid teachers in the State of Illinois – according to an article printed by the Chicago Sun-Times back in May.

D-64 spends almost $20 million more each year to educate 4,300 children than the City of Park Ridge spends to run an entire community of 37,000+ people.   And the City, despite cutting the multi-million dollar deficits it had been posting in recent years, could definitely operate a whole lot more cost effectively.

So what does that say about D-64?

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We here at PublicWatchdog generally are fans of citizen task forces to study particular community problems and provide input to our elected public officials. 

So when a task force was proposed in late 2009 to provide input and recommendations to the Chief of Police, the Mayor, and the City Council about the Police Department, we supported it.  After all, at that time the City had recently received the $100,000+ “Ekl Study” of the police department’s gaffes, shortcomings and dysfunctions; and it was just about to write a check for $185,000 to settle a police brutality/civil rights lawsuit arising from an officer’s alleged pummeling of a 15 year-old resident while in custody.  Clearly the PRPD needed some feedback from the community.

So the “Chief’s Advisory Task Force was formed in early 2010, and is now comprised of 25 citizen members, plus Chief Frank Kaminski, Cmdr. Dave Keller and Ald. Jim Smith (3rd).  After almost two years of operations, however, we haven’t seen all that much in the way of useful output from the Task Force. 

And that specifically includes a newly-proposed $1.1 million “upgrade” to the 50-year old police station, which was reported in a November 10, 2011 TribLocal article titled “Task force OKs $1.1 M in upgrades to police station.”  According to that article, this project is the brainchild of Task Force member Ralph Cincinelli, who identified “major flaws and risk factors inside the station” before coming up with his million dollar baby response. 

Although Cincinelli’s proposal reportedly doesn’t call for a “major addition” to the current building, the article states that it does include a “new separate, smaller building with a fitness room and space for property/evidence,” as well as a bike storage area and a sally port “to help transport arrestees securely.”

We’ve been hearing about the station’s “major risk factors” for years, well before the voters nuked the April 2009 referendum proposal for a brand new, triple-the-size cop shop which also was intended to address those risk factors.  Frankly, it almost sounds as if the physical conditions that create or contribute to those purported “major risk factors” may have been around since the police station was constructed, yet we’ve never heard of any actual incidents arising out of those factors.

Not that we would want to, mind you.  But if every member of this community were preoccupied with reducing or eliminating all the “risk factors” we face on a daily basis, we wouldn’t have the time or the money left to do much else. 

We assume that Mr. Cincinelli and his fellow Task Force members will come up with an actual report that will ultimately get presented to the City Council’s Public Safety Commission at an upcoming COW meeting.  Maybe by then he or somebody else tied to this project will try to answer the questions that we’ve been asking ever since then-mayor Howard Frimark and his “Purple Ribbon” Council became obsessed with the big new cop shop back in 2006-07:

• How have the current police station conditions impaired the apprehension and prosecution of criminals?
• How have the current police station conditions resulted in actual harm to PRPD employees and/or the public? 

Until those questions can be answered in ways that are acceptable to the taxpayers, we do not see the wisdom of spending $1.1 million to eliminate “risk factors” that remain unquantified either by likelihood of occurrence or by their consequences.  And we don’t see how coming up with ways to spend a lot of money furthers the Task Force’s mission. 

Then again, we’ve become accustomed to ”mission creep” – both at the local level and at all higher levels of government.

And it’s never a good thing. 

To read or post a comment, click on title.

Should City Manager Jim Hock be fired?

That’s the question the Park Ridge City Council is currently pondering, which is a more substantial issue that some of the ones that recently have consumed too much of the Council’s deliberations – like how many pets can be kept in any one residence. 

A couple of weeks ago, Ald. Dan Knight (5th Ward) opined that Hock’s performance didn’t seem worthy of the $200,000+ in annual compensation he’s been paid since arriving here in 2008.  For those who haven’t been paying attention, Hock’s compensation package includes a $350,000 interest free loan, a $5,000/year pay-down on that loan principal, the use of a City-owned car (along with gas and insurance), and pension benefits that we suspect exceed those of most of the Park Ridge residents paying the bill for Hock’s services.  

And it’s all guaranteed through May 2013, by a $117,000 severance package unless he’s terminated for “cause,” thanks to a new contract given him by the former City Council members as they were heading for the exits, after Hock had gone almost a year and a half without a contract since his original one-year deal expired.

From just the information that has become public, it looks to us like Hock has botched a number of significant responsibilities in just the last year or so that, cumulatively, have cost the City (a/k/a, the taxpayers) some significant money: 

– During the 2010-11 budget process, he disregarded the Council’s decision to eliminate the position of Deputy City Manager and reinstate the Hock-terminated Economic Development Director position – instead, retaining the former and sacking the latter.  He compounded that bit of what sounds like insubordination by then bestowing unauthorized severance payments on the Economic Development Director and the Director of Community Development, which cost the taxpayers an extra $45,000.   

– He unilaterally decided to have City absorb unbudgeted increases in employee benefits expense without informing or consulting with Council, costing another $141,000.   In a similar vein, he improperly attempted to pay the police chief $19,000 in “deferred compensation” in order to evade the City’s cap on police chief salary – a cost that was avoided only because Mayor Dave Schmidt vetoed it; and, after initially approving that deferred comp payment, the Council finally woke up and sustained the veto. 

– He irresponsibly handed the firefighters union negotiations to Chief Mike Zywanski (who doesn’t live or pay property taxes here), who promptly agreed – without even telling the mayor or the Council – to negotiation “Ground Rules” that required the negotiations to be kept secret from the public.  When Mayor Dave Schmidt finally discovered those “Ground Rules” and called Hock on them at the May 2, 2011, Council meeting, Hock failed to “man up” and, instead, continued to obfuscate for the next two weeks – presumably until he could persuade Chief Z to “wear the jacket” for that gaffe without Hock’s having to assume any responsibility.     

– He left the Finance and Budget Director position, the second most important City Staff position, vacant for almost a full year after receiving the application of the candidate he ended up hiring.   

– Most recently, the discovery that collection of at least $600,000 in City tickets and fines has been neglected since Hock took over as City Mgr., something for which Ald. Rich DiPietro (2nd) said there was “no excuse.”  

Yet DiPietro and five other aldermen have decided Hock deserves an evaluation process with some performance objectives and a period of time to achieve them – even though, according to an article in this week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“Park Ridge aldermen favor evaluation, improvement over firing,” Nov. 17), DiPietro claims to be only “fairly satisfied” with Hock’s performance, Ald. Jim Smith is “negatively impressed,” Ald. Sal Raspanti (4th) doesn’t “know if [he’s] satisfied…but there’s a lot of room for improvement,” and Ald. Marty Maloney is merely “satisfied.” 

Hardly a ringing endorsement.

Notably, none of those aldermen who want to give Hock more time to shape up have identified, much less elaborated upon, exactly what it is that Hock is actually doing well.  The best thing that a Council member has said about his performance comes from Ald. Tom Bernick (6th), who considers him “a valuable source” of information. 

We’re not sure about “valuable,” although we certainly would concede expensive.

We’d expect that even blind squirrel theory would account for at least one or two “very good”s or “excellent”s on something or other over the course of three years.  So, in the interest of magnanimity, we’ll offer one: Hock’s hiring of Finance Director Allison Stutts, who so far has been an all-star in the position – including being the one who was responsible for bringing to light the neglected ticket collection mess. 

But that seems to be it.  And therein lies the problem.

Is this kind of performance from the City’s top operating officer really all the taxpayers deserve for $200,000+ a year?  Or, put another way, is this all that any of the aldermen who represent those taxpayers expect from someone  in that position and at that price?  Or, put yet another way, is this all any of those aldermen would accept from one of their own employees making that kind of dough?  

But apparently that kind of reasoning doesn’t automatically come with a seat around The Horseshoe, so we will eagerly await what we expect to be a lot of warm-and-fuzzy goals and objectives that nobody will be able to objectively measure.  Look for “goals” like “Improve communication with elected officials” and “Enhance staff morale,” along with related objectives like “No less than five e-mails per week on topics related to the upcoming week’s meeting” and “Encourage independent action by subordinates.”

Which, in turn, will likely provoke comments from aldermen like: “Jim’s e-mails are a must-read – I couldn’t put them down!” and “I’ve never seen so many smiles at 505 Butler Place.”  And that will be more than enough for those among our elected officials who seemingly expect nothing and, therefore, can never be disappointed.

Meanwhile, no substantial improvement will occur other than what the mayor or the aldermen themselves specifically direct, even as Hock begins his search for a similar position in some other community and the remaining term of his sinecure here in Pleasantville winds down.

And for City government, the beat goes on.

Update (11/18/11): Yesterday the H-A reported (“Report reveals another half-million dollars in upaid debts to city of Park Ridge,” Nov. 17) that City Finance Director Allison Stutts had discovered that there are over $550,000 in additional uncollected debts owed the City, including $301,940 in unpaid ambulance bills and another $208,779 owed for fines for things like false alarms, cutting overgrown grass, damage caused to City property, sidewalk-replacement cost sharing, and unpaid rent for City-owned property.  And $36,000 is owed for red-light camera fines that have accumulated just since July of last year.

Worse yet, it appears that there’s another $124,078 in unpaid utility bills (water and sewer) that haven’t even gone to collection because – get this! – the City apparently hasn’t sent unpaid utility bills to collection since 2005.  For what it’s worth, that would have started on the watch of the previous inept city manager, Tim Schuenke. 

But don’t worry about all this uncollected revenue, folks:  all this incompetence will be eliminated just as soon as the City Council designs and implements its Hock Performance Improvement program, the theme song of which is rumored to be: “Nearer My God To Thee.

To read or post comments, click on title.

It originally was known as “Armistice Day” because November 11 was the day in 1918 that Germany signed the armistice treaty ending World War I, the “War to End All Wars.”  Unfortunately, World War II and the Korean War proved that wrong, and by 1954 Congress decided to change the name to Veterans Day.

No matter one’s personal political stripe, we all owe a debt of gratitude to our military veterans.  And with the United States waging war continuously since March 2003 using Reservists as well as “regular” enlisted men/women, there are far more “veterans” among us than we might realize – in addition to those vets of WW II, Korea and Vietnam.  Some are Purple Heart recipients for having been wounded.  Some of them have been honored with bronze and silver stars for the special distinction with which they served.

Every one of them who has actually seen combat, however, also carries the scars of battle.  Some are very visible, others not at all.  But as author Jose Narosky quotably noted: “In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.”   

Today politicians will give speeches, and those are necessary to ensure that we recognize and remember the service and the sacrifice inherent in military service.  But speeches aren’t nearly enough, especially for those who have returned from service significantly diminished, depleted or impaired.

Although we often disagree with Sen. Dick Durbin on public policy matters, he is spot-on when he says: “We owe our disabled veterans more than speeches, parades and monuments.” That’s especially true for those veterans whose disability arises from actually having been placed in harm’s way in the defense of this country.  We, as a nation, owe them the best care this country can reasonably provide to restore them, as much as possible, to the condition and functionality of which they were robbed on the battlefield.

And those of us who did not serve must do our best to ensure that they get it.

That’s our debt of honor.

To read or post comments, click on title.

After 3 years of posting annual operating deficits (a/k/a, expenses exceeding revenues in the General Fund) that totaled in the $5 million range under the new, money-saving 7-member “Frimark” City Council, we hear that the City of Park Ridge – thanks to the leadership and, yes, the vetoes of Mayor Dave Schmidt – has produced only the second operating surplus in a decade (for the just-concluded fiscal year 2010-11), although we await the results of the annual audit for confirmation.

But because the mayor, the City Council, and City staff couldn’t seem to consistently agree on what were essential City government expenses and what were frills, Schmidt’s semi-austerity approach that encouraged these much-improved results still left the City short on things like sewer maintenance and repair, street resurfacing, tree trimming, and various other services that many residents consider “essential.”  Schmidt, the Council, and staff often clashed not just over hundred thousand dollar cuts, but even over cuts of a few thousand dollars. 

Every one of those cuts, however, took another bite out of those deficits.

So it’s in the light of that kind of nickel-and-dime budgeting and spending trench warfare that the City’s recent admission that it has been grossly neglecting the collection of outstanding parking tickets and other City fines totaling almost $1 million dollars was a decidedly unpleasant revelation. 

That’s right, campers: according to a report by City Finance Director Allison Stutts, the City is carrying on its books over $1 million of uncollected municipal fines, including penalties and interest!  And approximately $900,000 of that has accumulated just since 2008! 

How did this happen?

As we understand it, those unhappy totals include primarily parking tickets outsourced to Professional Account Management, LLC (“PAM”), a subsidiary of Duncan Solutions of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, pursuant to a contractual arrangement approved by the City Council’s Finance & Budget Committee on March 13, 2007; and subsequently unanimously approved by the full Council at its regular meeting on March 19, 2007, as can be seen from the relevant excerpts of those meeting minutes.

From the discussion at last night’s City Council meeting, what then-Finance & Budget chairman Ald. Don Crampton (1st) optimistically termed “a great advance” for the City’s collection of tickets was screwed up right from the start because no City employee, or even a department, was expressly tasked with monitoring the arrangement – although Ass’t City Manager Juliana Maller insisted that, while all four City departments agreed to giving the deal to PAM, “it was always the intent that the Finance Department would manage” PAM.

That’s the classic “empty-chair defense”: blaming someone who is gone and, therefore, unavailable to defend themselves.  In this case, the empty chair belongs to former Finance Director Diane Lembesis, who left her position in January 2010 for a similar position with the Village of Gurnee.  By laying the blame on Lembesis’ empty chair, accountability for the problem presumably doesn’t get beyond her to her former “supervisors.”

Can you say then-Deputy City Mgr. Maller and City Mgr. Jim Hock (who also threw Lembesis under the bus last night)?

This outsourcing effort seems to have been so badly botched from its inception that there appears to be not only mass confusion as to what PAM was going to do and what the City as going to do, but also no requirement that PAM even provide the City with regular reports about its collection performance!  And, according to Stutts, no member of the City staff bothered to ask for any reports until Stutts arrived early this year, discovered the problem, and began digging into it.

As Ald. Joe Sweeney noted last night, Stutts deserves major kudos for her efforts.  And perhaps, we might add, a “Sherlock Holmes” deerstalker hat in recognition of her sleuthing.

We’ve been a proponent of outsourcing by government of those services that can be obtained more economically from the private sector, so long as they are properly bid out, properly contracted for, and properly administered.  What the City has demonstrated so far with outsourcing, unfortunately, is not what we had in mind, or what the taxpayers deserve.

It does, however, fit the the model of incompetence established by the City through its years of throwing large-but-arbitrary amounts of tax dollars at private community groups for unspecified, un-quantified, no-bid, no-contract services for which, not surprisingly, no monitoring or reporting has occurred.  With a paradigm like that, this PAM fiasco almost begins to make sense, albeit in a perverse way.

So when it comes to Outsourcing 101, give the City an “F” on tickets and fines.  After all this time, and with all the problems Stutts identified, the City will be lucky to collect even half of the outstanding fines.

And for that reason, it might be time for the City Council to start grading what passes for “management” at City Hall.

To read or post comments, click on title.

It was back in July 2008 that we first questioned the bona fides of Taste of Park Ridge NFP (“Taste Inc.”), the purported non-for-profit private corporation that was handed the Taste of Park Ridge event (“TOPR”) on a no-bid, no-contract basis in 2005 by then-mayor Howard “Let’s Make A Deal” Frimark and a purple ribbon-distracted/intimidated City Council.

Our concerns about Taste Inc. included that it seemed to be making a lot of money with absolutely no transparency or accountability to the City, even though – as originally marketed to the Council by Frimark – the folks running TOPR were supposed to be members of a City committee rather than a private corporation.  Worse yet, Taste Inc. was stiffing the City for the tens of thousands of dollars worth of “free” City services (police, fire and public works) it was using. 

But because none of Taste Inc.’s tax returns were being posted on GuideStar, the Internet clearinghouse for information about not-for-profits, we also began asking whether Taste Inc. really was a not-for-profit. 

We got thumped by a number of Taste Inc. defenders and apologists, including Taste Inc.’s then-treasurer, Jim Bruno, and its then-new “committee” member Mel Thillens, for even asking such an “insulting” question about all these self-less “volunteers” who committed thousands of hours of their time to TOPR with no expectation of compensation or other rewards.

But guess what?  After 3 years of stonewalling, and confronted by a new array of aldermen who began talking about putting TOPR out to bid, Taste Inc. finally admitted that it actually had been a for profit corporation during those first four years when it was falsely advertising itself as a not-for-profit one.  In other words, for the past six years those self-less “volunteers” who run Taste Inc. had outright lied to the people of this community – even while sucking tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars out of the City treasury.

Let’s call that simple deceit.

And several weeks after that, just days before the Council’s vote on bidding out TOPR, Taste Inc. suddenly produced its 2005 through 2008 corporate tax returns, along with an offer to actually enter into a contract with the City for next year’s TOPR that would cover the City’s “direct costs for services provided…[to TOPR].”

We understand that the newly-released 2007 return reports $111,803 in gross receipts/sales and $18,308 of taxable income.  What’s especially interesting about those figures is that an article published in the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate shortly after the 2007 TOPR (“Taste Committee reports record turnout,” July 19, 2007) reported that 2007 TOPR sales were “approximately $201,000.”  That’s a whopping $90,000 more than Taste Inc.’s 2007 tax return discloses. 

We’ll call that simple propaganda…if only because it sounds a little better than “intentionally under-reporting income.”

But the absurd manifested itself several weeks ago when – as reported in this week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“Complaint filed 2 years after alleged Park Ridge election incident,” Nov. 1) – deputy head-Tastee, Albert Galus, filed (a) a battery charge against Mayor Dave Schmidt for allegedly bumping him outside a polling place in April 2009; and (b) a “cyber-stalking” charge against the editor of this blog, claiming this blog posted “untrue” messages about him and Taste Inc.  

Hey, fatuous Albert!  Have you no shame?  You wait 2 years to file a complaint against Schmidt for allegedly battering you outside the Mary Seat of Wisdom polling place?  Seriously, Albert? 

And you file a “cyberstalking” complaint against the editor of this blog for writing about Taste Inc.’s lies and stonewalling?   Seriously, Albert? 

Not surprisingly, the Cook County States Attorney declined to prosecute either of Albert’s charges, presumably viewing them as the baseless political mush that they are.

Instead of making ridiculous charges against the mayor and this blog, maybe Galus should spend that time explaining why he and his Taste Inc. buddies lied to the taxpayers of Park Ridge for the past 6 years about Taste Inc.’s not-for-profit charade.  Or about how those same taxpayers enriched the Taste Inc. corporation to the tune of $70,000-$140,000 so that Albert and friends could walk around Uptown for a few days each summer in those orange polo shirts, acting important. 

Actually, we’ve got an even better idea: Why doesn’t Albert and his current Taste Inc. cronies – Dave Iglow, Sandy Svizzero, Barb Tyksinski, Dean Patras, John Warnimont, Jackie Mathews and Mel Thillens – actually start doing what they were supposed to be doing since 2005: volunteering to run TOPR for the City’s benefit, the way Frimark explained it to the City Council back on June 6, 2005?  That way, the Council doesn’t have to go through the hassle of sending TOPR out to bid.

All those Tastees need to do is tell the Council they want to liquidate Taste Inc. and donate what’s it its treasury ($73,000 as of year-end 2010 – there should be more in there now, after such a successful 2011 TOPR) to the City, to be placed in a newly-created TOPR “enterprise fund” that will be managed by a TOPR City committee comprised of Albert and his fellow Tastees.  They can continue to run it exactly the same way they’ve been running it since 2005 (assuming, of course, that nobody’s been stuffing TOPR cash into their pockets), except that all the profits would go into the City treasury – and its books and records would be open to public scrutiny.   

Everything would be totally transparent and above-board – just the way Albert and his fellow Tastees claim it has been since 2005. 

How about it, Albert?

To read or post comments, click on title.

With none of our local governmental bodies scheduled to meet tonight and, therefore, not playing any tricks on the taxpayers, we’ve decided to offer a few tricks and treats of our own – although, as might be expected, there are more tricks than treats:

Trick:  Former mayor Howard Frimark got his name splashed all over our two local newspapers a few months back when he insisted the City fine the editor of this blog more than $500,000 for approximately 1,100 postings using the “PublicWatchdog “banner” that includes a stylized partial depiction of the City flag.  Frimark claimed it violated the City’s flag ordinance.  But at last week’s City Council meeting – with Frimark nowhere to be seen – the City attorney reported that the flag ordinance likely was unenforceable, especially when applied to political speech.  So it looks like this trick’s on Howie.

Treat:  The Park District is reporting that it actually made a profit on its outdoor pools this year – thanks to the fact that the perennial financial albatross known as Oakton Pool no longer hemorrhaged around $100,000 of red ink this summer.

Trick:  Proving no good deed goes unpunished, a group of residents want the darkened Oakton pool replaced with a second ice rink. Of course, the proponents are already waxing rhapsodic about the need for another ice surface and how much revenue it will generate.  We suspect they’re suffering from brain freezes, but let the Park District hang a credible price tag – including any bond interest – on the idea, put it to referendum on the March 2012 primary ballot and see what the voters think of it.

Treat:  Rumors emerging from City Hall indicate that, for the just-concluded 2010-11 fiscal year, the City posted a surplus in its General (Operating) Fund, and an overall surplus for all of its funds.  That follows three straight years of deficits totaling almost $6 million by our count. 

Trick:  The ISAT scores are out, and both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times are reporting that no D-64 school ranked among the “Top 50” elementary or middle schools – despite its 4th highest-paid administrators and its 25th highest-paid teachers.  We can’t wait to hear the way the District’s spin-doctor, Bernadette Tramm, plays this bit of info, especially with teacher contract negotiations imminent.

Treat:  As reported in this week’s Park Ridge Journal, local website design firm Americaneagle.com has offered to make up a $2,900 shortfall in the holiday lights program. 

Trick:  City Mgr. Jim Hock’s admission that the City has taken no action since 2008 to collect on hundreds of thousands of dollars in parking tickets and other fines, which failure was recently discovered by new City Finance Director Alison Stutts.  It will be interesting to see how this dereliction of duty is spun and who ends up “wearing the jacket” for it.

Scared yet?

To read or post comments, click on title.

If you don’t recognize the name Benadette Tramm, don’t feel bad.  The “Public Information Coordinator” of Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 probably likes it that way.

She’s the District 64 employee whose job it is to burnish the public image of District 64 – to ensure that good news about the District gets shouted from the rooftops while bad news gets buried.  Quickly.  No matter how little useful information might be flowing out of D-64’s headquarters, it’s Ms. Tramm’s job to convince the average citizen that the sunlight on D-64 is so bright it’s time to put on the Oakleys…and slather on a little SPF-30 for good measure.

When D-64 wins the virtually meaningless “Big Red Apple” award every year, it’s Tramm’s job to make sure every local news organization knows about it the moment it’s announced.  And when the Chicago Sun-Times reports (as it did in its May 31, 2011 edition) that D-64 has the 4th highest paid administrators and the 25th highest paid teachers, it’s also Tramm’s job to convince those same local news outlets not to sully their pages with such matters.

So Tramm must have been working overtime this past week to spin the Chicago Tribune’s “TribLocal” reporter, Jennifer Delgado, into writing not one but two stories that were printed in yesterday’s edition.

The first, “D64 looks at new ways to communicate with taxpayers,” is a puff-piece on D-64’s purported embrace of increased communication and transparency “with parents, community members and taxpayers” – including improvements to the District’s website, the use of social media, and online surveys.  Delgado writes approvingly of how, just this past August, “the district started taping board meetings in response to parents [sic] complaints” – without mentioning that the District’s taping commenced only after resident Marshall Warren showed up with his own video camera and recorded the August 8th meeting.

Delgado also fails to mention that, prior to Warren’s self-help cinematography, Supt. Philip Bender was resisting video-recording of meetings and calling for an opinion from the District’s legal counsel, while Board member Scott Zimmerman proclaimed the videotaping of meetings as being “against school board policy.”  Why the oversight by Delgado?  We’re guessing she didn’t dig outside the little area Tramm had plowed for her – which means that including such information, as President Bush ’41 used to say: “Wouldn’t be prudent.”

Prudence also may be why Tramm bemoaned the expense of the community-wide telephone survey suggested by Board member Anthony Borrelli, and why a proposed District “blog” will likely contain only “one or two paragraphs or photos of school happenings” and won’t “be geared for commentary.”  In other words, D-64 doesn’t want any comments it can’t sanitize and control.

And prudence may also be why we can’t seem to find anywhere on the D-64 website the exact amount of extra dollars – not just the 44 cents added to the levy in 2006 and 2007, or some unidentifiable percentage – that the referendum tax increase took out of the taxpayers’ pockets; or why nobody at D-64 seems to be able to satisfactorily explain why its schools don’t consistently score as well on the ISATs as many suburban districts whose administrators and teachers aren’t nearly as well paid.

That’s what passes for communication and transparency from D-64.

Delgado’s second article “D64 moves quickly to bring finance committee back,” reports on D-64’s intention to quickly reconvene its Community Finance Committee (“CFC”) and recruit new members “to study subjects like spend management, student fees and taxpayer education.” 

Anytime you hear the term “taxpayer education,” think “propaganda.”  And when it comes from D-64, that propaganda likely is coming from Tramm.

The CFC, you may recall, was created in 2004 in order to address the death-spiral the District’s finances were in the years following the 1997 “Yes/Yes” referendum to replace the District’s then-newest school building with the “new” Emerson Middle School.  The CFC’s innovative response to that problem was to: (a) recommend a “backdoor” non-voting referendum that authorized the issuance of $5 million of working-cash bonds to keep the Illinois State Board of Education from taking charge of the District’s finances; and then (b) recommend the 2007 tax increase referendum.

Can you say “tax, borrow and spend?”  Or “borrow, tax and spend?” Or how about “Spend, borrow and tax?”  Did you know that’s what passes for financial strategy at D-64?

Which is why Delgado’s reporting that a CFC “subgroup” had advised the D-64 administration and Board that “the district’s fund balance would reach an apex after the referendum but then would gradually decrease, meaning the district might have to seek another referendum” made us more than a little suspicious – if only because we can’t tell from Delgado’s article whether the subgroup’s advice to which she refers occurred back in 2007, or is of more recent vintage.

When the District pushed through the 2007 tax increase referendum, it did so with the promise that the revenues produced by the tax increase, combined with the District’s more frugal management, would put off any future tax increase referendum to 2017.  At this point in time, however, we are skeptical about that promise becoming reality because we see no hard evidence that D-64’s management has been frugal…even before Board members John Heyde and Pat Fioretto start negotiating the new teachers union contract. 

Which means that the CFC subgroup’s prediction may very well come true…and sooner than 2017.

And when that time comes, expect Ms. Tramm to do her best to spin that bit of dross into pure gold.

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We’re starting this post out with one tiny bit of good news: the Park Ridge City Council sustained one of Mayor Dave Schmidt’s vetoes last Monday night – nixing higher wage ranges for non-union City employees – by a 6-1 vote (Ald. Jim Smith dissenting).  

City Mgr. Jim Hock requested those higher ranges to accommodate the 3% across-the-board raises the Council approved – on Hock’s recommendation – by passing the amended 2011-12 budget back on May 25th by a 5-2 vote (Schmidt and Ald. Dan Knight dissenting, Ald. Joe Sweeney absent), and then locked in by over-riding Schmidt’s veto on June 20th by a 6-1 vote (Knight dissenting).  The Council rubber-stamped Hock’s higher wage ceilings on August 15th by yet another 6-1 vote (Knight again dissenting) which Schmidt vetoed on August 29th, setting the stage for the veto-sustaining vote. 

The worst part of these raises (and the raises for unionized City employees) is that they come with basically no articulated rationale other than that those employees have gone 2-3 years without raises.  That’s it: no discussion of improved performance, no analysis of greater efficiencies, no attempt to differentiate among the various employees.  Just a blanket, everybody’s-entitled, 3% increase tacked onto whatever those non-union employees already had been making.

What were Alds. Sweeney (1st), Rich DiPietro (2nd), Jim Smith (3rd), Sal Raspanti (4th), Tom Bernick (6th) and Marty Maloney (7th) thinking when they voted for these raises?  Who knows, because they’re not saying: apparently they don’t believe they owe the taxpayers any explanation when giving away significant amounts of public funds.

Although the Council’s veto-sustaining vote didn’t repeal those raises that will cost the taxpayers $185,766 this year alone, by preventing increases in the wage ceilings it thereby capped those raises at those ceilings – with the balances of the would-be raises paid out in lump sum-like bonuses that, as we understand it, are not considered for purposes of pension benefit determinations. 

Whether by blind squirrel theory or the law of unintended consequences, this Council appears to have done a good thing for Park Ridge taxpayers.  And even if it provides only a small savings this year, a much bigger benefit may result if these lump-sum payments become an alternative to those arbitrary salary increases that carry the extra baggage of increases in pension liability. 

So we’re calling this one small step for Schmidt, even if it’s no giant leap for the Council’s spending lemmings – unless, of course, they can stiffen their spines enough to start saying “no” to raises and “yes” to bonuses based on productivity and merit instead of across-the-board donations.

Which leads us to Monday night’s over-ride of the mayor’s veto of the first $15,444 installment payment to the City’s private community groups – not including the Youth Commission, which is a City (i.e., “public”) commission rather than a “private” organization.  

Schmidt vetoed this installment on October 3, 2011, noting that these donations of completely arbitrary amounts of tax dollars that are budgeted to total $61,776 this year not only violate Article VIII of the Illinois Constitution and the City Council’s own Policy No. 6, but also represent bad management – as Schmidt’s veto message pointed out:

Furthermore, if the City is to expend public funds on these privately-performed services, it should not do so in the form of donations of arbitrary funding amounts, but in the same manner that it purchases any other services from private vendors: under a written contract that identifies each service provided, to whom it is being provided, and the charge for each such service; and that also requires that the City be furnished with the information necessary for it to objectively determine whether all the services for which it is being billed have, in fact, been rendered to Park Ridge residents.

Unfortunately, don’t expect this Council – with the exception of Ald. Knight – to “get” these concepts.  Our tongue-tied aldermen seem to enjoy playing Santa Claus with our money far too much to concern themselves with something as mundane as requiring contracts from these private organizations that expressly limit their receipt of City funding to: (a) specific services to be provided to Park Ridge residents at specific unit prices; and (b) the City’s receiving a detailed accounting confirming that those services have, in fact, been provided at those prices.

What’s wrong with that, one might ask?  It would make the people running those private organizations unhappy.

And one thing we’ve learned about these spendthrift aldermen is that they don’t like to make anybody feeding at the public trough unhappy.

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Within the past couple of weeks, the heretofore unthinkable happened.

The new mayor of that political cesspool known as Chicago, and the almost-new president of the Crook County board, both announced that their respective branches of government were going to get salaries under control or there would be more layoffs – in excess of 1,000 at the county level, along with furloughs and the loss of paid holidays; and more than 500 in Chicago, along with eliminating almost 800 vacant positions.

But here in Park Ridge, our public officials not only keep giving out raises without a care in the world, but they also sweeten the pot with additional benefits like the no-layoff provision contained in the new firefighters union contract – presumably to prevent themselves from correcting their mistake at a later date should their judgment ever return.

Monday night, by a 6-1 vote (Ald. Dan Knight dissenting), the Council over-rode Mayor Dave Schmidt’s veto of the contract between the City and the firefighters union – in an empty Council chambers as the clock worked its way toward midnight, after a closed-session discussion orchestrated by the City’s highly-paid “labor attorney” Dina Kapernekas, whose hiring and compensation arrangement we still haven’t been able to find memorialized in any of the Council meeting minutes.

Such 11th-hour maneuvering is a slap in the face of anybody who believes in transparent government.  That’s even more true when the maneuvering endorses a contract that was negotiated under a public-information blackout agreed to by Fire Chief Mike Zywanski without the good sense of consulting with the mayor or the Council prior to agreeing to it; and without the integrity of admitting to what he did when the mayor first asked about it at the May 2nd meeting – unless his initial silence was intended to buy time for him and certain other City employees to get their stories straight and persuade Chief Z to wear the jacket?

Not surprisingly, four of the six aldermen casting over-ride votes (Alds. Sweeney, DiPietro, Raspanti and Maloney) Monday night didn’t even feel any obligation to publicly explain the reason(s) for those votes, limiting themselves to a simple “no” when they were polled on the motion to sustain the veto.  Apparently they don’t care whether or how the firefighters are supposed to actually earn their 2% bump in 2012-13 and their 3% bump in 2013-14.  2-3% quicker response times on fire calls?  2-3% greater success rate on paramedic resuscitations?  2-3% reductions in fire damages?  2-3% more cats removed from trees?

Or is the real point of their sphinx-like silence that they truly believe City employees do not need to actually earn their raises in this madcap world of public-sector unionized employment?  Or in the equally madcap public-sector non-unionized employment, for that matter – as we saw from this same merry band’s approval of an amended 2011-12 budget back in May that included 3% across-the-board raises for the City’s non-union employees – with only Schmidt and Knight dissenting?

Only Alds. Tom Bernick (6th) and Jim Smith (3rd) gave any clue to their reasons for their veto over-ride votes, and Smith’s was little more than a call to “move on.”

Bernick, on the other hand, called it “a very good contract” despite being unable to articulate anything “good” about it other than that it would eliminate any chance of the union demanding costly arbitration.  In fact, Bernick sounds so terrified of arbitration that he may have crowned himself the Council’s new “Chicken Little,” title vacated by former Ald. Jim Allegretti – especially in light of Kapernekas’ admission that the City’s turning down the contract didn’t make arbitration a certainty because the City and the union still could agree to resume negotiations over those two points on which Schmidt based his veto: the 3% year-three raise and the no-layoff provision.

Bernick’s expressed arbitration-phobia and the “sphinx”-aldermen’s unexplained over-ride votes become far more problematic, however, is in how these bad contract terms affect future negotiations and contracts. 

As Schmidt correctly noted in his comments immediately prior to the over-ride vote, by agreeing to these terms the City is effectively setting a new baseline for subsequent negotiations…and any subsequent arbitration award.  In other words, by agreeing to the 3% year-three raise and the no-layoff provision, the City has now given the firefighters union (and every other City-employee union?) carte blanche to treat those terms as an entitlement in future negotiations…and has given any arbitrator carte blanche to award those terms in any future arbitration.

What this vote (and the prior vote to adopt this flawed contract) also does is effectively announce that these aldermen, save for one, are pushovers: six Neville Chamberlain wannabes going belly up for the union and then proudly waving this contract above their heads while proclaiming labor “peace in our time.”  

Can you say “entitlement,” Alds. Sweeney, DiPietro, Smith, Raspanti, Bernick and Maloney? 

We knew you could.

Now, how about “appeasement”?

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