Yesterday’s edition of the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate contained an article announcing the hiring of Rebecca Allard as the new business manager for Park Ridge Niles Elementary School District 64 (“School board approves new business manager,” June 11).  She will replace Bruce Martin, who has served in that capacity for the past several years.

Ms. Allard comes to District 64 from Palatine District 15, where she served only a year after moving over from Geneva Unit District 304 in Kane County.  Prior to that, she served as director of business and personnel for the Gurnee School District.

Call us “old school,” but we would have expected that a new school district business manager’s first public statements would be about things like school finance and fiscal responsibility. As quoted in the H-A story, however, Ms. Allard seems far more into “successful relationships”: “I believe successful relationships are based upon successful relationships and that’s knowing one another and feeling comfortable and having those conversations.”

As we see it, the emphasis on “relationships” over objectively measurable credentials and performance has been one of the prime contributors toward creating the mess of incompetence and corruption that has become the hallmark of government at all levels in Illinois.  That’s because it is “relationships” that are the lifeblood of sweetheart insider deals, of putting the idiot siblings (or cousins, or in-laws) of the well-connected on government payrolls, of giving the somebodies-who-know-somebody the no-bid contracts.  And while those relationships surely are “successful” for the beneficiaries of those deals, they tend to be disastrous for the taxpayers who have to fund them.

Maybe we’d be a little more tolerant of such comments if the recent history of District 64’s finances were not so checkered.  As we have pointed out many times before, the first half of this decade saw the District on the Illinois State Board of Education’s “Early Warning” or “Financial Watch” lists – the two lowest financial rankings the ISBE gives to school districts – four times, the latest during the Spring of 2005. 

By the Fall of 2005, things were so bad that the ISBE appeared poised to take over the District’s finances.  So the District employed a sneaky “back door” working cash bond issue – ostensibly, to cover the Cook County Assessor’s and Cook County Treasurer’s delay in getting the District its second installment of property tax revenues, but in reality a subterfuge for funneling $5 million in what amounted to borrowed funds into its depleted reserves, thereby keeping the ISBE at bay until the District could pass its big tax increase referendum in 2007.

As best as we can remember, the departing Bruce Martin was the District’s business manager during those bleak years; and, as best as we can tell, he was getting paid rather handsomely for his efforts [pdf].  We don’t know what Ms. Allard will be making – the H-A story doesn’t mention it – but she wasn’t doing too shabbily herself [pdf] even before her most recent stint at Palatine District 15.

As the biggest “local” property tax consumer, District 64 owes the taxpayers a commensurately substantial duty to spend those tax dollars wisely – a task that will fall in no small part to Ms. Allard.  We sincerely hope, therefore, that she left behind in Palatine the viewpoint she expressed when responding to questions about retiring superintendant Robert McKanna’s $327,596 of total compensation, noting that such amount “was in line with what other superintendants get on the way out in a district this size.”

That’s the kind of herd-mentality bureaucratic thinking that spawns, not solves, budgetary problems – and that fuels, not quells, public cynicism about our elected officials and our various governmental bodies.