Just a month ago we wrote a post about what we dubbed a “boneheaded” ethics complaint by Park Ridge’s Gene Spanos.

Spanos’s complaint, in the form of a January 13, 2014 letter notarized on January 14, 2014, claimed that Ald. Marc Mazzuca and the City’s O’Hare Airport Commission chairman James Argionis were figuratively sleeping with the enemy by attending and participating in meetings of the Fair Allocation in Runways Coalition (“FAiR”), a group with the professed goal of dispersing the current concentration of O’Hare-related air traffic over the Northwest Side of Chicago and the near Northwest Suburbs…such as Park Ridge.

To most of us, that would be a good thing and FAiR would be our ally.  But not in Spanos’s wonderland.

In a January 24, 2014 memorandum, City Attorney Everette M. “Buzz” Hill, Jr. reviewed the City’s Ethics Code and determined that “attendance and participation at FAiR meetings creates NO conflict of interest” for either Mazzuca or Argionis.  But Spanos’s letter constituted an ethics complaint under the Ethics Code, for which the Code requires an investigation by an independent outside attorney.

So it came as no surprise to us that in a February 26, 2013 [sic] letter, independent outside attorney and retired Cook County judge James P. Etchingham found that Spanos “should be criticized for even suggesting any type of conspiracy, ethics violation or conflict of interest” for Mazzuca and Argionis because their involvement with FAirR “promotes the health safety and welfare of the community they serve.”

Exactly.

And that’s probably about as close to calling Spanos’s complaint “boneheaded” as judicial decorum, even the retired judge version, allows.

Nobody likes airplane noise, or whatever pollution may be fluttering down onto our community.  But it’s time the residents of Park Ridge realize that O’Hare expansion is a high-stakes game and our chip stack isn’t tall enough to effectively compete.

Our state-level representatives – State Sens. Dan Kotowski and John Mulroe, State Reps. Marty Moylan and Mike McAuliffe – have so far proved to be useless when it comes to all things O’Hare.  The same goes for U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin and Mark Kirk, and U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky.  That’s because they and their political masters don’t want anything to curtail the O’Hare economic engine, especially when Chicago, Crook County and the State of Illinois as a whole already are barely limping along economically.

So when we finally get allies within the City of Chicago – the folks calling themselves FAiR – the last thing we need are grandstanders like Spanos fighting some kind of mindless political turf war against those allies, then going off half-cocked and filing baseless ethics complaints against our two City officials who, as Etchingham points out, “should be encouraged, not discouraged, from attending” FAiR meetings.

Spanos’s complaint was so bogus that Etchingham billed only 5.75 hours, and a total fee of only $1,581.24, to dispatch it.

It could have been worse.

While an alliance with FAiR would appear to give us nothing more than a tiny spark of hope, that’s more than we’ve had since the O’Hare Modernization Program was conceived and blessed by the FAA, Congress and O’Hare’s two major air lines.

Spanos and his CAPP crowd should stop trying to extinguish that spark.

UPDATED: Based on the letter that came over our transom this afternoon, it looks like Spanos is unapologetic.  No surprise there.  But two things deserver special mention.

The first is Spanos’ equating his boneheaded faux-ethics complaint with questioning and challenging our leaders.  We’re huge fans of the latter, no fans of the former.  But the disconnect that’s troubling is Spanos’ apparent inability to tell the difference.

The second is his invocation of his military service and his Rosemont public safety service to add legitimacy to his conduct in this matter.  Instead, it demeans the service, which is a shame.

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