Short History of Oak Park

They are People of the Plan that cost $500,000 – what SEIU spent on yesterday’s runoff election in ONE CHICAGO WARD, in case you’re looking for special interests.

One thing, it’s time to slice if not dice the superblock, Marion to Harlem, Lake to North Blvd., to make it vehicle- and pedestrian-friendly. If you build it, they might not come, you know. It has to be easy to get there.

So down goes the Colt Bldg., we hope without need to run over protestors with bulldozers.

Why? To achieve one major slice, connecting North Blvd. with Lake St. and north to Holley Court parking. There. We feel better already.

The other slice is making a street from Marion, now restreeted, down Westgate, also restreeted. From this alone comes four new corners, and corner stores are good things.

We get two more (real) corners at Marion, and two more in the (sob) filled-in hole where once stood the Mighty Colt, that gorgeous thing, and that makes two more.

We can rename the village Oak Park Corners, like in “Our Town,” except nicer. Or we can rename Downtown Oak Park The Corners of Oak Park, with a life-size statue somewhere of Tarzan shaking hands with Frank Lloyd Wright.  Turning one of the corners and bumping into each other — something like that.

Once all this is in place, plus a few two-story stores, we can sit back and watch those autos cruise up and down in search of THINGS TO BUY and a place to park in front of the store of choice.

It will be like hitching Old Dobbin in front of the Emporium. And they say there’s no art in us.

If there’s no space in front of that store, and there might not be even with our crack crew of highly paid unionized meter maids to keep things moving, it’s over to Holley Court garage as quick as you please.

There are kinks to work out, but all in all, I think we have a winner. I can feel Oak Park moving again already.

Finally, some picky picks on Lyon and two others of his slate:

* Lyon retold his story about downtown real estate broker Bill Sullivan and his 200 employees. On the contrary, Sullivan told Lyon one of his CLIENTS has 200 employees, as this blog explained just the other day. Picky, yes, but the pain of not being read has been more than I can withstand.

Consider his windup, however, and how it illumines the knotty subsidy question:

“You vote for one who is not perfect,” he said. “but all of us live here, so we should look for similarities. I’ve been called mean, a cynic, an arguer,” he continued, alluding to a village council “meltdown” – “September third,” interjected Ray Johnson, sitting right in front of him, naming the date at which apparently tempers flared.

Milstein was speaking in a small OP Library meeting room just off the 2^nd-floor art gallery, in a heart-to-heart-talk atmosphere hosted by the NAACP and chaired by its president, Dorothy Reid.

The environment was relaxed compared to the just completed Carleton Hotel ballroom forum hosted by the Oak Park Realtors, where issues and positions were to the fore.

This group numbered four or five people, if that, of off-the-street attendance, all of us white except for Reid and her mother in the back of the room, long-time village community relations director (and current president of the 19^th Century Club) Sherlynn Reid.

Milstein concluded: “I will be forever grateful [for] knowing each and every one of you,” even, apparently the lying ones.

His running mate Annabel Abraham repeated her complaint that village board President David Pope had picked “almost half the board” – three trustees, with concurrence of the board itself, one to fill his own trustee slot when he ran for president, the other two to fill seats vacated by resignation.

Ray Johnson got autobiographical. He grew up in “rural Michigan,” where his mother was a township clerk. As trustee, he had “never missed a board meeting.”

Jan Pate said she had “no regrets” about running for trustee. “You feel enriched” by the experience, she said.

It was decompression time for candidates on the long trail to next Tuesday. Almost no NAACP members were there. They had turned out in force a month ago to hear elementary school board candidates in their uncontested election, Dorothy Reid said. School matters mattered more, apparently.

Johnson and Pate running mate Jon Hale likened the gathering to “an encounter group.” He recalled serving on the village Planning Commission, where he “knew nobody,” having arrived not long before from “a red state.”

He recalled that the commission received “no direction” from the (VMA-endorsed) village president, “or anything like it.” There had been “no pressure” from the VMA.

“We have to make village hall a civil place where people feel comfortable,” he said, touching on an election theme raised earlier by his running mate John Hedges, who also spoke.

NLP’s Harvey Lyon said with emotion that if his immigrant father saw him now as a trustee candidate, he would say, “I’m proud of you, Son.”

His running mate Mary Shiffer noted gratefully that “in about four days [the campaign] will be over,” to which Dorothy Reid, whose state legislator bid a few years back dragged on for months in litigation over vote-counting, said with perfect timing: “Prayerfully.”

Let us all pray.

He also read without comment a press release saying the Village Manager Assn. (VMA) had admitted its failure to report donations from three businesses “doing business in Oak Park,” one of them Regency Development, which has the big Marion-Ontario project almost completed.

It was a shot across the VMA bow if not worse. But VMA-Progressive Action’s Ray Johnson brushed it off. His slate, Citizens for Progressive Action, “has nothing to say” about how VMA raised money. “We set limits for our campaign,” he added. No more was said on the point in the 90 minutes or so that remained.

Vision Community Action’s Robert Milstein had shots to spare, however. His opponents are “simply lying” if they embrace their “tax and build myth,” he said. “We don’t need TIF’s,” he said, referring to Tax Increment Financing of redevelopment.

Milstein’s running mate Gary Schwab echoed Milstein’s opposition to TIF’s. A TIF is a “slush fund,” he said in a key considerably lower than Milstein’s. So what if without one we can’t have “grandiose projects,” he said, encapsulating his slate’s anti-development position. “We need to pay as we go,” said Milstein, voicing another theme.

VMA-Progressive Action’s Jon Hale zeroed in on the claim by Harvey Lyon that corporate headquarters would locate here without incentive. “Doesn’t work,” he said, saying he’d been “laughed at” when he asked developers about this.

(Incidentally, at this and another forum, Lyon referred to a conversation with Realtor Bill Sullivan in which Sullivan mentioned his 200 employees in Downtown Oak Park. Not quite, said Sullivan when asked about this. He had mentioned a downtown client as having 200 employees.)

Hale shot down the NLP claim than Elmhurst has a “no-subsidy policy.” Yes it does, said Hale. “Twice they have assembled whole blocks” for reduced-rate sale to developers” and have paid as much as $50,000 for someone simply to “raze a building.”

Responding to a question about the anti-development NIMBY syndrome (not in my backyard) and the more recent NOTE (not over there either), Milstein said it was “name-calling” and called for emphasizing “minority rights.”

He sharply criticized the plan to bail out elementary schools with TIF money, protesting, “We are not the school board.” The solution, he said, must come from the schools, not the village.

Lyon accused village staff and past VMA leadership of bad performance, calling three of them a “VMA mafia” who had “got out of Dodge.” He named former board president Joanne Trappani, former manager Carl Swenson, and former development director Michael Chen.

Johnson rejected this as “quite offensive” and objected to such “personal attacks.” Milstein also abjured the “mafia” terminology but said the same three had allowed “departments [to] deteriorate.” In fact, he said, they had “emasculated” the community relations department.

Milstein running mate Schwab objected to being “clubbed over the head” with claims of citizen participation in devising the Oak Park plan. He charged that changes were “pushed through” by “Trappani appointees.”

Summing up for New Leadership Party, Barbara Dolan employed a bit of drama, standing and removing the Roller Derby helmet amd black leather jacket she had worn throughout, apparently with a view to emphasizing her being “in enemy territory” among the Realtors.

On the front of her white tank top was the name of her team, “The Fury.” On the back, seen when she turned to leave at the end, was her sobriquet, “Queen B.” Her Roller Derby opponents had not inspired fear, she explained, but the “PR” onslaught by the well-funded VMA-Progressive Action team had done so.

Milstein meanwhile had some especially sharp remarks at the end. Having earlier complained of code violations as a major problem, he told how he would like them handled. If you kept failing inspections, he said, biting off his words, “you’d be fined and fined and fined and fined.”

Oak Park needed “a trolley system” throughout the village, he added.

Finally, he tore into village president David Pope, a once-VMA candidate who won the presidency two years ago as an independent but this week endorsed the VMA slate.

“He’s no longer independent, is he?” asked Milstein with a good deal of feeling. “He lied to us!”

Other, less telling, flourishes came from Milstein’s Vision Community Action running mate, Jim Balanoff, who produced a plethora of admonitions and avowals, among them “Let me be frank,” “Be honest,” and “We got to be honest.” This was good advice, and a church auditorium is a good place for it, even if one man’s honesty and candor is another’s bombast.

What else last night? The Marion Street Mall restreeting loomed large. VMA-Progressive Action candidate Jon Hale defended it as part of a plan for all of downtown, called it otherwise indefensible. You want to “revitalize” a retail area, you increase “connectivity” – make it easier to get around. So you break up whatever “superblock” interferes with that. It’s getting around that matters.

(As a statement of the superblock problem, we might consider this from a blog by Richard Layman, “a historic preservation and urban revitalization advocate and consultant in Washington, DC., Rebuilding Space in the Urban Place:

While the intent of the superblock was to separate pedestrians and automobiles, what happened is that places were made over for the car, and the walking experience, especially in center cities, was debilitated.)

Hale reminded the intense and energetic Milstein of his argument for saving the Colt Building, “I don’t care how much it costs, we have to save the building.”  “History matters,” Milstein said last night, dusting off an old slogan-argument to bolster his Marion Mall preservation theme. 

He went further, envisioning a pot of gold in old buildings whose historic ambience would boost tourism to the tune of millions in receipts.  Damn the tax base, full speed ahead with tourism, he seems to be saying.

Balanoff, scion of a major Illinois labor-union family, stole the show with stump speech after stump speech in which he accused the VMA of “terrible mismanagement . . . driving homeowners out . . . [being] hypnotized by developers . . . [making] a sweetheart deal with [developer] Taxman,” taking money from downtown property owners “expecting a return,” and being “captive of developers.”

If I were a VMA-Progressive Action candidate, one of Johnson Pate Hale & Hearty, I mean Hedges, I would have been tempted to slink out of Irving school with my tail between my legs. But in fact, they were unfazed by the assault, pluckily picking themselves up off the floor time and again, doggedly pursuing the tack of their choosing.

For instance, Ray Johnson repeated his assertion that delay on the Harlem-Ontario Whiteco project with its delicious Trader Joe’s as keystone, is costing the schools $700,000 (so far), and the First Coming (never mind the Second) of Trader Joe’s will bring in $1.2 million to cash-strapped schools.

He contrasted this, not surprisingly, with the $5 million-plus spent to buy the Colt Building when the developer Taxman, thwarted contrary to recommendations by a citizens committee, whose plan “was scuttled,” exercised his pull-out option.

Civility came up. The VMA people consider it missing in action the last two years. There have been “attacks” from the board on developers, said Johnson, an incumbent. (Hell, there were attacks on them this very night.) Robert Milstein, also an incumbent, justifiably took this personally. In his first two years on the board, he was the most civil person there, he said. But it’s got so, “if you question someone, you’re not civil.” When people come to Oak Park – developers, for instance – “they are all on the same page.” In any case, if he wins, he will keep on doing as he’s been doing, he said.

Others had their say. Annabel Abraham, running for the two-year slot with Balanoff and Milstein, cited “family tradition” as her motivation, noting her late husband Bernard’s extensive elected-office record in Oak Park, including a stint on the village board. She warmed to the discussion of care and feeding of a village manager with praise for the current man, commending him for living near Barrie Park and not in a “hoity-toity section” of town.

When VMA’s Jan Pate rather neatly recalled (in discussion of helping local businesses) that her people had instituted retail support grants in 2004, one of Abraham’s opponents for the two-year slot, New Leadership’s Rose Meyer, shot back – to the extent she shoots anything, being sweet of temper and visage – that in that year the Colt-buyback proviso was approved that in her (NLP) party’s view is the root cause of the Colt debacle.

As for helping local business, she said one thing the board can do is to “feel their pain.” No money is to go with the sympathy, however: “We pay our way as we go through life,” and so should small businesses. She also plumped for “quality of life,” citing her teacher who told her, apparently long ago, “This life is not a rehearsal,” meaning you get your quality of life here if anywhere. Being not much younger than the still-lively Meyer, I appreciate her smell-the-roses point of view. A certain perspective arrives with the years, but I have thought of that as a personal not a governmental matter.

Meyer as uber-senior was not alone in her carpe diem position about investment. Her NLP running mate Barbara Dolan summed up her slate’s position: “Here’s the bottom line! Control spending!” But to invest is to spend, she continued. So let there be an end to new buildings and condos and instead (apparently) give it all to the schools, which is OP’s prime selling point. She might have added, save some for streets and sidewalks, even heated ones as proposed for the restreeted Marion Street Mall, which she and her mates support, but Balanoff Milstein oppose mightily.

Dolan and Meyer’s running mate Mary Shiffer delivered her own stump speeches, in a manner that calls for use of the admittedly feminist no-no, “perky.” Let’s say bright and lively, ok? She cited her master’s degree dissertation, I believe in support of the NLP’s no-subsidy principle, though failing to hand it out for us to study. She also mentioned an anti-subsidy Cleveland State U. study as recommending creation of “a friendly atmosphere” for developers.

Yet another NLP candidate, Harvey Lyon, repeated his call for persuading national companies to build regional headquarters in Downtown OP and regional companies to do the same with their national headquarters, which as sound bites go is excellent. But if Lyon – at 79 years old, for gosh sakes, but looking great – would learn how to project his voice, open his mouth more widely, and in general use a microphone for the use God has in mind for it, we could have made out more of what he was saying. He of all people, at 79, should know there are others out there for whom hearing clearly is something of a luxury. The other eleven could get through, including two 80-plus-year-olds. Why couldn’t he?

As for DTOP HQ’s, VMA spoilsport Ray Johnson had to observe that sans subsidy-investment, you don’t get no HQ’s to come to your town. There was time for Lyon or a running mate to tell us where it’s happened, which would have taken wind out of Johnson’s sails, but no one did. Lyon also accused VMA trustees of “not listening” to citizen commissions. But Johnson had already noted the “scuttling” by the majority-NLP-slated board f a citizen committee’s recommendations for the Colt Building, and one may recall that board’s railing about committee and commission membership. The problem, one may further recall, was less whether to listen to a commission than whom to put on it.

A word about manner of presentation, even as the blog veers toward a whopping 800 words and the blogger wonders if anyone is still reading besides #4 Daughter in her Loop office. Manner? Take NLP’s B. Dolan, who oozes energy from every pore as she delivers the NLP message. She’s the mother of two and was a Roller Derby athlete at age 40. She smiles stunningly, has a lilt to her voice, looks around as she talks, exuding all the confidence of a good marketing meeting presenter.

Discussing how to control animals, she told us she and her family found a cat in their yard and even on a weekend worked things out swimmingly with the non-governmental Animal Control League, which she thinks deserves partnership with the village, offering her own life experience in the matter, bobbing her head for emphasis and in self-affirmation. So much personality, so little time to absorb it, the listener thought.

Quips fall where they may from Robert Milstein, as any board meeting watcher on TV knows. “If I were a state legislator,” he said, discussing how to lower taxes, “which I’m not,” he added to chuckles. His slate has village commission experience, “125 years of it,” he said, adding uncontrollably, again to chuckles, “which none of us are.” One waits for the quip-shoe to fall, ready to flinch.

VMA’s Pate, on the other hand, also smiling, offered no such distractions. Neither did Milstein running mate Gary Schwab. She crisply disposed of the village’s agonizing over animal care – to contract with the above-mentioned league in a privatizing mode or do it oneself in a purely public one – as “a classic example” of process gone awry that “creates a sense of unease” among villagers.

Schwab got right to it in opposition to her. He’s “troubled” by partnership with Animal Care League and wants a village-owned facility as animal shelter. There was no competitive bidding, he objected. He lists problems. He’s not ready to stop arguing about the league.

So. Another issue to chew on. It all goes to show there’s a choice for you, voters. Watershed time, folks! May the best men and/or women win!