In our never-ending quest to keep our finger on the pulse of this community we regularly check out our local social media sites. And over the weekend a February 27 post on the Park Ridge Concerned Homeowners Group FB page caught our eye.

Kicked off by Josh Chapman’s complaint about the deplorable condition of his unpaved alley that was ignored even as the City spent wasted “$15K fighting a developer in court when 2 law firms told them they wouldn’t win” over the density of the 400 Talcott residential development, the comment string took a few twists and turns while touching on other City projects that somebody wants done.

Without much knowledge or concern about their costs, and how the City – a/k/a, the taxpayers – will be able to pay for them.

Acting Mayor Marty Maloney provided some very good information and insight into the paving issue, to which Chapman provided one trenchant comment (“[I]t might be a good exercise to do an ROI on the cost of continued maintenance on the unpaved alleys vs. investing to pave them.”). Doing such ROI analyses – and having them prominently posted on the City’s website for all the special interests to see – would be a big step in reducing the ignorance that fuels too many of these special-interest discussions.

On the other hand, like many of the folks up in Mayfield Estates who knew or should have known of that area’s lack of storm sewers and propensity for flooding when they bought their bargain-priced property and built their McMansions, the complainers about the unpaved alleys didn’t wake up one morning to find their paved alleys torn out and replaced with gravel. Nor, as best as we can tell, were they ever unequivocally promised that their alleys would be paved at City expense by any specific date, if at all.

So while perhaps the City could do a better job of maintaining the alleys, the high dudgeon and semi-hysteria about their disrepair must be taken with a couple of heaping scoops of Kosher salt.

But perhaps the best contribution to that comment string came from Ald. Nick Milissis (2nd), which we are reprinting in its entirety except for inserting paragraph breaks that the alderman must have overlooked in what appears to have been his homage to William Faulkner:

Sure, let’s add paved alleyways with sewer drains to: a new police station, major flood resolution projects, paying down the uptown TIF, providing salary increases every year for police, fire and the rest of city staff, buying new ambulances and fire trucks, the list goes on and on and the reality is each and every one of us has something in their radar that they believe is of the outmost importance and a need.

At the same time everyone agrees we pay a lot in taxes and can not tolerate any increases. Of course many ignore the inconvenient fact that a majority of our taxes go to the school districts and not the city. Yet from that small slice of tax revenue the city gets everyone wants everything yesterday.

Sorry but that’s not how it works folks. We try to prioritize as best we can but we can’t do everything for everyone.

Not diminishing the asks that are on this posting but I choose to prioritize a bumpy alleyway that might look unattractive as a lower priority to flooded homes and destroyed properties that lower the value of everyone’s property value around town. New lockers in the police station can wait in line behind residents losing cars and basements during major storms.

I am all for addressing actual health issues in the police station such as mold remediation and air quality. The problem is that some use the air quality issues as leverage for is to build a Nile’s style station with Sally ports and other unnecessary luxuries. We have to be realistic for the sake of our residents. Police just received brand new equipment, squad cars, a nice salary bump so let’s not pretend we’re mistreating our officers and tone down the rhetoric on these forums.

And kudos to Milissis for also pointing out in a subsequent comment that “too many infrastructure fixes and improvements were swept under the rug for decades” while “outright negligent decision making stuck us with the crushing debt of the uptown TIF” that the fiscally-responsible city councils since 2011 have had to address with many “unpleasant decisions” – including project prioritization and larger annual tax increases.

Of course, all those former City officials responsible for the decades of neglect are long removed from the days of their irresponsible public office-holding, and their disappearance from public life suggests a kind of terror at the thought of stepping into any of these debates – either on social media or, like big boys and girls, by showing up at Council meetings – and taking ownership of their FUBARs. Not surprisingly, many of them, including all three living former mayors and twenty-five former aldermen or other City officials, endorsed our late Mayor Dave Schmidt’s opponent in the 2013 election, an unprecedented exercise in futility that we wrote about in our 04.12.13 post and that actually may have contributed to the increase in Mayor Dave’s vote total and margin over 2009. 

But with all these projects vying for attention, the City needs to make a list that explains each project and attaches the best-available cost figure to each, then let this Council prioritize that list and publish it prominently on the City’s website so that everybody can see what those priorities are – and can challenge them if so inclined. Or accept them and shut up.

Take the unpaved alleys, for example.

We understand that a reasonable guestimate of the cost of alley paving is $400,000 per block, which includes relief sewers for the run-off. But that’s without any debt service that would be incurred if it were to be funded by bonded debt. Additionally, under previous alley-paving programs there was a split of the costs between the City and the homeowners on the affected bloc, with the split being either 50/50 or 75(City)/25(homeowner). But given the rise of the freeloader mentality, we wonder how many complainers would be willing to pick up 50%, or even 25%, of the cost of paving their blocks.

We suspect the City spends less than $400,000 per decade on the maintenance of each unpaved alley, even if they are graded – and gravel added – a couple/few times a year.

On the other hand, an argument has been made by City staff that paved alleys contribute to sewer flooding, even though the relief sewers have restrictors that limit the speed at which alley water enters the main combined-sewer system. We have yet to read or hear, however, how much water the unpaved alleys absorb versus their paved counterparts, which also raises the hot-button issue of “green” v. “grey” infrastructure.

Installing an estimated 50 blocks of “grey” at an estimated $400K/alley is $20 million, not counting debt service. And as best as we can guestimate, Milissis’s whole list represents close to $300 MILLION of wishes, many of which are special-interest ones. Those need to be more accurately valued and prioritized if they are to be managed in a way that reduces the one-off “Where’s ours?” influence of the special interests and focuses on what the entire community’s needs and  wants.

And, most importantly, to demonstrate their willingness to pay for it by measurable referendum votes.

Because, to paraphrase the old English proverb: If wishes were horses, freeloaders would ride.

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