On a golf course, there’s no excuse for piddling along at the speed of a turtle. Play slow enough and you’ll be penalized.
The same, unfortunately, is not true for members of the Cook County Board.
The board’s affinity for slow play in general is legendary. That’s how the county’s forest preserve district chalked up millions of dollars in deficits while board members snoozed, unaware. We’re talking about county commissioners who didn’t get around to inspecting the 1998 and 1999 audits of the deficit-ridden forest preserves until (yawn) 2001.
But the pace at which the county is pursuing privatization of its 10 forest preserve golf courses suggests a new low in adrenaline output. A year and a half has passed since Commissioner Michael Quigley first suggested privatizing the money-losing courses. More than six months have passed since a Deloitte & Touche audit quantified the bad management by finding that the district loses an amazing $4.16 on every round of golf played. Almost six months have passed since Board President John Stroger said he would seek to privatize the golf courses.
So how’s it going? As the Tribune’s Mickey Ciokajlo reported Friday, not so great. County officials have taken so long to request and then evaluate proposals from golf management companies that some board members suspect shenanigans. “Unquestionably, the bureaucracy has held this up,” Commissioner Peter Silvestri, whose district includes several county courses, said Monday. “I believe part of it is that some people really don’t want to privatize.”
In other words, some people in county government don’t want an efficient, even profitable operation because that could mean the end of employment for scores of do-little payrollers who got their jobs through political connections.
Silvestri is one of several board members frustrated by the delays in what was supposed to be an urgent process. Of course, at the forest preserve district, “urgent” isn’t part of the lexicon.
Within a couple of weeks, the district is supposed to serve up its choice of management companies. Then the board must discuss that proposal. Meanwhile another season of golf, and of losses, will be frittering away, uninterrupted by decisive action from the folks at Cook County.
Whatever contract the district finally proposes deserves close scrutiny. Example: Stroger has said a new contractor would be required to give first priority to hiring current employees.
Yet privatization means giving a vendor authority to provide a service, then watching that vendor like a hawk to make sure it performs well. It does not mean larding a contract with requirements that tie the vendor’s hands and protect county payrollers at taxpayers’ expense.
Of course it’s difficult to evaluate the golf privatization proposal because, even at this late date, none exists. The months pass and pass while the forest preserve bureaucrats take their time. When, one wonders, will the County Board distribute a fat wad of pink slips to penalize them?
