Park Ridge Mayor Dave Schmidt’s message in the most recent edition of The Spokesman (“Budget problems persist,” August 2010) is a needed reminder that the City continues to face substantial financial problems that must be addressed on an immediate and ongoing basis instead of at year-end, when the money already has been spent and we’re staring at yet another multi-million dollar deficit.

Schmidt correctly points out that the chronically-mismanaged State of Illinois owes Park Ridge over $1 million in payments that the City Manager and the City Council counted on to help balance the 2010-11 budget. Whether and when that money ever hits the City treasury remains to be seen, which appears to be why Schmidt reiterated in The Spokesman his previously-disclosed plan to veto the Council’s expected donation of approximately $200,000 of City funds to a variety of private community groups who can’t or won’t do what it takes to raise the private contributions necessary to support themselves without handouts of tax dollars.

While Schmidt cites the current precarious financial circumstances as the principal reason for his opposition to throwing money at these community groups, we think donating public funds to private organizations is bad public policy at all times, especially without a quid pro quo arrangement by which those private groups contract with the City as vendors to actually sell their specialized services to the City.

We also note that City Council Policy Statement No. 6 permits City funding of these community groups solely in “limited circumstances” and prescribes certain criteria for the appropriation of public funds to benefit private entities:

3. When considering use of limited public funds for private non-governmental organizations the City
shall consider:

   A. The community need for offered services(s)
   B. The community benefit for such service(s)
   C. Private financial support for the service(s)
   D. Community volunteer support for the service(s)

Throughout the entire course of debate on community group funding, these four criteria were virtually ignored by the City Council. Instead, we got general ipse dixit pronouncements from the aldermen who favor these kinds of donations about what a great deal these groups provide for the City. And most of the organizations who appeared before the Council seeking funds provided no specifics about how many Park Ridge residents they serve, what the cost of those services for Park Ridge residents really is, and exactly what Park Ridge taxpayers are getting for their money.

To the contrary, from the limited hard data these organizations provide it appears that (for example) the Center of Concern provides the great majority of its services to non-Park Ridge residents, and that 15-20% of the Senior Center membership consists of non-Park Ridge residents. But during the City Council budget hearings, the Council asked no such questions and the community groups provided no such information beyond their standard warm-and-fuzzy sales pitches.

We hope the City Council finally wakes up to economic reality and demands an up-to-date accounting from City Mgr. Hock that shows exactly where the City’s finances are in relation to the 2010-11 budget before it even considers giving public funds to private groups. We also hope the Council demands a detailed accounting from each group about exactly what it does, for exactly whom it is done, the specific per-person cost of doing it, and why it can’t/won’t be done with private donations rather than by these groups sticking their snouts into the public funding trough.

The Mayor once again has sounded the financial alarm. Will the aldermen once again sleep through it?