Village of Downers Grove  Manager Ginex, Mayor Krajewski, Council Members:

As noted at your recent Saturday "Community Dialog on Village Finances," I and others were greatly disappointed by the failure of Downers Grove Village Government to deliver a Community Forum on Village Finances, as you promoted.  Although it certainly was not surprising to discover that your idea of a community forum is a highly orchestrated event with all topics pre-determined and mostly of a non-controversial, generic nature, with no time allowed for open questions/comments by citizens regarding financial issues not on the pre-approved agenda.  To think I and other busy citizens would come to a Saturday morning meeting in December planning to discuss a pre-formulated mission statement is absurd, and it is why I and others left rather than participate in such an insult to our time and serious concerns.

Although I no longer believe current D.G.  Village leadership is interested in honest discussion of your looming fiscal train-wreck, if Saturday's "Community Forum" had allowed open discussion of Village financial issues, topics I would have liked discussed would include:

1. What is the true financial impact of your ill-advised, incredibly expensive parking garage?

2. How do you plan to pay for a downtown TIF that you finally admit is now going to create over a $30 million deficit for taxpayers?

3. Why will your projections for the equally ill-advised Curtis block redevelopment, in the face of a continuing slow economy, be any more realistic than your CBD projections? Don't you learn from past mistakes?

4. Why do your police and fire pension funds continue to understate the extent of their actual underfundedness by projecting unrealistic, actuarial investment return rates of 8.5%?

5. Why are nearly $7 million of projected 04-05 expenditures identified only as "other" services, claims, etc.?

6. How can Village health insurance costs be projected to have little increase between fiscal 2004 and fiscal 2007?

7. What is the current status of the Village's Reserve Fund?

8. Why did fiscal 2003 expenditures include $4.4million "claim payments" and a $1.4 million operating loss for Waterworks?

9. Why are you projecting police and fire salary increases three times the rate of inflation?

10. Why has the Village's tax levy more than doubled from fiscal 1993 to fiscal 2002, while DuPage County decreased its levy during the same period?

11. Why were 2003 downtown TIF revenues $297,000 instead of the projected $4.5 million?

12. Why did the 2003 utility tax generate $1.7 million instead of the budgeted $2.8 million?

13. Why isn't it poor fiscal management to have increased D.G.  citizens' per capita tax burden from $17 to $739 from fiscal 1993 to fiscal 2002, and total debt service from $395,000 to $6.8 million?

14. Why shouldn't D.G.  taxpayers' response to all this and more be elimination of home rule taxing powers and removal from office, A.S.A.P., those responsible for these fiscal problems?

Sincerely,

William Vollrath,  Downers Grove

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