You get the sense observing the Riverside village board that everyone is a little twitchy. Since the Riverside Community Alliance was voted into power back in April, they’ve not yet made good on that promise for a deep and unflinching look into the void of village finances and a decided pulling of Riverside back from the brink.
So far the board’s actions have been almost halting – find a buck here and a buck there to hang onto, shuffle ledgers around to maintain, for the most part, the status quo.
Next month, taxpayers have been told will be the moment of reckoning. Strategy sessions are coming and that long-awaited, line-by-line audit of the village’s budget will be completed, revealing to all the way forward.
We can’t wait for that to happen. Since the election, there’s been plenty of “who could have predicted this?” rhetoric and a whole lot of reacting to financial predicaments and not a whole lot of proactive work being done. We guess that’s to be expected, because this whole business of governing a municipality, even one as small as Riverside, is more complicated than you might think, especially without a full-time village manager for a good portion of that time.
But with the new year, that’s supposed to change. The village has a new manager, an administration with eight months of governance under its belt and a whole lot of promises to make good on.
Perhaps the trustees are twitching like thoroughbreds at the gate, waiting to be unleashed and perform as they were meant to perform. Or maybe the twitching betrays a hesitancy, the realization that “it’s up to us, now.”
The preliminaries are over for the RCA board in Riverside. Making good on the promises of 2009 must be the order of the day in 2010.
We have to ask
What the hell is up with Congressman Danny Davis? We like his political outlook. We’re suckers for his rhetoric. But what’s happened to his political smarts?
Davis, who represents part of North Riverside, spent the past year gumming up the works with his always-suspect plan to run for Cook County board president, only to back out and run for re-election to his oh-so-safe congressional seat. Then, last week, he chose from among his almost-rivals for the county board post and endorsed, inexplicably, Dorothy Brown. He said it was because she was ahead in the polls.
What happened to leading the way, Danny? What happened to progressive, independent politics? Your past year feels like an enormous political brain cramp.
We have higher expectations.