Community Forum for Youth

There will be a community meeting this Wednesday, August 15th at 10am at the Presbyterian Church to hear from youth and other community members about ideas for improving the safety and well being of Geneva's children and teens. We support this effort to bring many voices to the table, and look forward to other youth speak out events in various neighborhoods across the city.

An Information "Lock Down" Doesn't Serve the Public Interest

City Manager Rich Rising some time ago ordered all City staff not to have any direct contact with Councilors. Any contact must be approved by him. He says that is his way of making sure Councilors are well served. We say it is his way of controlling government. We’re told that we’re not allowed to have direct access to any department heads because that would be "micro-managing" and we’re certainly not supposed to solicit input from the so-called “rank and file” city employees. Other communities have a ‘Personnel’ or ‘Employee Relations’ committee where union reps. and others can offer candid assessments of city policies directly to council members, but no such luck here in Geneva. This is what we call the “information lock down.”

So as we grapple with issues of youth violence in Geneva, and proposals for a gun amnesty program and a “curfew” (see our post from May on that issue), we must rely on a third hand report from the police department (the Council hears what the City Manager says the Chief reported that the officers and command staff shared). Sound convoluted? We think so, too.

And it’s totally inefficient. A question is raised months ago: What can we do to curb youth violence, vandalism, and other issues in the community? Granted, there’s no easy answer, it’s a complex problem. But it seems like the first thing you need to know in order to answer it is: What do the police officers think? These are the people dealing with the issue day in and day out. Don’t you think they have some ideas?

You might think we could just break “the rules” and go out and talk to the guys directly. Well, the last time Councilor Augustine had a candid conversation with a DPW employee about an idea for improving the department, the city administration tried to get her to reveal the identity of that person so that he could be fired for insubordination. Don’t worry, Augustine didn’t spill the beans. But we don’t want our police officers to suffer the same Grand Inquisition.

Maybe we could speak to them ‘unofficially’, like if we all happen to be in the same place at the same time and the topic happens to come up? That’s not useful either because we still can’t tell council what we’ve learned without revealing that the guys talked or having the majority of council accuse us of making it up. If they don’t believe us when we discuss studies showing the negative impact of high property taxes (and they don’t believe it) then how can we expect them to believe a report from us about what the police officers want done?

Instead, we’re expected to make decisions based on a set of facts that have been filtered through many channels. Here’s an example. Last year, a woman living on East North Street approached council asking us to take action regarding “gang activity” in her neighborhood. Councilor Capraro asked, at that meeting, to get a report from the police department about levels of “gang activity” in that part of the city and the city as a whole. We received a short memo. from the Chief of Police stating that there are no gangs in Geneva. Period. But we still have questions about that. Did he mean that we don’t have nationally-recognized gangs? Does he mean that we don’t have gangs that are specifically organized to commit crimes? What exactly counts as a ‘gang’? And how should we describe what’s going on in some of Geneva’s neighborhoods?

We need to hear directly from the officers that are on the streets and in the schools about what they’re seeing. We know that there has been an issue with making sure the department is fully staffed, but if we assume that’s being resolved (as we’re told that it will be), what other strategies would they suggest to deal with the problems of drugs and violence? What are their thoughts on the ‘curfew’, gun amnesty, or other efforts to promote parental responsibility?

All in all, we believe that Geneva is a great city, a safe city. But some of our residents have a much different experience. If there’s a way that City Council can make a change for the better, then we must act. But we can’t pull answers out of thin air.

Republicans Go "the Blog Way": Beckley and D'Amico Flip Flop, Join Democrats in Criticism of Cass

It seems like only yesterday Mayor Cass was blasting the Democratic committee for “going the blog way” by embracing concepts of open, honest, and accountable city government. Those are the values that led the Democrats to create a platform that strives for ethics and integrity in government, increased citizen participation, and a more active council that operates respectfully and responsibly. That’s the platform that Councilor Cosentino objected to when he wrote a letter to the editor explaining why he was not interested in the committee’s support.

What a delight to see the Republican committee’s platform echo similar principles! Finally we’ve reached consensus that the current majority on council is leading the City astray. Republicans say: the taxes are too high, that we need to share services with the Town and County, that Council should meet twice a month, that the City should have committees to work on major issues rather than always operating as a committee of the whole, that the ‘curfew’ proposal is on the right track, that there should be no more “back room deals”, no more violations of the Open Meetings Law, that there should be a lakefront plan that isn’t the ‘same old same ole’ group.

Wow! Where have we heard that before? Well, in these blog postings:

• Does Geneva Have the Highest Taxes in the Country? (March 29^th)
• A Tax Exemption Would be Good, but a Lower Tax Rate Would be Better (April 3rd)
• A Case Study in What We Call “The Back Room” and Why It’s A Bad Thing (April 16^th)
• Reorienting City Council (April 19^th)
• Can We Expect Different Results From the Same Old Efforts? (April 23^rd)
• “Curfew” Not Really A Curfew But It’s Still A Good Idea (May 27^th)
• Not All Property Tax Relief is Created Equal (June 25^th)
• Sharing Services In the Name of Community: City, Town, and County Have to Get It Together (July 17^th)

Not to mention all of our responses to comments on some of the posts.

But now it seems worth mentioning that these very ideas being touted by Beckley and D’Amico in the newspaper as their own original brainstorms, were some of the very things they have publicly opposed.

For example, what prompted Beckley to have a change of heart on the tax rate? It was just this past budget cycle that he wrote a lengthy article on the virtue of the majority’s increase, claiming “It’s Only A Nickel.”

And D’Amico was happy to join the majority of council in the back room when they agreed to give City Manager Rich Rising a 5% retroactive raise without a completed performance evaluation. In fact, D’Amico didn’t even serve on the council during the period Rising was being evaluated on. But that didn’t stop him from casting the deciding vote on the matter, late at night, when the matter hadn’t even been included on the agenda.

And Beckley has been an outspoken supporter of projects requesting large public investments and/or tax breaks. He even criticized Councilors Augustine, Nyrop, and Espenscheid by name for asking “too many questions” about these projects.

Beckley and Rising are on the Geneva Arts Development Council board together (see the official listing on their website), and Beckley was quick to defend Rising’s plan to demolish a block of Main Street for a tax-exempt performing arts center. That’s “progress,” they say.

D’Amico has blasted our blog in the newspaper and at council meetings, but it seems that someone in the Republican party likes what they’ve been reading. But we all know that it’s one thing to share ideas, it’s another thing to share a commitment to putting those ideas into action. Beckley and D’Amico’s track record doesn’t give us any confidence that they can make good on their promises.