After just 13 months on the job, Park Ridge Recreation & Park District executive director Ray Ochromowicz (a/k/a “Ray O”) is leaving the PRRPD for the St. Charles Park District.
That Ray O is leaving for St. Charles is not surprising from a “career” perspective. The SCPD owns and manages 1,400 acres of parks and recreational facilities, compared to a meager 130 acres at the PRRPD. The SCPD also sports such features as a 9-hole Robert Trent Jones, Sr.- designed golf course, a miniature golf course, and a variety of other amenities beyond what the PRRPD offers. A new $10.2 million (not counting debt service), 9.2 acre water park complex is scheduled for a June 2011 grand opening.
It’s also rumored that the SCPD offered him a big bump up from his current $120,000 salary, which would be expected given how much larger the SCPD is than the PRRPD.
In his short time at the PRRPD, Ray O has done some very good things. He is credited with revamping the District’s organizational structure, revising job descriptions, and establishing a pay-for-performance plan that saw $36,000 of performance-based bonuses paid to District employees in 2010. He established needed customer satisfaction assessment measures.
He also started the District toward a modified zero-based budget process – which is the direction in which we wish all local governmental bodies started moving – and slashed expenses by 10% while producing approximately $1 million more in revenues than expected.
Those notable achievements, however, were tempered by a few notable failures.
Ray O was stonewalled when he tried to take on two of the District’s most sacred cows and financial black holes: the Oakton Pool and the Senior Center. In each instance small but entrenched, vocal minorities – with the aid of a slim majority of sympathetic Park Board members – were able to preserve their “entitlement” facilities that suck almost $300,000 a year ($100,000 for Oakton, $200,000 for the Senior Center) out of the taxpayers’ pockets to subsidize what effectively serve as semi-private “clubs” for their relatively few users.
Another notable gaffe was the cell tower at Northeast Park, a somewhat marginal idea to begin with that was totally botched by Ray’s failure to follow the long-standing District practice of sending written notification to all of the park’s neighbors in advance of the District’s public hearing on the project. Consequently, the project received few objections until it finally came before the Park Ridge Planning & Zoning Commission, where an irate SRO crowd convinced that City commission to deep-six it.
And we seriously question the wisdom of Ray O’s plan for turning Centennial Pool into a modified water park, if only because he has proposed using a significant amount of the District’s non-referendum bonding power to do so – in the face of the voters’ decisive rejection of every referendum on spending big money to increase the size and amount of water at Centennial (or at Oakton) since at least 1995.
The last time the District committed a significant amount of its limited non-referendum bonding power, we got our $12 million-plus (counting principal and bond interest) poorly-designed and undersized Community Center – which deprived the District of the $7.6 million of non-referendum bonding power it would have needed to acquire 13.8 acres of what was then (in 1996) the “Edison Park Home” property (on Canfield between Devon and Higgins) that subsequently became the Brickton Place development.
Despite those failures, we hope the District seeks and finds someone with Ochromowicz’s ability, financial focus and direction. But even if it finds one, it will need fiscally-responsible Park Board members to encourage the new director to stay on the relatively sound financial path that the District generally has been following for the past decade.
Unfortunately, the Park Board will be losing its most fiscally responsible member in Marty Maloney, who after 8 years on the Board has chosen to seek election to the Park Ridge City Council as alderman from the 7th Ward. Besides Maloney, only Board president Jim O’Brien (who is seeking re-election) and vice-president Rich Biagi (who has two more years remaining on his term) have consistently displayed any backbone on the Oakton Pool and Senior Center albatrosses, in sharp contrast to Board members Richard Brandt, David Herman, Mary Wynn Ryan and Stephen Vile.
Since 1995, the Park District has seen the most contested election races of any local governmental body. We think that is a big factor in the Park District having been (in our opinion) the leading local governmental unit when it comes to: improving operations of existing facilities while eschewing big expenditures and/or debt; meaningful intergovernmental cooperation; transparency of its operations (it was the first to videotape its meetings and post them on line); and accountability, including the solicitation of public opinion through both advisory and binding referenda before big decisions are made.
We hope this April’s election sparks spirited, issues-oriented debates among this crop of Park Board candidates about whether they wish to see the Park District continue to move in its present direction, or whether they wish a return to the District’s less transparent, less accountable, more tax, borrow and spend ways of the early-to-mid 1990s.
Meanwhile, we bid bon voyage to Ray O, while at the same time wondering just how much better the PRRPD might have become with another year or two of his presence at the helm.
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