By all accounts, Joe Baldi is a decent and affable guy.  After serving four years on the District 64 School Board and two years as a 5th Ward alderman, he chose not to run for re-election to Mayor Howard Frimark’s stripped-down City Council last year; and the 5th Ward seat was subsequently won by another former District 64 School Board member and Frimark supporter, Robert Ryan.

Mr. Baldi was then appointed by Frimark to the City’s Planning & Zoning Commission (the “P&Z”), where he has served in relative obscurity.  Until this past Monday, that is, when he submitted a comment to our article The Twilight Zone Of Park Ridge Zoning in which he made some statements about the expansion of R-5 multi-family residential zoning in Uptown that led us to give him star billing in Why More Condos, Mr. Baldi?

Fortunately for PublicWatchdog and its readers, Baldi has chosen to share even more comments in response to his eponymous article – and those comments provide a rare glimpse into what seems to be a relatively common mindset among local politicians and that, we believe, contributes greatly to making local government inefficient, wasteful, and unresponsive to the majority of our citizens – and vulnerable to being hijacked by the monied special-interests.

While what follows is a decidedly unvarnished deconstruction of each of Mr. Baldi’s statements about his vote on expanding the potential area for R-5 zoning in Upown, we nevertheless do wish to express our gratitude to him for being, to the best of our knowledge, the only P&Z commission member with guts enough to at least engage in something approaching a real public debate on the topic, in a forum free of the more stilted and restrictive P&Z meeting format.

So without further ado, what follows are passages from Mr. Baldi’s comment, along with PublicWatchdog’s responses:

Baldi: “My approach started with the premise, advanced by City Staff, that the change would conform the ordinance to it’s original intent and correct a misinterpretation.”
PW: Blaming “Staff” is a lame, politician’s version of “The devil made me do it.”  Your job on P&Z is, in large part, to make sure “Staff” is doing its job and telling the truth.  Ever heard of “Trust, but verify”?  You might want to start by challenging “Staff” to explain in sufficient detail “What ‘original intent’?” and “Whose ‘misinterpretation’?”  The bottom line is that this is not a simple “misinterpretation” but an attempt to expand the R-5 area.  And if you can’t see that, then you’re not doing your job. 

Baldi: “We were told repeatedly that you can’t define one zoning district by reference to another.”
PW: Told by whom?  “Staff”?  Even if that were true, you could have remedied it simply by re-naming the “B-4” zoning district as the “Core” of the Central Business District, or by defining/describing it by the street names or other measures of its boundaries.  It should not have been a major problem. 

Baldi: “Since there is no defined district that corresponds to the area zoned B-4 in the Central Business District, I voted to allow the R-5 zoning to be placed in the area defined as the Central Business District.”
PW: Which, of course, was the easiest and least responsible rubber-stamp thing to do.  Rolling over instead of fighting is always the easy way out, and it endears you to Mayor Howard “Let’s Make A Deal” Frimark and the developers, builders, lenders, appraisers and all the other real estate special interests for whom the short-term benefit to their wallets of high-density residential seems to mean more than preserving the character and feel of our community. 

Baldi: “I would revisit your review of the amount by which this expands the area where R-5 can be placed. There is no way it represents a 75% increase over the B-4 area.  Only the area surrounded by the dark line on your map is in the Central Business District, and most of that is already B-4.”
PW: As we understand that map (which we believe came from Judy Barclay of CURRB), the darker shaded areas reflect the portions of the Central Business District which are not B-4 but which would become R-5-ready if the City Council approves the recent P&Z recommendation.  While trying to aggregate a number of irregularly-shaped areas and compare them to another irregularly-shaped area is a major challenge for us, when we “checker-boarded” those new areas and matched them with the B-4 area we found that the darker areas cumulatively measured just a shade under 75% of the B-4 area. 

Baldi: “I listen to citizen input and consider it when voting. That will not always mean I do everything that is suggested by citizens.”
PW: We don’t expect you to do everything suggested by citizens, nor do we think you should.  But you should be able to explain your decision with something more substantive than that you relied on “Staff,” or that you are waiting for an actual controversy to occur before you address the policy decision of whether or not we need/want more R-5 multi-family residential properties in Uptown – or anywhere else in Park Ridge. 

Baldi: “This may not be comforting to you, but you do realize that the R-5 zoning does not exist anywhere other than the Executive Plaza area approved by the P&Z commission before I joined it.”
PW: You’re right: It isn’t.  And it’s irrelevant to this particular discussion, unless you’re trying to distance yourself from the EOP fiasco by noting that you had no role in it.  But now that you mention it, we don’t recall your attending those meetings and speaking against the EOP density or the variances that allowed the developer to exceed the zoning code by 8 units – and pocket another estimated $500-600,000 of profit in the process. 

Baldi: “In order for anyone to obtain the benefits of the R-5 designation, they will have to make a presentation to the P&Z Commission and the City Council, at which I trust citizens will again appear and hope to be heard.”
PW: From what we remember and have been able to research, P&Z’s record in those situations has been abysmal when measured by how often it has sided with the citizens.  Have you ever heard the term “shouting down a well”?  As shown by the recent City survey, “being heard” by our local officials was not given high marks by the survey respondents. 

Baldi: “At that point we can have a very legitimate debate on whether more condos are appropriate anywhere in the Central Business District or not.”
PW: That is exactly the WRONG time to have “a very legitimate debate” on this issue.  Instead of addressing it now – where it can be discussed more objectively and solely as a matter of “policy” – your idea of deferring such a debate until a time when policy can be influenced (if not outright steamrolled) by such irrelevant but nevertheless powerful considerations as the nature of the specific project, its specific features and uses (paging “senior housing”!), and the identity of the developer (paging Bruce Adreani!) is not only bad policy, it’s just plain dumb. 

Baldi: “I won’t prejudge that debate because I have to listen to both the applicant and the opponents of any proposal.”
PW: A debate between “the applicant and the opponents” of a particular proposal is what you’ll end up with regularity if you refuse to address this issue now as a matter of policy – before it turns into an ad hoc adversarial situation. 

Baldi: “I will tell you that the key for me will not be whether a developer can make money on a project or not. I find that to be irrelevant to the City. The key will be the impact on the City, traffic and the effect the development will have on the City after the developers have made their money and moved on.”
PW: Sounds like more subterfuge and obfuscation to us.  All of the various density/traffic scenarios related to R-5 multi-family residential can be identified and quantified now, based on recognized standards and models for residential density that are readily available and regularly relied on by the various “experts” who will show up on behalf of the various combatants when these situations turn adversarial because P&Z is foolishly putting off these policy decisions.

Baldi: “As far as I know, zoning ordinances exist for the City to make choices about how it will develop, without unduly burdening property owners in utilizing their land. If we do that, we have met our obligation and can restrict or deny development in places it does not fit.”
PW: Well, you got the first part right – which is why the time is now for discussing whether that portion of the Central Business District not currently zoned B-4 should be qualified for R-5 zoning.  Resolution of that issue now will give residents and developers alike more predictability as to what can and cannot be built throughout the Central Business District rather than engage in a crap-shoot over density objections every time a new project is proposed. 

Baldi: “In any event, keep up the good fight. I don’t expect to agree with everything you say, and I don’t expect you to agree with or like everything I do. Nevertheless the questions and positions you promote are necessary to insure a good debate on the issues that face the City.”
PW: Agreed.  And thanks again, Mr. Baldi, for helping provide our readers with a lesson in how local government can fail its citizens when its elected or appointed representatives blindly trust “Staff,” take the easy way out, and put off to tomorrow the tough decisions that should be made today.