From the Daily Chronicle yesterday:

DeKALB – Some members of the DeKalb City Council raised concerns Monday about the lack of a basement in the new DeKalb police station.

The issue surfaced while a representative from PSA Dewberry, the architecture firm in charge of designing the $12 million building, as well as a construction manager and city officials, gave the council an update on the building’s design phase.
…
“The lowest level was the most expensive real estate on the entire project,” [Public Works director T.J.] Moore said. “… We could get everything we absolutely needed to have by giving up something we wanted to have.”

Apparently, there are costs associated with the necessity of moving a sewer line on the proposed police station property.

T. J. Moore joined the [DeKalb Sanitary District board] meeting at this time, and discussed with the Board the potential building site and building configuration for the new DeKalb Police Station. The Board instructed the engineers to prepare a cost estimate for moving the existing sewer line to conform to current policy. Cost sharing can then be discussed.

So, the costs were not known until sometime after the February Sanitary District meeting.

I don’t know about you, but I’d like to know what the sewer move cost estimates have turned out to be, and what impacts these costs (and/or the necessity of a move itself) have had on the design plans.

Meanwhile, the Sanitary District meeting minutes for February and March trace the sewer-related travails of the CVS pharmacy construction at Route 38 and Annie Glidden, including the requirement of obtaining Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) approval for the permanent routing of the sewer line there.

[Hat Tip to J.H.]

First, let’s take care of the error in the story. It says

Assuming the auditing firm signs off on the city’s finances for the year, the report is then sent to the Illinois comptroller’s office. But the office only files them and does not have the time, funding or legal authority to conduct independent reviews, said Brad Hahn, communications director for Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka.

“The comptroller’s office serves as a repository for audits and annual financial reports,” he said. “(Dixon’s) filings were all on time and complete. There were no red flags.”

It is not hard to check the facts. Go here, and you’ll see that, according to the state’s own website, Dixon has failed to submit its Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) for FY2011, which ended April 30, 2011.

The comptroller claims a CAFR submission compliance rate of 86%, but as indicated above, has no enforcement power over the scofflaws.

Would that really constitute a red flag, though? Maybe, but good luck finding anything truly amiss in any sort of legal sense from a CAFR. What CAFRs are really for is to give people, including “civilians” like you and me, a sort of snapshot of the financial health of a community.

For example, if you’ve been visiting City Barbs with any regularity, you know that I’m currently concerned about a) DeKalb’s promoting recent rising revenues as a spending “all clear” signal even though they are mostly of temporary and/or highly variable varieties; b) long-term liabilities in general; c) rapidly rising annual pension costs; and d) DeKalb residents’ growing per capita debt burden. These concerns all rose from studies of the CAFRs but are about the results of policies, not of criminality per se.

The perfect example of how little help a CAFR can be in detecting wrongdoing is the story of the growth of the Waste Fund into a slush fund containing $485,000 — a development undiscovered by anyone looking at budget or CAFR until layoffs were staring us in the face in mid-2008 and city staff had to come clean to avoid them.

No, if you wanted to find the corruption in DeKalb, I suspect you’d best start with an investigation into how the city manager uses his spending authority, and at the practices used in awarding no-bid contracts — you know, like what should have happened when the Wogen scandal broke.

Therein lies the biggest difference between Dixon and DeKalb. No matter what you might have to say about the Dixon commissioners’ naivete or complacency or whatever, once the administration came upon evidence of wrongdoing, from all accounts it immediately called in the authorities and is welcoming additional scrutiny.

It’s the difference between “if” vs. “when.” DeKalb is saying something like this can’t possibly happen here, another symptom of its deep denial that anything it does could actually be wrong. Dixon’s cleaning house, while DeKalb never acknowledges the existence of any dirt at all.

If anyone is going to spend tax dollars on new street signs, then they should be in DeKalb Barbs orange, using the school’s logo. Here is the D logo.

I bet a lot more people would want the street signs using the school colors. There are already several cities in Indiana that have their street signs using the local school’s colors and logos. One example is Brownsburg, Indiana, which is the hometown of basketball player Gordon Hayward. The Salt Lake Tribune thought highly of the city’s high school themed street signs.

How did Dixon get by on less for all these years? How did Dixon keep the budgets trim when they allegedly had tens of millions of fewer dollars to spend all these years?

In 2010, I spent a whole week in Dixon for the annual Lincoln Highway Association conference. In 2007, the conference committee looked at Dixon, DeKalb, and Joliet as possibilities for hosting the conference. DeKalb did not have adequate open hotel space away from railroad tracks. Meeting space in Joliet would have been more expensive. Dixon has adequate hotel space in a quiet location, has inexpensive meeting room space, and as a bonus, it is a beautiful city along the Rock River. Leading up to the 2010 conference, I was in Dixon at least once a month for a couple of years. Business with the LHA still takes me west frequently enough that one local resident thought I lived there (the same thing happened in Franklin Grove).

Dixon somehow found money to refurbish the riverfront area and spruce up the city in time for the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth. I see plenty of police cars on patrol in Dixon. The streets look good enough, even the side streets. The petunias look great in the summer–those are tended to mostly by volunteers. Dixon somehow had enough money for the fire department to turn the Rock River green for St. Patrick’s Day. Dixon has wonderful local festivals, and preserved historic buildings.

Two out of the four IL Representative 90 candidates in the March primary were from Dixon, including Tom Demmer, who won the primary.

So, how did Dixon get by on less for all these years?

While I know other small cities are looking at Dixon for what not to do, I think there are some lessons to learn about how to get by on less money that will go overlooked.

As an incorrigible repeat offender I could not stop myself from submitting a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to obtain the following information:

1. The breakdown of the transfers so we can tell how much is going to the General Fund and how much is going to Debt Service. As you can see below, they used to break it down:

I tried to look it up using the city budgets, but the numbers there do not add up to the sum stated in the TIF report. It might be important. Especially nowadays with EAV falling and with half of the property and sales tax increments being paid out to all the overlapping local governments as surplus, we need to keep an eye that the city can still cover its debt service payments as well. Combining the transfers as they did for FY2011, so that you can no longer tell where they went at a glance, is a step backward in transparency anyhow.

2. The reason why Joint Review Board annual meeting minutes are not routinely submitted.

3. The reason why DeKalb’s CEO doesn’t do the required CEO compliance certification.

Bonus table: Central Area TIF state and local sales tax increments:

The sales tax increments pretty much mirror what has happened in DeKalb overall: taxable sales plunged by tens of millions in 2008-9 and have not yet climbed back to pre-crisis levels.

Sales and use taxes also make up 40% of the revenues in DeKalb’s General Fund budget. DeKalb is hoping to collect $12 million in sales and use taxes during the current fiscal year, 2012, which ends June 30.

Additional sources: City of DeKalb’s FY2012 Adopted Budget (PDF pp. 120-124) and FY2011 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (PDF pp. 211-214).

What’s changed is the energetic 20-something who found that her hen-keeping proposal could not get a fair hearing.

My mom, pillar of support that she is, tagged along for the meeting. At multiple points she looked at me and asked “are they serious?” and I had to tell her yes, our local government is so fucking ridiculous you can’t even tell when they’re being serious.

This isn’t just about losing. It’s about HOW members of city commissions and the council casually dismissed hours of painstaking research (some obviously did not even read the backup materials provided) and 400 petition signatures.

— On Mon, 3/19/12, Povlsen, Kris wrote:
From: Povlsen, Kris
Subject: So much for Transparency
To: “‘markX@X.com’”
Date: Monday, March 19, 2012, 2:30 PM
Guess this says a lot about your character and walking the talk! You are a hypocrite CITIZEN CHARVAT!

What’s even more hilarious is where the seed for this outburst came from.

About 40 minutes earlier, city manager Mark Biernacki had sent around a message containing this (my emphasis):

The topic below came to our attention via an email from a citizen. Apparently, the DeKalb Township Board has on its april 10 annual meeting three pending advisory referenda questions that address the forms of government for the City of DeKalb and the DeKalb Library (Home Rule, City Mgr Form of Government, and a separate Library District. [sic]

…At that meeting, if a simple majority of the registered electors who show vote “yes”, then these advisory questions will appear on the November ballot. As you can see, Mr. Charvat has initiated this (interesting in that he appears to want this to sneak by without too many people knowing about it, in contrast to the transparency he so strongly advocates for when discussing governmental matters).

There is a big difference between city government and Mark Charvat. Mark Charvat is a private citizen exercising his rights as, you know, a private citizen. He is under no obligation to keep the City of DeKalb in the loop.

On the other hand, the City of DeKalb MUST keep its citizens in the loop and boy, do they resent it. Last night Alderman Gallagher called people who file FOIA requests “repeat offenders” who are looking for the “silver bullet” (and incidentally he completely missed the point that most FOIA requests are, and always have been, commercial requests). Recently the mayor called people who want a referendum on the city manager form of government “a group of obstructionists that really, truly don’t have the interests of the community in mind”; and at the first meeting of the state’s attorney’s anti-corruption initiative Povlsen called anti-corruption advocates Woodward and Bernstein wannabes.

We must watch the mayor carefully, as he may be working up to some serious slander.

Meanwhile, another seed was planted in that same Biernacki e-mail:

I recognize that if successful these are only advisory referenda and cannot bind the City Council. However, the Mayor and Council are asked to assess and determine what would be the political implications for the City should these advisory referenda pass.

The business of the city council is supposed to be policy, not politics, but as ever it’s Biernacki who sets the agenda and the rest of the council follows like puppies.

I still miss our Old Post Office . . .

http://www.change.org/petitions/to-the-mayor-and-the-city-council-of-geneva-illinois-save-the-historic-pure-oil-building

The Geneva City Council will discuss it on Monday night’s agenda. The Kane County Chronicle has an article here:

http://www.kcchronicle.com/2012/03/23/demolition-of-pure-oil-building-topic-of-geneva-meeting/axcf9kt/