If you have a twisted sense of humor, a strong stomach, and some time to waste tonight and tomorrow, you might consider wandering over to the Park Ridge Public Library and watching what’s being billed as the Park Ridge City Council’s “strategic planning session.”  At the very least, you can see how $19,500 of your tax dollars are being spent.

As reported in yesterday’s Herald-Advocate (“City schedules strategic planning,” Nov. 13), the City is bringing in Robert Oberwise of Executive Partners [pdf] to “facilitate” this circus minimus, which will run from 6:00 – 9:00 p.m. tonight, and resume tomorrow from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.  While you will be allowed to spectate, you won’t be allowed to commentate.  But it might not take long before you’ll want to expectorate. 

The reason for this exercise?  The official party line comes from Mayor Howard “Let’s Make A Deal” Frimark himself, whose sales pitch is: “The goal really is to get the council and staff moving in the same direction, so we’re all on the same page.”

What exactly does that mean, Mr. Mayor?  Are you saying that the Council and staff have been going in different directions, or been on different pages?  If so, can you give us some specific examples – or are you just blowing smoke at us again?

The first clue that this is going to be an exercise in futility comes from City Mgr. Jim Hock, who is staring down the barrel of over $3 million in cumulative budget deficits inherited from his predecessor, Tim (“Good Riddance”) Schuenke.  Hock says he is looking “to hear from the mayor and aldermen what their most important concerns are” before he suggests any budget cuts.

Sorry, Mr. Hock, but you’re the professional city manager making in the vicinity of $200,000 a year to serve as the City’s CEO, so it’s time you started acting like one.  You’re the guy who should be proposing those cuts that your years of municipal managerial experience tell you need to be made – and then let the mayor and the aldermen react to them.  The method you are suggesting may cover your tail politically, but only because it invites politics into what should be economic decisions. 

And with the whole regional business community predicting even more dire economic straits in the near future (according to Mayor “Li’l Richie” Daley), we shouldn’t have to blow almost twenty grand for strategic planning…if our city officials have even a modicum of common sense and good judgment.

First of all, they need to stop talking about building a new $20 million-plus police station that will saddle us taxpayers with 20 years or more of relatively non-productive debt and debt service.  And they also need to tell those folks on the Library Board to stop wasting any more of their time and our money on silly half-baked surveys designed to gin up support for an addition to, or replacement of, that building.  It’s way past time that these public officials got over their edifice complexes and started doing a better job of managing the facilities they’ve been given.

But if all Mayor Let’s Make A Deal and his Alderpuppets want is their names on a bronze plaque, we would much prefer that they abandon all these foolish building schemes and, instead, buy a plaque that reads:

“Dedicated to our fiscally-responsible public officials who, unlike the bureaucratic lemmings who populate the local governments of most other communities, had the foresight, the wisdom, the courage and the discipline to refrain from wasting millions of taxpayer dollars on grand but unnecessary structures.”

And to put our money where our mouth is, PublicWatchdog will gladly pay for that kind of a plaque.

But we’re not going to hold our breath waiting for City Hall to call us on our offer, because we realize there are more “benefits” – wink, wink – to the construction of a new cop shop or a new library than just a plaque on the wall, “benefits” that often escape the attention of the average taxpayer. 

After all, Park Ridge does sit right next to Richie Daley’s Chicago, and snugly within the boundaries of Crook County.