How does a $13.2 million parks project grow a $1.6 – $2 million cost overrun before the project has even gone out to bid?

Just ask the Park Ridge Park District.  Or not, given that it has become rather closed-mouth about this topic.

As reported by the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate in a November 12 article (“Higher costs predicted for Park Ridge Youth Campus”), a $1.6 -$2 million overrun is what PRPD Building and Grounds Supt. Terry Wolf is currently projecting.  According to Wolf, the Park District is “trying to clarify that [number] and identify where and why we have these overages.”

It’s as if they popped up overnight, like mushrooms in an autumn wood.

But you can’t think about this stuff the way you would financial problems in your private life, a/k/a the “real” world.  The bureaucrat world of 15% (or worse) cost overruns is nothing like the one the rest of us live in, where financial decisions have real consequences that can’t be pawned off on friends and neighbors the way bureaucrats can pawn them off on unsuspecting and relatively helpless taxpayers

Think about it this way.  You hire a contractor who tells you he can design and build that addition to your home for $100,000.  So you go to your bank and max out your equity line of credit to borrow that $100,000.  You sign all the paperwork needed to indenture yourself to the bank.  And then your contractor tells you, oops, your project is already 15% over budget…and he hasn’t even pulled the permits.

This cost-overrun disclosure makes us wonder exactly who was doing the budgeting over at Park District HQ back when this Youth Campus Park project was being put together and gussied up for sale to the community in a binding referendum in April 2013.

Can Park Board president Mel Thillens – the tax/borrow/spender who championed the no-referendum $8 million Centennial water park effort in 2012-13 and then followed that up by leading the Youth Campus Park referendum campaign before allegedly becoming a born-again fiscal conservative while running his losing race for state representative – explain how the Park District can be as much as $2 million, or 15%+, over budget yet not know exactly why?

Are we looking at a cynical case of bait-and-switch designed to bamboozle the voters?  Or is it just some irresponsible and/or incompetent WAG budgeting ?

Board president Thillens?  Thillens?  Anybody?  Bueller?

Either way, Park District management – Board and Staff – should have some big-time explaining to do.  But as we’ve seen with the water park boondoggle and the Senior Center/Kenmitz Estate fiasco, what passes for “management” at the Park District is shameless enough that providing explanations to the unwashed masses of District taxpayers is optional, at best.  After all, the votes on the Youth Campus Park already have been counted, so who cares!

Meanwhile, the Park District reportedly is the recipient of a $750,000 state grant for this Youth Campus Park project, and expects to receive an additional $500,000 from the sale of naming rights for a multi-purpose building on the site.

The naming rights deal was announced by Exec. Director Mountcastle at the November 6 Park Board meeting.  In response to Commissioner Rick Biagi’s question of whether that $500,000 in new money would result in an equivalent amount being shaved of the referendum-authorized bonding, or be rebated to the taxpayers, Mountcastle –predictably for a consummate bureaucrat –responded: “That would not be my recommendation.”

In other words, a million here and a million there is no big deal to the Mountcastle’s of the world, so long as those millions go toward building a better bureaucratic resume and not be wasted by giving them back to the taxpayers.

At the end of the day, the taxpayers have no more of an idea of where those $1.6 to $2 million in cost overruns are coming from than they did of where the original $13.2 million cost for the Youth Campus Park project came from for referendum purposes.

And the best way to cope with that is not to think of any of it as “your” money.

Because Mountcastle and most of the Park Board don’t think of it that way.

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