The Park Ridge City Council made a wise decision last Monday night at its Committee of the Whole (“COW”) meeting when it reached a 5-1 consensus not to proceed with $1.167 million worth of engineering work in furtherance of a $48 million flood relief project for the west-of-the-Country Club area.

The $48 million project, if built, would include 19,000 feet of new storm sewers and a whopping 32 acre-feet of water storage, most of which would likely require a massive vault under part of the Park Ridge Country Club. But despite the size and cost of the project, it would only provide protection from 10-year floods and not from the 100-year floods that have plagued Park Ridge in recent years.

From a cost-effective public works perspective it was a pretty easy decision.

Heck, even the folks from Christopher Burke Engineering – who could have pocketed that $1.167 million fee with no concerns for whether or not the $48 million project would ever be constructed – acknowledged it would cost way too much for way too little real protection.

But political considerations tend to exert a lot of influence on these kinds of decisions, especially when special-interest groups make their presence felt.  And that was the realm in which 5 of the 6 aldermen in attendance stood tallest last Monday night.

Led by Public Works chairman Ald. Marty Maloney (7th Ward), Alds. Nick Milissis (2nd), Roger Shubert (4th), Dan Knight (5th) and Marc Mazzuca (6th) voted not to waste the $1.167 million on plans that would likely sit on a shelf gathering dust. Only lame-duck Ald. Jim Smith (3rd) voted to move forward with the project, claiming doing otherwise was just kicking the can down the road.

Not unexpectedly, however, that decision was greeted with derision from folks in the affected area who don’t seem to understand, or just don’t want to accept, how any elected official might object to spending multimillions of tax dollars to protect one relatively small section of Park Ridge (680 homes out of over 13,000 residences, or less than 6%) against 10-year floods when 100-year flooding is becoming the norm. And when 100-year flood protection in other areas is available for significantly less money.

If you visit the Park Ridge Concerned Homeowners Group (“PRCHG”) Facebook page you can read read how last Monday night’s meeting was “a disgrace” and a “charade” in which the Burke representative “appeared to be in cahoots with members of the City Council.”

While there’s a possibility that some of the City’s Public Works personnel may have gotten a tad too cozy with the Burke folks, that’s always the danger when any City department works closely with one consultant for awhile. But it’s hard to argue for Burke’s being in cahoots with the entire City Council when that “cahoots” involves Burke walking away from a million-dollar piece of business.

The PRCHG folks also seem to be talking through their collective hats when suggesting that the City should be exercising its right of eminent domain to force the Park Ridge Country Club to accommodate whatever flood relief the City wants to construct on PRCC property. ED would require the City to purchase the necessary land from the PRCC – at fair market value – for construction of the water detention vault. The additional millions of dollars that would entail should make ED a non-starter.

And their complaints about the City permitting the construction of McMansions beg the question of where were all those complaints over the past 10 years or more when some (many?) of the current complainers were happily watching their own property values go up as a result of a McMansion or two being built on their blocks? And where were they over the past 15 years when previous City administrations were budgeting several hundred thousand dollars each year for the construction of relief (storm) sewers but then deferring those projects when they decided to divert that money elsewhere?

One complaint raised in the PRCHG discussion by commentators Christopher Kueppers and Thomas Sotos, however, is a good one – one that we raised in our 10.02.14 post about the controversial O’Flaherty project on Talcott: the wisdom of a “fee-in-lieu” of providing sufficient water detention.

We can see no evidence that such a fee is sufficient to effectively ameliorate the adverse effects of new developments to which it is applied. Additionally, according to an August 23, 2013 Memorandum from City Engineer Sarah Mitchell, that fee is used “for future sewer improvement projects” – so not only might it not be implemented as soon as the applicable fee-in-lieu property comes on line but, also, that fee might not even be restricted to that particular fee-in-lieu property or block.

That doesn’t sound like the best plan for dealing with a flood-prone community. But those are different issues for another day.

At least for the time being this Council has made sure that $1.167 million of taxpayer money won’t be wasted on a project that won’t do the job needed to be done.

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