It’s way too early to say that meaningful change is finally coming to the economic mindset at 505 Butler Place.  But a hint of change does seem to be in the air.

After finally deciding to put Taste of Park Ridge out “to bid” (technically, an RFP is not a “bid,” but that’s the drift of it) and requiring the winning proposal to reimburse the City for its approx. $20,000 in annual service costs, at last Wednesday’s 2012-13 budget workshop a slim majority of the Park Ridge City Council – Alds. Jim Smith (3rd), Sal Raspanti (4th), Dan Knight (5th) and Marty Maloney (7th) – preliminarily rejected any more handouts of public funds to those 3 private “sacred cow” corporations who have been feeding at the public trough without a shred of credible proof that they have been providing essential services to Park Ridge residents: Center of Concern, Maine Center for Mental Health, and Meals on Wheels, which together will receive $61,776 this current fiscal year.

We realize that’s a small amount, considering the size of the City’s budget.  But it’s the principle that counts.

Even semi-regular readers of this blog know our objections to these giveaways, which we articulated in posts on 04/05/10, 08/23/10,  05/16/11 and 12/14/11: these corporations don’t provide services the City is required to provide; the City Council has never satisfied the requirements of Council Policy No. 6 for giving public funds to private entities; and these corporations don’t provide meaningful transparency and accountability to the taxpayers.  These reasons alone should be enough to prevent these giveaways.

But the other factor that may have swayed one or more of the four majority aldermen is that the City just doesn’t have the money, irrespective of whether or not those three “principle” objections could be satisfied.

That’s because, per City fund policy, the City’s General Fund should have a fund balance in the neighborhood of $7 million.  Instead, it is limping along at a level approximately $4 million south of there with no plan yet in place to increase it significantly – one of the main contributing factors to Moody’s recent downgrade of the City’s bond rating.

Meanwhile, the City has numerous infrastructure needs that have been “deferred” – in reality, just plain neglected – over the past 10 years.  Just the short list would include sewer maintenance, repair and replacement; water main replacement; tree trimming and reforestation; and street/parking lot re-surfacing.  The City also is looking at vehicle replacement and technology replacement needs for the coming years that will carry a significant price tag.

Makes you wonder what the heck has been happening at City Hall for the last decade, doesn’t it?  Maybe Ald. Rich DiPietro (2nd) can explain it, since he’s been there since 1995.

And let’s not forget that the City already is planning to raise sewer rates to fund the first phase of the flood remediation project, and planning to raise water rates to cover the City of Chicago’s latest price increase.  Given how mismanaged that city’s government has been for decades, we have to assume that Mayor Rahm will increasingly jack up the cost of water to Park Ridge and other water-dependent suburbs.  

Before Wednesday night’s preliminary show of hands on cutting community group funding, one of the Council’s two Center of Concern advocates, Ald. Tom Bernick (6th) – DiPietro is the other – may have sensed the direction the debate was heading.  Bernick began referring to CofC and the other two groups as a low-cost, outsourced equivalent of other municipalities’ “human services” departments, even while acknowledging that the actual benefits of those services couldn’t really be measured. 

He even went so far as to propose service contracts between those groups and the City – further proof that even a blind squirrel can find the occasional acorn.  Or that Bernick simply “borrowed” one of our ideas for dealing with these giveaways, albeit without attribution.  We’ll consider it flattery instead of plagiarism.

It must be remembered, however, that last Wednesday night’s Council action was just preliminary.  There’s still a long way to go before the 2012-13 budget is finalized. 

And we’re hearing that those community groups and their advocates – including current and former Park Ridge elected officials, such as all those on CofC’s Board of Directors and its Advisory Board, and even some state-level elected officials – are already burning up the phone lines and demanding face time with the aldermen in a full-court press to change the minds of the four “majority” aldermen.  They’ve learned over the years that it’s a lot easier to get taxpayer money out of compliant elected City officials than out of the taxpayers directly.  

Hopefully, our aldermen are finally learning that if the Council keeps doing what it has been doing economically, the City will keep getting the same unsatisfactory economic results it has been getting.

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