There’s an old joke about how differently a chicken and a pig view the traditional ham & egg breakfast: The chicken may be interested, but the pig is committed.  

That’s how we here at PublicWatchdog view the ongoing debate between those who want a PADS homeless shelter in Park Ridge, on one hand, and many of the parents of St. Paul of the Cross school children, in whose gym the homeless will be housed on Sunday nights.  The PADS supporters are interested in helping the homeless, but the parents are really committed to the health and safety of their children.  

The parents see the shelter as one night a week of comfort for 20 transient homeless versus the health and safety of 700+ school children from our community.  Cast that way, it’s hard to justify putting the shelter at St. Paul or any other school, especially knowing that there are other available sites in town for homeless shelters even if not all of them satisfy the PADS “model.”

But we’re not just dealing with the health and safety of 700+ St. Paul school children.  Because a PADS shelter will attract homeless from outside Park Ridge who might otherwise have stayed away, this is a civic issue that impacts the whole community.  And that’s why the whole community should get the chance to vote on the issue via referendum this coming April.

Not surprisingly, that’s not what the Park Ridge Ministerial Association (“PRMA”) and the pro-PADS crowd wants.  They’d prefer not to hear what the voters think and, instead, have Mayor Howard “Let’s Make A Deal” Frimark and his Alderpuppets hurry up and adopt the zoning ordinance text amendment recommended by the Planning & Zoning Commission (“P&Z”) that permits homeless shelters as “special uses,” but only after they eliminate the recommended restriction on any homeless shelter locating within 500 feet of a nursery or elementary school.

But to make that happen, the Council will pretty much have to ignore a number of provisions of the zoning ordinance. 

For example, the purpose of the zoning ordinance [pdf] is to address 19 separate criteria, none of which at first reading appear homeless shelter-friendly.  Item “O” identifies one of those purposes as being to “[p]rohibit uses, buildings or structures incompatible with the character of the districts in which they are located.”  We see nothing about St. Paul of the Cross’s zoning district that reveals a “character” compatible with temporary transient sleeping accommodations in an elementary school gymnasium.  

Similarly, the purpose of a zoning amendment [pdf], such as the one P&Z recommended to the City Council, is “to permit modifications in response to changed conditions or changes in City policy.”  It should be noted, however, that amendments “are not intended to relieve particular hardships or confer special privileges or rights upon any person or party.” [Emphasis added.]  Such language would appear to disfavor a homeless shelter as one of those “special privileges” for both the transient homeless and the PADS supporters.

And because we are dealing here with a text amendment that will permit homeless shelters as a “special use” [pdf] that is not currently provided for in any of the classifications for existing zoning districts, it requires “consideration, in each case, of the impact of those uses upon neighboring land and of the public need for the particular use at the particular location.” [Emphasis added.]  

An April advisory referendum may not be the absolute best way to discern the “public need” for a shelter at St. Paul, but we can’t think of a better way.  And it’s far more meaningful and objective than counting the number of white shirts at City Council meetings, or counting the names on competing petitions.

It should also be pointed out that even a quick reading of Section 4.8.D-4.8.E [pdf] and “Table 1: Standards for Zoning Amendments” [pdf] makes it pretty clear that a text amendment like what is being proposed for the PADS shelter cannot be adopted by the City Council without consideration of nine separate public policy criteria, three of which (Table 1, at Nos. 1, 2 and 6) stress the general welfare of the City as a whole over “just [the welfare of] the applicant, property owner(s), neighbors of any property under consideration, or other special interest group.” (Table 1, at No. 6.) 

We’re still waiting for the PRMA, the pro-PADS crowd, or Mayor Frimark to make a plausible argument about what benefits a PADS shelter brings to the whole city, and how it promotes the general welfare of our entire community.

In fact, a homeless shelter may not satisfy any of the other six “text amendment” criteria, either, unless something in the City’s “Comprehensive Plan” (which we could not find on the City’s website) encourages zoning amendments that facilitate the establishment and operation of temporary homeless shelters in Park Ridge. Frankly, we doubt that’s the case.

But this isn’t really a zoning matter.  It’s a political matter that’s being driven by Mayor Frimark’s rumored assurances to the increasingly politicized PRMA and its supporters that he could get them a PADS shelter using a City Council packed with a majority of his Alderpuppets and a P&Z Commission whose compliance was expected because every member of it was either appointed or re-appointed by Frimark. 

But, remarkably, seven members of the nine-member P&Z actually stood up for school children and the community as a whole (over Frimark and the PRMA) when they voted last month to recommend the text amendment that contained the 500-foot restriction.  And the two who voted “no” did so not because they wanted a more liberal amendment but because the proposed text amendment was not restrictive enough.

So with P&Z’s refusal to rubber-stamp Frimark’s decision, the mayor is reportedly scrambling to come up with some kind of “compromise” that might keep the 500-foot restriction but limit it only to times when children are in school.  Maybe we’ll hear about that at tonight’s (October 6) continued City Council Committee of the Whole meeting, currently set to begin at 6:00 p.m. at City Hall.  The White Shirt brigade, fresh from yesterday’s pro-PADS rally at St. Paul, is expected to show up in force.  Will they bring their bagpipes?

After having created this divisive issue with its secretive and heavy-handed conduct, the PRMA has now turned to staging political rallies and flexing its political muscle to get its way – without any accountability to the majority of our residents who will be impacted by this special-interest project.  Apparently “playing politics” is also a kind of “ministry,” at least when the PRMA does it. 

But if the PRMA wants to “play politics,” it should do so the most honest and fairest way – by taking its chances at the ballot box with an April advisory referendum instead of by cutting deals for the benefit of one special interest while ignoring the rest of our community.

We’re taking a break from the PADS/zoning code text amendment controversy today because something even more troubling hit our radar yesterday – courtesy of the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“City manager warns: Expenses outpacing revenues,” October 2). 

According to that article, former city manager Tim Schuenke put together some revenue projections “that never materialized in actual dollars,” so the City is now looking at a year-end 2007-08 (last year’s) budget deficit of $1.7 million.  And it looks like this year’s budget is heading down that same track.  That’s got new City Manager Jim Hock warning that the City will need some “dramatic cost cutting measures” to make ends meet.

Revenues related to housing – building permit fees and transfer taxes – account for the lion’s share of the revenue shortfall: $1.2 million, with sales tax and water revenues making up most of the balance.  And the Uptown TIF fund was $531,466 in the red last year, which means that it continues to borrow money from the City’s general fund to pay for Uptown improvements being done.  The TIF isn’t expected to start breaking even on its annual revenues versus expenses until 2009-2010, although it will likely be in an overall debt position for years to come. 

This does not bode well for the infrastructure maintenance, repairs and improvements that haven’t been getting done, much less any hope for a plan to increase the number of storm/relief sewers or take other measures to reduce the flooding that continues to plague our community.

What sounds just plain wacky, however, is how the City Council came up with a balanced budget for this current year, according to the Herald-Advocate: “Earlier this year, the City Council balanced the 2008-09 budget in large part by approving increases in projected revenues recommended by Schuenke.”  That sounds a lot like the fun-with-numbers Congress has been playing for the past several years, which has caused the national debt to increase by almost $4 trillion?

Of course, now that Schuenke’s gone (and we say “good riddance”), Mayor Howard “Let’s Make A Deal” Frimark and his Alderpuppets can lay most of the blame for this mess on him.  But it was the folks still sitting around the big table at City Hall who bought into Schuenke’s charade and accepted the made-up numbers, so it’s time for them to step up to the plate and be accountable to the taxpayers for the problem we’re now facing. 

But the real test of City leadership – or lack of it – will be how it reacts to this bad economic news and the prospect that the national and world economies will not be recovering anytime soon. 

So far, Frimark is still trying to get the taxpayers to bail out his buddy and campaign contributor, Bill Napleton, by spending $2-3 million on Napleton’s empty car lot at Greenwood and Busse so that the City can spend upwards of $20 million (in bond principal and interest) on a big new police station.  

With that kind of thinking, and with the pinch many of us are feeling from the heftier property tax bills starting to show up in our mailboxes, maybe a homeless shelter – but for real Park Ridge residents, not those homeless imports from neighboring communities who are part of the PADS traveling road show – isn’t a bad idea after all.

One thing that came out of Monday night’s Committee of the Whole meeting is that the Number One concern of those who want to eliminate the 500-foot restriction (from nursery and elementary schools) from the proposed zoning ordinance text amendment is not “the homeless”: it’s about making sure that PADS gets the Park Ridge homeless shelter franchise. 

That’s right, it’s all about PADS.

So why didn’t PADS officials show up Monday night to state their case for why PADS is the right choice to solve whatever homeless problem Park Ridge may have?  Why did they leave it up to PRMA ministers, a lawyer from the Chicago Archdiocese, a parade of former Park Ridge aldercritters, and an array of white-shirted supporters of the PADS franchise to explain the need for PADS? 

Those are questions posed by occasional Watchdog contributor “Kaiser Sosay,” who shared with us what he would have liked to have heard PADS say Monday night, but didn’t:

*  “We understand you are concerned about the safety of your children.  We take safety as our first and foremost goal when it comes to our guests, our volunteers and each community in which we operate a shelter.  The following are all of the safety measures we currently employ….”

*  “These are the extra things we are going to do at St. Paul of the Cross to ensure the health and safety of the children….”

*  “Here is a list of the other elementary schools in/near where we operate shelters on nights where school will be in session the following day….” 

*  “Here is what we do (or will do) to make sure that our guests enter and leave the shelter area before the children begin to arrive….” 

*  “Here is what we do (or will do) to make sure that no contraband will be stored around the church/school building by any of our guests….” 

*  “These are the costs that the City may incur as the result of our shelter being opened in your town, for which we will reimburse the City….”  

But I really would have liked it if representatives of the PRMA had stopped complaining about how there should be no restrictions on a PADS shelter in Park Ridge and told us what the PRMA would be willing to do to help those homeless people they talked about Monday night, like that guy who delivers and installs appliances, or that mom of three kids who works two jobs.

I would have liked to hear the PRMA say that its members were going to “adopt” one or more of these people and actually work to get them up and out of homelessness, not by providing shelter for just one night a week but by providing real housing for up to a year.

I would have liked to hear PRMA say how it and its stable of volunteers would work to provide each of these people (and their families) with training, daycare, food, clothing, a job, help with paying bills and other incidentals as a way to enable these down-on-their-luck folks to earn their way out of homelessness.  Instead of just a series of random handouts to whomever shows up on a given Sunday night, I would have liked to have heard about a comprehensive, well thought-out plan to deal with the root problems that have caused these people to become “down on their luck” and give them a boost back up the ladder.

I would have liked to hear how this plan would let the participants know that by the end of that year they would be expected to have made substantial strides toward getting past whatever brought them down and move into the “payback” phase of this program – in which they would contribute their own time, effort, money, or whatever other resources they can spare to help mentor some new person entering this program.

What would happen?  I don’t know for sure, but ideally within one year these people would have built ties to our community and transitioned from being part of the problem to being part of the solution – one person/family at time – by “teaching them to fish” as opposed to tossing them a perch one night a week. 

That’s what I would have liked to have heard in place of PADS, PADS and more PADS.

We think “Kaiser” is onto something, although it will require more effort and commitment than what the PRMA has signed on for with a lightweight, turn-key PADS “if it’s Sunday, this must be Park Ridge” franchise. 

Are the PRMA and its White Shirts up to such a task?  Don’t hold your breath…unless you look good in blue.