In 2010 Mayor Dave Schmidt formed the Police Chief’s Advisory Task Force in the aftermath of the so-called “Ekl Report” of 2008, which identified a variety of problems within the Park Ridge Police Department that had arguably damaged relations between the PRPD and the public it is sworn to serve and protect.
As we recall it, the Task Force’s “task” was simply to come up with ways to improve those relations.
Unfortunately, Schmidt and the City Council provided no detailed task or mission definition. And because power, even on a small scale, abhors a vacuum, the Task Force members promptly filled that vacuum with all sorts of “mission creep” tasks and activities increasingly removed from the PRPD’s community relations – the most notable being the Task Force’s recommendations and advocacy for over $1 million of improvements, renovations and expansions of the police station.
But Schmidt recently let it be known that the Task Force is being disbanded due to the completion of its original task of improving relations between the PRPD and the community.
Whether the Task Force’s efforts actually improved the PRPD community relations appears to be a function solely of anecdotal “data” that varies significantly – depending on whom you speak with, their connection to the PRPD or to the Task Force, and their own experiences with the PRPD both pre-Ekl and post-Ekl. Our own anecdotal “data” suggests that most people never had any problem with the PRPD and saw the Ekl Report as an unnecessary expenditure, irrespective of the glimpse into the internecine power struggles between two rival police factions back then.
In the three years the Task Force has been operating, it has attempted to insinuate itself into all sorts of City matters, including “public safety” (e.g., “the role of the Police Department in [dealing with]…cyberbullying”), legislation (“proposing changes to the municipal code regarding underage drinking disposition”) and other local issues the scope of which “goes beyond the Police Department and involves other parts of the city government” – according to Task Force chair Frank Gruba-McCallister’s Report to the Mayor and City Council presented at last Monday (May 13) night’s meeting.
Sounds to us a little bit like task force members gone wild.
But there may be more method to this “wild”-ness than initially meets the eye, perhaps related to the new community health initiative and survey sponsored by the “Healthier Park Ridge Project” (the “HPRP”).
According to a Chicago Tribune article from December 17, 2012, by Gail-Tzipporah Saunder, the HPRP arose out of Lutheran General Hospital’s failure to pay the City any parking taxes on cars parked in its lot. Instead of paying the parking tax, LGH reportedly started giving money to the City’s paramedics – although we haven’t been able to determine whether LGH’s contributions matched what the City should have been getting in parking taxes. And the same lack of quantified dollar value appears to be the case with this new health survey.
Not surprisingly for an upper-middle class community like Park Ridge, the hot-button public health topic is mental health/mental illness, at least judging by Gruba-McCallister’s Report and quotes from Police Chief Frank Kaminski, Maine Center for Mental Health’s CEO Fran Hook Hume, and Park Ridge Health Commission member Peter Ryan.
Kaminski pointed to the number of suicides in “our community” and the decrease in state funding for mental health services, while Hume and Ryan both extolled the health survey as a way to understand what the community is thinking about public health.
During the Council debates over public funding of private “community group” corporations which have no legal accountability to the taxpayers, it was often noted by those corporations and their advocates that the City – unlike its neighbors such as Des Plaines, Niles and Morton Grove – had no social services department and, therefore, should be funding those corporations as a substitute for its lack of in-house services. Of course, none of those corporations’ officials or advocates offered to provide the City with transparency and accountability relative to their services, nor did they offer to enter into any legally-binding service contract with the City for a fixed amount of services at a fixed price solely for the benefit of Park Ridge residents.
City Council Policy No. 6, however, governs private vendors of services “deemed to be of substantial benefit to the community” and which are not “in conflict with or duplicative of services provided by any other governmental body having jurisdiction within the City.”
Given the way some of our past mayors and Councils tossed around tax dollars, however, it’s no surprise to us that we can find no indication in City records of a prior Council actually conducting any evidentiary hearing or otherwise taking evidence, and making findings, related to the benefit to the community of the private services and the availability of those services from other governmental bodies – like Maine Township or Cook County.
LGH’s community relations director, Paula Besler, has said that LGH is willing to provide financial support to initiatives created from survey results, including the option of creating a community health specialist position.
But we’re betting that, if this initiative gains traction, LGH won’t be providing all the “financial support” for all those sub-initiatives.
And we’re also betting that it’s only a matter of time before the various private corporations that became so comfortable over the years feeding from the public trough with only the most minimal transparency and no legal accountability to Park Ridge taxpayers turn up at City Hall some Monday night with what Will Stockdale (in “No Time For Sergeants”) called “a handful of ‘gimme’ and a mouthful of ‘much obliged’.”
Meanwhile, we’ll await the expected effort from the Police Chief’s Task Force folks to prod the Council into creating some kind of City “commission” that will allow them to pursue their many and varied governmental interests on a more permanent basis.
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