Today we are going to take it a little easier and simply pose some questions…without suggesting any answers.  Hopefully some of you readers will be able to provide those. 

Question No. 1:  Should the City pass through to residents all costs it incurs to third-parties for services provided to residents (e.g., the increase in water costs imposed by the City of Chicago) at 100% of the City’s cost?

Question No. 2:  Should the City continue to run budget deficits rather than increase taxes?

Question No. 3:  Do local political parties (e.g., the old “Homeowners Party” or the new “Citizens for Non-Partisan Local Elections”) help or hurt the local political process?

Question No. 4:  Does the General Caucus really improve the quality of the members elected to the District 64 school board?

Question No. 5:  Do the two local newspapers – The Journal and the Herald-Advocate – do an acceptable job of reporting local news?

Question No. 6:  Should the cost of all Park Ridge Recreation and Park District services, including Community Center membership, be “free” to residents (i.e., paid totally by property taxes, which would need to be increased for that purpose)?

Question No. 7:  Should the City acquire private property whenever it becomes available and “bank” it, even when it has no immediate, concrete plans for its use (as in the Courtland property immediately south of City Hall)?

Question No. 8:  How much more per year are you willing to pay in property taxes to the City for some form of meaningful, city-wide flood control?

Question No. 9:  Should the City continue its new practice of Committee-Of-the-Whole meetings or return to separate, individual committee meetings?

Question No. 10:  Should all of our local governments videotape and post the videos of their meetings on-line? 

Have at ‘em!

Yesterday’s on-line Park Ridge Herald-Advocate reports that four Park Ridge Public Works Department employees received termination notices as one of the City’s cost-cutting measures in the face of this year’s multi-million dollar budget deficit (“Four city employees handed pink slips,” August 4). 

This action came in the wake of the Public Works employees union’s reported refusal to agree to wage freezes or pay cuts.  Ironically, one of the four terminated employees repairs water main breaks and maintains and repairs our sewers, while another one patches our roadways.  

We wonder if those are the kinds of services Ald. Don Bach (3rd Ward) was considering reducing when he came up with his demand for staff cuts months ago, even while he was voting to give more public money to private community groups?

We don’t know how much these four employees were being paid, but we’re guessing that this was more of a shot-across-the-bow, a signal to the union that the City is serious about the proposed wage freeze.  And it should be.

The union is an easy target for blame, if for no other reason than it should have realized – with the City’s big budget deficit and mounting expenses cutting into already-thin reserves – that its bargaining position was weak.  On the other hand, it has a reason to question the City’s good faith when it is asked to give up contractual rights while at the same time hearing Ald. Frank “Borrow & Spend” Wsol and his Council buddies planning to squander $420,000 on ridiculous flood control “rebates.”

The City administration deserves its share of the blame as well, because those are the folks responsible for managing the City’s operations and its money.  They’re the ones who proposed the $2.5 million deficit budget in the first place, and who have failed over a number of years to control spending and/or request increased taxes in order to build sufficient surpluses in “good” years to carry us through the “lean” ones.

In fairness, current City Manager Jim Hock shouldn’t wear the jacket for all of this mess, as he inherited most of it from former City Manager Tim Schuenke, who apparently figured out that the easiest way to balance an unbalanced budget is with revenue estimates pulled out of thin air.  While Hock did himself no favors by proposing this year’s deficit budget, he’s still a big improvement over his predecessor; and, hopefully, he will learn and improve as he gets a better understanding of the community and the sometimes bizarre dynamics of City government.

But the folks who really deserve to wear the jacket for this are the members of our City Council, past and present, who we elect to keep a keen eye on the bureaucrats and represent our interests with good judgment and foresight.  Instead, they spent most of this decade as mindless enablers of Schuenke’s budgetary follies.

Whether they were the rubber-stamp Homeowners Party seat-fillers who monopolized the Council until 2003, the mixture of Homeowners and “Independents” from 2003 through 2007, or the Frimark Alderpuppets who currently predominate, none of them demanded the kind of fiscally-responsible, forward-thinking management the taxpayers deserve.  But as best as we can tell, the current crew has done more than their predecessors to erode the City’s fund balances and leave us exposed to the full fury of a bad economy and neglected infrastructure.

They were the ones who passed what appears to have been the largest deficit budget in recent City history and then compounded that insanity by refusing to pass through the $400,000 water rate increase from the City of Chicago to water users, while also approving over-budget funding increases to private community organizations.

So if you find yourself getting a little ticked off about that pothole in front of your house or that clogged street drain at the corner of your block, consider taking a stroll around the Brickton Art Center or stopping by the Park Ridge Senior Center – because that’s where some of the money is being spent that otherwise could have been used for street and sewer services.

Welcome to the reap-what-you-have-sewn world of fiscal mismanagement in a bad economy.
 

At last Wednesday’s (July 29) meeting of the Park Ridge Flood Control Task Force, the first public words emerged from the City’s sewer consultant, Christopher B. Burke Engineering, Ltd.  And those words were not encouraging.

If we understood them correctly after only one viewing – and we encourage you to judge for yourself by watching the Power Point presentation recorded by the volunteer-operated video camera donated by Mayor Dave Schmidt at www.motionbox.com/video/show/7a9ad7bc1919eccbf5 – it sounds like a comprehensive, city-wide flood control program will be financially unattainable.

But before anybody goes off half-cocked, we hope that the consultant will expand and refine its analysis as it continues with the process because, frankly, a few of its comments were hard to accept in the absence of some follow-up questioning that really wasn’t provided by the Task Force members. 

The first one that got our attention was the assertion that the flooding is not the result of insufficient maintenance of our sewer system, or of new development.  We wonder how the consultant could come up with that conclusion, given the fact (as we understand it) that the City has done little-to-none of the sewer-cam inspections of the system that it is planning to do.

But the most notable one was the consultant’s branding as “myth” the idea that there are one or more “gatekeepers” who open and close locks, valves, etc. in logic-defying ways that permit flooding to occur before rapidly draining it away.  That might cause many of us – who, on that bleak Saturday morning of September 13, 2008, watched inches and even feet of water accumulate in our basements over the span of an hour or more before mysteriously draining away in minutes – to wonder out loud, if not utter a barnyard epithet that begins with the word “bull.” 

But only Task Force member Gale Fabisch had the temerity to challenge that conclusion, and challenge it he did – asserting that there are, indeed, such “gatekeepers” because the whole Chicagoland metropolitan area has a “controlled” sewage system where even the level of the Chicago River can be, and is, controlled by…wait for it…locks and valves.  And Fabisch should know, having worked 30+ years for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District. 

For the second meeting in a row, Fabisch has shown himself to be the most valuable Task Force member by a sizable margin.  Hopefully, his colleagues, especially those with engineering backgrounds, will raise their games and begin asking the tough questions that need to be asked, starting with Public Works Director Wayne Zingsheim.

If we heard Zingsheim correctly, protecting all of Park Ridge against just one of those “10-Year Floods” could cost us in the $240 million range.  Unfortunately, nobody (not even Fabisch) asked Zingsheim to explain whether the entire City needed that protection, which would seem to be a reasonable question in view of the fact that certain areas of the City report little flooding, while certain other areas flooding is mercifully limited to rainwater seepage instead of the nastier sewage backups.  It was left to Fabisch to make that distinction when appealing to more residents to make the effort to report flooding

But hundreds of millions of dollars is not the final word on that topic.  And that also doesn’t mean that significant, worthwhile flood relief can still be achieved on a less ambitious, more focused scale – as evidenced by the consultant’s focus on six specific flooding locations, identified as “St. James Place,” “Northwest Park,” the “Country Club,” “Burton Lane,” “Overhill” and “Mayfield Estates.” 

Once again, we encourage you anyone who has an interest in our flooding problems to watch the video of the meeting, not only to listen to the consultant’s presentation but also to the good/bad/silly questions and comments from the Task Force members.   

But whatever you do, don’t bail on the video until you get about 3/4 of the way through the second (of the 3) video clips when resident questions and comments are received.  Because the comments of Mr. Al Laird, 1525 South Courtland, should not be missed. 

If the iconic Tribune columnist Mike Royko were still alive and giving out his “Ubi est mea?” (“Where’s mine?”) awards, we would nominate Mr. Laird for his money-is-no-object-so-long-as-I-get-mine approach to the much-discussed flood control rebate program.

That fiscally irresponsible program (considering that the City is running another multi-million dollar deficit again this year), proposed by 7th Ward Ald. Frank “Borrow & Spend” Wsol, would put $240,000 of our tax dollars – in up to $2,500 increments – into the private pockets of residents who already installed flood control systems on their property.  But judging from Mr. Laird’s little diatribe, $2,500 of what is basically a “welfare” payment isn’t enough for him. 

Guess he really must be “special.”