At Monday night’s meeting the Park Ridge City Council approved the MAP Amendment and the variances needed for the Park Ridge Recreation and Park District to commence work on its Youth Campus Park project (the “YCP”).

As best as we can tell, that was the correct result – if for no other reason than pinch-hitting City Attorney Kathy Henn’s improvised opinion that linking the City’s approval of the YCP zoning matters to the Park District’s granting of rights to the City to use Northwest Park for storm water detention might violate the City’s Zoning Code.  Not any state statute or court decision, mind you, but our own Zoning Code.

Once that opinion was given, the Council defeated the “linkage” amendment proposed by Ald. Nick Milissis (2nd) by a vote of 5-2, Ald. Jim Smith (3rd) and Milissis dissenting; and then it approved the zoning relief by a vote of 6-1, Smith again dissenting.

Whether Henn’s opinion on this issue will cause the Council to revise the Zoning Code to eliminate the arguable ban on linkage in the future remains to be seen.  But it probably deserves at least some cursory review to determine whether linkage is an arrow that belongs in the City’s zoning quiver.

The linkage issue inspired some interesting discussion/debate by the aldermen, one aspect of which deserves special mention because it was as unnecessary as it was disappointing.

Regular readers of this blog may recall that we endorsed Marty Maloney for 7th Ward alderman in 2011, and he prevailed in a 3-way race.  While we have disagreed with him significantly on several occasions since his election, he has served honorably and creditably overall – just as he served honorably and creditably on the Park Board from 2003-2011.

But in arguing against Milissis’ linkage amendment by suggesting that the Park District could be expected to cooperate with the City’s storm water detention program, Maloney disingenuously cited the cooperation of Park Boards past in accommodating the City’s installation of its two reservoirs on Park District land (Kalina Field and Hinkley Park), and the construction of the City’s salt dome at Oakton Park.

Why was that disingenous?

Because Maloney knows that no governmental bodies act consistently and predictably: he’s now been a member of two different ones.  Their actions are always the product of the personalities, policies and politics of the elected officials who oversee them, and of the bureaucrats to whom the elected officials too often delegate/abdicate too much responsibility and discretion.

The people who sat on the Park Boards that gave the City the use of Kalina, Hinkley and Oakton for City facilities are not the same people who sit on the Park Board now.  And the attitude displayed by a majority of the current Park Board members, and by its director, is not the same one that prevailed back when those three projects were done.

Maloney knows that, too, because he was on the Park Board when the new City reservoir was constructed under Hinkley Park.  He knows that the City didn’t even have to ask the Park District for the use of Hinkley Park because it was the then-Park Board that came up with the idea – and offered that site to the City – as a way to save City taxpayers the millions of extra dollars it would have cost to put the new reservoir on the old Public Works site at Greenwood and Elm, which was the City’s original plan.

Putting the reservoir at Hinkley also kept that old Public Works property available for sale by the City for what some brokers had previously guestimated to be another million dollars or more.  And it prevented the delays in the reservoir project, and the Uptown Redevelopment project that depended on relocating the reservoir, by the additional time left on NICOR’s lease of the old Public Works property that NICOR didn’t vacate until 2009.

Maloney also knows that this Park Board is different from previous ones – including the ones he served on – because his boards (with the support of then executive director Jim Lange) went to referendum four times during 2005-2006, at least twice on multi-million dollar aquatic facilities.  Those boards and that director respected the taxpaying voters of this community enough to ask for their endorsement and their tax dollars for such expensive projects with such substantial long-term impact on this community.  And they had the courage to risk being told “no,” as they were.

That’s a far cry from this current Park Board, a majority of which just a year ago arrogantly told the taxpaying voters to go scratch themselves – and the horses they rode in on – when that Board voted to build the $8 million Centennial water park without the courtesy of even an advisory referendum.  Those cowards insisted they knew that the community wanted the water park, they just didn’t have the courage to find out for sure.

At Monday night’s Council meeting, Maloney talked about obtaining the cooperation of those Park Board members voluntarily, calling on the “you’ll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar” aphorism.  But “flies” who seemingly care so little for what is fair and just for the entire community that they don’t have the decency to hold a vote on an $8 million water park, may not be “catch”-able when it comes to making Northwest Park available for storm water detention, especially now that they’ve got their YCP zoning.

After all, those are some of the same folks who turned tail and ran away from the North Park detention area project after some neighbors beefed about it.  Can they be trusted not to cut and run again if Northwest Park neighbors beef?  Can they be trusted to stand tall when the Park District’s sports affiliates show up en masse to oppose anything that might jeopardize their Northwest Park playing fields?

We hope Maloney is right with about catching flies, because the City just gave the Park District plenty of honey.

But he was dead wrong Monday night by suggesting what past Park Boards had done was a predictor of what the current Park Board might do.  That’s the kind of cheap political trickery we have come to expect from our state senators and state representatives, and from all those other two-bit professional politicians that have run our state into the ground.

You’re much better than that, Ald. Maloney.

You know it.  And we know it.

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