As regular readers of this blog well know, we have actively and consistently opposed what had been a common practice of some of our local governmental bodies: taxing their residents and then using those tax revenues to make donations to certain private charities favored by those public officials with control over that money.

Last year the Park Ridge Library Board voted to discontinue what was known as the Food For Fines program (“FFF”). FFF was a longstanding program under which the Library staff waived overdue book and materials fines – money owed to the Library and, therefore, indirectly to its taxpayers – in return for non-perishable food donations to the Park Ridge Kiwanis Clubs that they forwarded to the Maine Township Food Pantry.

In other words, FFF caused the “donation” of public money belonging to the Library (a/k/a Park Ridge taxpayers) to a private organization (the Kiwanis) for the benefit of a different taxing body (Maine Twp.) that serves a much broader “community” than just Park Ridge.

In arguing against the discontinuance of FFF, certain Kiwanis members contended that FFF demonstrated the community’s commitment to taking care of the less-fortunate.

But according to an article in the current Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“Park Ridge Kiwanians help families in need buy food for the holidays,” Dec. 20), in the first year that the FFF program was discontinued (2014) the food collection drums at the Library produced a mere 25 food boxes instead of the customary 200 boxes. And although Library staff never bothered to keep track of how many dollars of fines were being waived in return for how many food items, rough estimates based on average monthly fine revenues suggest that it was in the thousands of dollars each year.

So, apparently, many of those FFF participants were motivated more by the personal gain from trading a can of creamed corn for a few dollars of fines than by their commitment to the less fortunate in their community.

Or maybe they just preferred a different way of demonstrating their commitment to the less fortunate, such as donations to the many church food drives, or to various other charitable organizations.

But as the H-A article reports, this year the Kiwanis reinvented its food donation program to rely on its own fundraisers and individual contributions, rather than taxpayer money, to provide $100 gift cards and hams to 35 families whose children qualify for the free lunch program due to their families’ low income.

That’s what true “charity” is: privately chosen, not publicly mandated.

Which brings us to another true “charity”: the Park Ridge Holiday Lights Fund. 

In 2009, the City Council – under the leadership of then-mayor Dave Schmidt – cut from the City budget the approximately $40,000 annual holiday decorating expense in order to direct those dollars to essential City expenses. Some residents beefed and whined about that and other cuts, insisting that “a majority” of residents happily paid taxes for such amenities. But we supported Mayor Dave’s cuts because essential expenses should always take priority over amenities. And among those essential expenses were million-dollar increases in the debt service expense of the Uptown TIF, compliments of former mayors Wietecha, Marous and Frimark, and their complicit aldermen who buried the City in long-term bonded debt in order to sweeten the financial pot for the Uptown TIF’s private developers.

In response to the cut of those expenses, volunteers – many of whom were children in the Indian Scouts and Princesses program and their parents, with some assistance from the Park Ridge Public Works Department – took up the decorating. But as time went on, the extent of the decorating declined until many trees were barely decorated and many others not at all.

That prompted this blog to publish a July 22, 2015 post suggesting that a holiday lighting project for the Uptown and South Park business district was something a business organization like the Park Ridge Chamber of Commerce should take the lead on, because holiday lights in those two areas make them much more attractive for shoppers. And shortly afterwards, Chamber members Rick Biagi (also a Park Ridge Park District Board member) and John Moran (also a Park Ridge alderman) pitched the Chamber on letting them form and run a holiday lights committee under the Chamber’s auspices, using the Chamber’s not-for-profit status.

The Chamber, however, wanted no part of Biagi’s and Moran’s idea and told them so in no uncertain terms.

Undeterred, Biagi and Moran – with the help of a few other like-minded volunteers – formed the Park Ridge Holiday Lights Fund as an independent 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation with the motto “Lights For The People, By The People” and fully-transparent “open-book” finances. And in less than four months more than 400 of those “People” (and businesses and organizations) came through, helping the Lights Fund raise almost $45,000 in donations toward the $85,000+ 3-year light purchase commitment while creating the most “Bedford Falls”-like Uptown in memory.

Despite all that community support, however, it should be noted that the overwhelming majority of Park Ridge residents did not donate to either the Kiwanis food fund or the Holiday Lights Fund.

But that’s okay, because voluntary individualized charitable donations – not mandatory collectively-taxed contributions – are the kinds of acts that tend to ennoble the givers while inspiring (hopefully) gratitude in the recipients/beneficiaries, as de Tocqueville observed 180 years ago in his “Memoir on Pauperism,” even without having the Kiwanis or the Holiday Lights Fund in mind.

And they’ll have another chance to do so – voluntarily, as their spirits move them, not as government demands of them – next year and the year after that.

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