We wonder whether 7th Ward Ald. Marty Maloney knew what was in store for him and his fellow aldermen when he arrived at 505 Butler Place last Monday night, with the Public Works Committee he chairs scheduled to take up the flood control projects proposed by the City’s flood consultant for three neighborhoods on the City’s northwest end.
Whether he did or didn’t know, Maloney masterfully handled the often heated marathon session attended by over 70 flood-impacted residents. And he was able to deftly forge a consensus to move ahead with further consideration of the Mayfield Estates and Northwest Park 100-year flood control projects.
That’s “further consideration,” as in “we’re going to continue to evaluate it.” Not: “It’s definitely going to happen.”
The Mayfield Estates project has an estimated cost of $2.3 million, while the Northwest Park project carries a tab of $16.6 million – but only if the Park Ridge Park District agrees to let the City use Northwest Park for a temporary floodwater detention area. And from what we hear, that cooperation is nowhere near the lock some people would like it to be, although that’s an issue for another time.
Left behind Monday night was the “Country Club” flood control project for the area extending west from the Park Ridge Country Club’s Greenwood Avenue boundary. Although that project could benefit the largest number of households among the three projects under consideration, it also could add as much as $80 million to the bill while only providing that area with protection against 10-year floods.
For those of you who are still wondering what all this 10-year, 100-year stuff means, it’s that in any given year there is a 1 in 10, of 1 in 100, chance of such a flood occurring – not that such floods are expected only every 10 or 100 years. Another mystery solved.
We empathize with the residents of these affected areas, and especially the residents in Mayfield Estates. Most of their problems are caused by overland flooding resulting from the lack of storm sewers in the streets – a deficiency that has existed since the installation of such sewers was rejected by Mayfield Estates residents in 1967, when that area was annexed by the City. We’ve seen that overland flooding up close and personal, and the helpless feelings it generates truly can be devastating.
But the question of whether the substantial costs required to solve flooding problems in those three affected areas should be imposed on all the City’s taxpayers has significant economic and public policy implications. And those implications need to be addressed with the cold light of reason and logic, not the heat of raw emotion on display Monday night by residents who demanded that the Council approve flood remediation plans NOW – and costs be damned!
Many of Monday night’s speakers stated, in one form or other, that money should be no object in dealing with these problems. We can understand such sentiments coming from folks who likely have already done the math and realize that if the whole City is on the hook for the multi-millions of dollars it will cost to provide all this flood protection to just these two or three limited areas, the beneficiaries of that largesse are likely to reap several dollars in property value increases for every dollar they pay in increased taxes. And they don’t seem to give a rat’s derriere that such major financial commitments will leave the City with millions more in annual debt service payments that hogtie future Councils in dealing with future City-wide needs.
Most of Monday night’s speakers portrayed themselves and their neighbors as helpless victims of some sort of City misconduct or neglect. But nobody seemed ready, willing and able to articulate exactly what the City did – or didn’t do but should have done – that has caused any of these flooding problems, or that justifies imposing multi-million dollar burdens on all the City’s taxpayers. For example, nobody has demonstrated, or even credibly alleged, whether and how the City ignored its own Zoning Code, Building Code, or any other codes so as to cause or exacerbate this flooding. Similarly, nobody has demonstrated, or even credibly alleged, whether and how the City has neglected the infrastructure in those areas – at least not in ways it has not done with other areas of town.
That would appear to lead to a couple of hard and inconvenient truths: If you built or purchased a home in Mayfield Estates since at least September 2008 without a MAJOR discount because of that area’s well-known flooding problems, you’re either reckless or an outright idiot who doesn’t deserve to get bailed out by the rest of the City’s taxpayers.
And if you DID get a major discount for building or purchasing a home in that area in the hope that City-funded flood relief would provide a windfall increase in your property value, you’re a speculator who doesn’t deserve to turn a profit at the expense of your fellow taxpayers.
Advocates of these flood control projects have advanced all sorts of doomsday scenarios – running the gamut from small children and pets being swept away in the rushing floodwaters, or the elderly dying when ambulances can’t get them to Lutheran General due to impassable streets, to homeowners in these affected areas simply abandoning their homes for whatever price they can get, thereby letting “less desirable” (wink wink, nod nod) residents purchase them and colonize those areas.
Because virtually anything is “possible,” such possibilities – however farfetched – can’t be totally dismissed. But mere possibilities can’t be allowed to act as guns to the heads of either the Council or the rest of the community, extorting OPM (“Other People’s Money”) for the benefit of the few.
While the Mayfield Estates project is “only” $2.3 million, that comes out to roughly $100,000 per affected home – or, put another way, a $100,000 handout by the City’s other taxpayers to each of those 23 affected homeowners. If that sounds a little pricey to you, join the club. And because it very well may sound a little pricey to a majority of the City’s other taxpayers, shouldn’t they have the right to say so, or not – by means of an advisory referendum in November’s general election, or in the April 2015 local election – before the Council commits to these projects?
We think so, and for one very good reason: the only time in the past three decades that the City or any other local governmental body has committed such major funding or bonded debt to any project or related group of projects without at least an advisory referendum was when the City Council gave us the Uptown TIF development. And just look at how well THAT has worked out, financially, for the City!
If these projects are such a great deal for the entire community – as their proponents loudly insist at every opportunity – then it shouldn’t be all that hard for those same proponents to make a convincing case to a majority of voters that a “yes” vote for City-funded flood control in those three affected areas is a solid investment, directly or indirectly, for the entire community. And if they can’t make such a case and the voters say “no” to such a grand funding plan, the City Council can still choose to provide some less-costly relief to those affected areas – such as through the creation of Special Service Areas (“SSA”s) where the affected property owners take on a significant portion of the funding with the help of some reasonable City subsidy.
After all, if “money’s no object” for the City’s taxpayers, why should it be an object for the homeowners who are getting all the benefits?
Make no mistake about it: a referendum and/or the creation of SSAs may not be a perfect solution. But based on what we know right now about the cost and effectiveness of these three proposed projects, it appears to be the fairest and most reasonable solution for all involved.
Except, perhaps, to those who’ve already developed a “jones” for OPM.
UPDATE (01.20.14) We ran into one of our readers yesterday morning who suggested what sounds to us like an eminently fair application of the SSA approach: why not tie the City’s contribution to the cost of flood remediation in Mayfield Estates, the Northwest Park area, and elsewhere to the cost of installing relief sewers in those areas?
The precedent for this idea is that the City historically has attempted to upgrade its basic sewer system by adding relief sewers to handle storm water (even though those relief sewers usually were the first casualty whenever expenditures needed to be cut) and has not specially charged the principal beneficiaries for those relief sewers. That’s a public policy decision that past Councils have made and reaffirmed over the years, as recently as the installation of several million dollars of relief sewers in various areas of town as part of the Burke flood remediation plan, which was done without imposing SSA’s on those residents.
Unless and until the self-styled “victims” of flooding – be it in Mayfield Estates, the Northwest Park area, west of the Country Club, or anywhere else – can present compelling evidence that the City somehow CAUSED the flooding in their area, the City should not pay what amounts to damages or reparations to the residents of those areas. The cost of installing relief sewers, on the other hand, can legitimately be viewed as nothing more than implementing the sewer improvement/enhancement program that long has been in effect.
While we would hope that the Council will consider this kind of SSA funding for flood remediation projects such as the ones currently on the table and others to come, from what we’ve already heard from the residents of these flood-afflicted areas and their advocates, we aren’t optimistic that they will be satisfied with such a plan. The more those folks howl about how their being required to pay anything for flood relief is unfair, however, the more they will reveal themselves to be just another group of freeloaders looking to feed at the public trough.
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