(Adam Studzinski/WJBC)
By David Stanczak
I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, or maybe I’m Don Quixote, or maybe just the Grinch. Monday night, the Bloomington City Council composed a wish list of the things it could do with the $750,000 in state money it was going to use to acquire land adjacent to McGraw Park, but which it has now been told is unavailable.
Many years ago, Ruth Krauss wrote a book entitled A Hole Is to Dig, which consisted of brief inquiries to small children. The purpose of the book was to demonstrate that children don’t view reality the same way adults do. A similar book, Money Is to Spend could be written to illustrate that elected officials don’t view reality the same way as others. Just as a child sees a hole as something to dig, an elected official sees money as something to spend. Not all elected officials suffer equally from this malady. The bigger the governmental unit, the worse the affliction, witness the fact that municipalities generally manage to balance their books every year, but our state has earned the lousiest credit rating of any state, and the federal debt just went past the $18 trillion mark. The bigger the unit, the more its officials see their function as spending money by distributing it to others.
Apply this principle to the park grant. There is nothing on the city council’s wish list (improving the Constitution Trail, Miller Park Pavilion repairs and upgrades, Sunnyside Park renovation, Prairie Vista golf cart path resurfacing) that does not sound like a good idea. However, nothing in that list is a project that implicates any interest of the State of Illinois. Put most bluntly, with a multi-billion dollar pension underfunding and a billion dollar hole in this year’s budget, why in the hell should the State of Illinois be paying $750,000 for any of these things? I’m not picking on the Bloomington City Council; elected officials all over the state do it. But with the state in the state that it’s in, they all need to stop it. Sure $750,000 isn’t going to cure the state’s financial woes, but if all communities started asking this question, it would be a start. And it would get people thinking of money as something not to spend.
David Stanczak, a Forum commentator since 1995, came to Bloomington in 1971. He served as the City of Bloomington’s first full-time legal counsel for over 18 years, before entering private practice. He is currently employed by the Snyder Companies and continues to reside in Bloomington with his family.
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