It’s official. If you would like to use a meeting room at the Naperville Municipal Center, you’d better bring cold hard cash, your checkbook, credit card or a bunch of piggy banks, to pay for the privilege of using a room for whatever good cause you may have, or the folks at city hall will tell you to take a hike, beat it, or get out of here.
The Naperville Municipal Center is the building city officials approved to build with tax payer’s dollars. In other words, your dollars built the building, that the mayor of Homer Glen referred to as a ‘Taj Mahal’ of city halls. This is the building that city officials use for their convenience for offices to conduct business and have meetings. It’s in these offices and meeting rooms that they create policy mandating that the tax payers who built the building and meeting rooms, can’t use the building and meeting rooms unless they pay a fee. Thomas Jefferson wouldn’t be a happy guy.
Watch and listen as Naperville resident Jim Haselhorst makes a very common sense presentation to the city council. Pay special attention to the last minute or so, when tax payer Haselhorst asks an excellent question, only to be ignored and sent on his way by the entire council:
Nine members on the council, along with the city manager, give Haselhorst what is commonly known as the “bum’s rush”, scoot him out the door without the common courtesy of an answer.
This council meeting occurred Tuesday October 20 at 7pm, the same night and start time for game three of the National League Championship Series involving the Cubs at Wrigley Field. That hasn’t happened in 7 years. It’s possible that Jim Haselhorst is a Cub’s fan and he gave up something special for his few minutes in front of the council, but even if Jim isn’t a fan, he still took the time and made the effort to address the council and deserves more than a rude brush off. Would it have been that difficult for one of the ten,including the city manager, to give him an answer. Even something as simple as, “Thank you Jim for your comment, we appreciate it, and we’ll consider it with all options.”
Apparently, Mr. Haselhorst wasn’t worth a 4-second response.
To the credit of mayor Steve Chirico, he does keep the meeting moving in an efficient business-like manner, and council members John Krummen and Paul Hinterlong both have recently asked/allowed speakers to complete their comments beyond the time-allotted limit. Refreshing to say the least.
Now if the Naperville city council would only give 15 four-second courteous responses to presenters, it would only add one minute to the length of the meeting. That’s not too much to ask for the folks who ‘built’ the council chambers.
The issue was, is and will always be should government encourage citizens to participate in THEIR tax paid for systems, facilities, programs and governance?
This transparent method to deprive citizens of a meeting place paid for by them not by banning it because that would be illegal but by taxing it out of existence which is always legal for governments who want to discourage and freeze out the voters.
Jim was right but just too nice in taking these people to task. These clowns waste more money in a week through lack of appropriate oversight on their city manager and his incompetence then the entire expenditure they claim it will cost yearly for this service. It’s appalling that they would fiddle while OUR Rome burns by not balancing our budgets while significantly increasing our taxes and service charges.
The City Council is dead wrong on this issue. It’s petty to charge NFP for room rentals on a building we already paid for through our property taxes. I can’t imagine the rental income will make a dent in the city debt.