Another year – and 103 more PublicWatchdog posts – has passed.  So it’s time to take a brief look back and a brief look forward.

The year 2012 began with our questioning  whether then-city manager Jim Hock would raise his game in response to the City Council’s demand that he start earning his approximately $215,000 annual compensation.  He didn’t, and he was gone before mid-year.  But the City’s taxpayers are still holding the bag for his defaulted interest-free home loan, which former mayor Howard Frimark and then-and-now City Attorney Everette “Buzz” Hill conspired to subordinate to a bank loan Hock also took out for less than half the amount of the City’s loan, all without even telling the Council. 

Whether Mayor Schmidt and the Council learned anything from that wasteful exercise remains to be seen.  It also remains to be seen whether Hock’s replacement, Acting City Manager Shawn Hamilton, can raise his game enough to lose the “Acting” but still retain the rest of the title when his contract runs out this Spring. 

And with number-cruncher extraordinaire Allison Stutts having left the City’s finances in the hands of newcomer Kent Oliven, we hope he and Hamilton have the common sense and the work ethic needed to stick with Stutts’ battle-tested budget playbook rather than start cutting corners on what appears to have become the best budget process the City has employed in at least 20 years.

At the beginning of 2012 we also called for open-session contract negotiations between our local governments and the various employee unions, with special mention of Park Ridge-Niles School District 64’s then-upcoming teacher negotiations.  The idea would be to have all such negotiations occurring in meetings open to the public, and broadcast/videotaped for viewing by those citizens who were not able to attend in person.  That way, the public could judge for itself who was being unreasonable in their demands or offers.

Not surprisingly, that didn’t occur for any of the negotiations conducted last year.  Worse yet, the D-64 negotiating team of Board president John Heyde and member Pat Fioretto agreed to a new contract that continued the D-64 practice of actually requiring secret, closed-session contract negotiations.  Chalk up yet another bargaining coup for the Park Ridge Education Association, a/k/a the teachers union. 

Last year saw the closing of the Park Ridge Youth Campus up in the City’s 1st Ward.  A local institution for over a century, in recent years it had become a continuous source of police calls related to resident runaways and physical altercations between residents.  Come April, the voters will have a chance to decide whether to borrow and spend over $13 million to turn that 11+-acre parcel into a park and recreation complex – or leave it available to private developers, most likely for single-family residential.

We also look forward to this April’s local elections because of all the contested races, including: 

• for City of Park Ridge mayor, Mayor Dave Schmidt and challenger Larry Ryles;
• for 2nd Ward alderman, Nicholas Milissis and George Korovilas;
• for 4th Ward alderman, Roger Shubert and Jane Johnson;
• for 6th Ward alderman, Ald. Marc Mazzuca and Vincent LaVecchia;
• for Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 School Board, incumbent Scott Zimmerman and newcomers Terry Cameron, Vicki Lee, Dathan Paterno, Benjamin Seib and Rick Van Roeyen vying for four seats;
• for Maine Township High School District 207 Board, incumbents Eldon Burk, Eric Leys, Margaret McGrath and Carla Owen vying with newcomers Mary Childers, Jin Lee, Jeffrey Spero and Sean Story for five seats; and
• for Park Ridge Recreation and Park District Board, incumbents Rick Biagi, Richard Brandt, Steven Hunst and Stephen Vile vying with challengers James Phillips and Joan Bende for four seats.

Our hope for these elections is that the candidates will take their campaigns seriously and actively engage each other in substantive debates not only on the issues but also on their individual philosophies of local government – instead of hiding behind vague pronouncements, warm-and-fuzzy promises, and outright dishonesty about the costs of those promises.

Unfortunately, the Park Ridge Recreation and Park District will be giving the taxpayers only one referendum (a binding one, for $13 million, on the Youth Campus park and recreation plan) in April instead of two (the second being an advisory one, for the $7.1 million Centennial outdoor pool project), but only because it legally can’t get away with giving us none at all.  That display of contempt will earn this Park Board the dubious distinction of being the first in 20 years to do a major multi-million dollar project without seeking the advice of the voters via referendum.

Nevertheless, our hope for 2013 is that all members of this community – individuals, businesses, community groups, etc. – strive to become more self-reliant and less dependent on local government (a/k/a, the taxpayers) to solve their problems.  In that regard we close this post with two quotes from the late longshoreman/public intellectual (and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner) Eric Hoffer:

“It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities”; and “The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.”

Happy New Year!

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