The Park District of Oak Park has stepped into the fray over where to locate a new pool for Oak Park and River Forest High School, but it is uncertain whether the park and school districts are serious about joining forces to establish a community center that would serve as a shared facility.
Jeff Weissglass, District 200 school board president, said at a recent school board meeting that he supports an off-site pool facility shared by the high school and the wider community, but he would neither confirm nor deny the existence of an ad hoc committee created by the park district to search for an alternative pool site.
“I’ve always thought that if there were a solution [that comprised] a shared community pool, it’s something we should seriously look into,” he said in a recent interview.
But park district board member Kassie Porreca confirmed that the park district established an ad hoc committee in November made up of representatives of the village’s various taxing bodies to select a consultant to find an appropriate site for the community center, which she says was originally envisioned as a gym and track.
Porreca does not serve on the ad hoc committee, but told Wednesday Journal that the committee has narrowed down the list of potential site-selection consultants to three and that a decision is expected early next year.
Park district board Vice President Victor Guarino said in a telephone interview that the idea behind the ad hoc committee, of which he is a member, was to bring all the taxing bodies to the table to see if there were opportunities for collaboration. He confirmed that a shared pool and community center is on the table conceptually.
“The point of the committee is to see what is realistic and what are the needs [of the various taxing bodies] and concepts that people have,” he said, adding that the conversations about the shared facility thus far are conceptual and in the brainstorming phase.
Oak Park Mayor Anan Abu-Taleb, who serves on the ad hoc committee, said in a telephone interview that the idea of using the community center to house the pool has been discussed, but added, “I’m not sure [the community center is] going to address the D200 pool.”
A final report from the consultant is expected by summer 2016, according to Porreca.
She said that the idea of a shared facility that would include a pool for the high school has not been discussed at the park district board.
While village leaders contemplate a possible Plan B for the pool proposal, Wayne Franklin, of Oak Park, and Matthew Kosterman, of River Forest, have filed a joint objection to the petition signatures that was notarized on Dec. 21.
The Oak Park and River Forest High School District 200 Board of Education approved a resolution of intent to issue the bonds without a referendum last month, which prompted some residents to organize a small movement to gather the minimum 4,211 signatures (which had to come from registered voters within the high school district) required to force the bond issue onto a ballot. The organizers, who estimated that they gathered upwards of 4,300 signatures, said they pulled off the monumental task in a few weeks.
The bonds would partially fund the construction of a proposed $37.5 million pool facility, an unwelcome development for many residents who organized and signed the petitions. Their frustration was largely because the proposed pool would require the demolition of the high school’s roughly decade-old parking garage and the creation of a new on-street parking plan that would have to be approved by the village. Some residents who signed the petition said they support the proposed pool plan, but want the pool’s funding decided directly by taxpayers.
But many other residents, satisfied with the more than two-year vetting process by which school board members (both present and former) arrived at the current plan and anxious to see the high school’s nearly century-old pools replaced, have expressed frustration with petition proponents — who they’ve claimed are late to the table and are slowing, if not completely derailing, the much-needed pool’s construction.
Both Kosterman and Franklin, (who according to D200 board meeting minutes, is the parent of an OPRF swimmer and tennis player), are quoted in media reports and meeting minutes from 2014 as being in support of the current pool proposal. They’re represented by Anish Parikh of Chicago-based Parikh Law Group, LLC.
In their objection — which lists Monica Sheehan, one of the main organizers of the petition drive, as the “principal proponent of the referendum in question” — the men claim that the petition sheets demonstrate “a pattern of fraud and disregard of the Election Code” to such an extent that all of them should be invalidated.
Among the most serious charges, the objection notes that the petition sheets circulated by Sheehan and five other people are invalid because they weren’t signed in the presence of those residents and the circulators couldn’t verify the residences of the people signing petitions.
The objection also claims that “every single petition sheet […] fails to identify the dates of circulation,” that some petitions sheets include “the names of persons who did not sign the petition sheets in their own proper persons” and that some petitions sheets include signatures of people “who have signed […] more than once.”
“I am confident the petition for referendum will withstand this objection,” said Sheehan in an email statement.
A hearing was scheduled for Dec. 28 in downtown Chicago, but has since been rescheduled for a later date, which was not available at press time. The two objectors couldn’t be reached to comment.
CONTACT: michael@oakpark.com
