Mayor Dave Schmidt said he would veto the “hopelessly flawed” 2010-11 City budget.  Monday night, he did just that – and gave a seven-page address [pdf] that explained why.

With that veto Schmidt made a number of people unhappy.

He made City Mgr. Jim Hock unhappy, because Hock is going to be the guy who will have to do the heavy lifting if the Council votes to sustain Schmidt’s veto at the next regular City Council meeting on May 17.  After not even being able to come up with a balanced budget initially, and then watching the City Council fold, spindle and mutilate what he did come up with before cutting and pasting most of it back together, Hock can’t be looking forward to doing any part of that task again.

Schmidt sure made the O’Hare Commission folks and their supporters unhappy when he recalled the millions of dollars Park Ridge wasted over the years on unsuccessful anti-O’Hare efforts, then stated that he would not “stand idly by while it wastes another dime” on such folly – much less the $165,000 that the City Council added to the budget, and that Alds. Ryan and Allegretti wanted to jack up to $200,000 and $250,000, respectively.

And Schmidt made all those private community groups – the ones who can’t be bothered to raise enough private funds to finance their 501(c)(3) quasi-hobbies because they have become addicted to easy handouts from feckless public officials – very unhappy when he said they don’t deserve money that should be “devoted to funding essential city services, such as police, fire and public works, to the fullest extent possible.” 

But we’re guessing the unhappiest people are the seven men who sit around The Horseshoe, the ones who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, come up with a budget the mayor would sign and now have been publicly called out for their shortcomings.  Had Schmidt just gone along and rubber-stamped this latest budget charade – the way previous mayors rubber-stamped previous budget charades – everybody could have claimed plausible deniability if/when, this time next year, the City is looking at another gaping mulit-million dollar deficit.

But Schmidt didn’t play along.  And he didn’t merely try to tinker with something that is screwed up well beyond a tinkering solution, perhaps because he learned one lesson from recent City government history: When city managers can’t cut expenses enough, they simply fabricate revenues; and clueless aldermen usually just rubber-stamp those, too, just like the Council and then-Ald. Schmidt did last year at this time, and the year before that.  

At least Schmidt learned his lesson.  And he also correctly pointed out in his veto address that the line-item veto doesn’t work with revenues.

Already there is whining about Schmidt’s veto.  Some of it is no doubt coming from the aforementioned folks whose unhappiness is directly related to their own personal interests.  Others claim to be disappointed the mayor didn’t have any magic bullet solutions that, presumably, would have given everybody everything they wanted – without raising taxes, of course. 

What the whiners ignore is that, the way City government is set up, it is the City Manager’s job (with the assistance of City staff) to formulate and propose a budget; it is the City Council’s job to debate, amend and approve that budget, without the mayor even having a vote in the process; it is the mayor’s job to sign the budget as adopted by the Council or to veto it; and, if the mayor vetoes it, it is the Council’s job to decide whether to make changes to the budget or over-ride the mayor’s veto.

Hock did his job, however well or poorly; the Council did its job, however well or poorly; and the mayor just did his job, however well or poorly.  Now, according to our form of City government, the ball is back in the Council’s court.

If at least five aldermen think the Council did its job well and that Schmidt’s veto is wrong, then we encourage them to over-ride that veto – and to accept accountability for the results.