We try not to be cynical about government. Ours being a newspaper covering portions of Cook County, though, that’s a hopeless goal. To watch this bloated, self-perpetuating, citizen-mocking cesspool of self-interest operate is to doubt its every utterance.

Which brings us to the current plan of Todd Stroger and his idiot pals to relocate the Cook County Department of Public Health administrative offices from two rented floors of an office building in Downtown Oak Park to new space in a county-owned facility in Oak Forest.

Government bodies paying rent never seems like a great idea to us. Especially when they are sitting on vacant property they already own. And the county does own the former Oak Forest Hospital.

It also owns the former Cook County tuberculosis building in nearby Forest Park. That building is vacant only because Oak Park’s state Senator Don Harmon got the state to pass a bill driving a stake through the tubercular heart of that insanely obsolete unit of county government.

Instead of selling that Desplaines Avenue site to a developer interested in building townhomes at the tail end of the boom, the county sat on it, still sits on it, as a potential holding site for some other hypothetical county function.

We have no opinion on whether a Lake Street rental or Forest Park or Oak Forest relocation is the proper solution for the public health department. Our point is simpler. Whatever happens, taxpayers will lose.

 

We suspect a pest

We’re not in the habit of prejudging hearings on contested election nominating petitions. Challenging signatures is a time-honored practice – when it’s sincere and warranted. Sometimes it is used productively to block schemers from the ballot. Too often, though, it is just the work of someone looking to clog the system.

That’s our suspicion about whoever is the real force behind the current challenge to the petitions of two Park District of Oak Park incumbents, Marty Bracco and Christine Graves. Bracco and Graves have actually put themselves forward to serve the community as opposed to whoever is lurking behind the scenes trying to raise a rumpus.

We also suspect this will all blow over very quickly.

 

Rush to judgment

Lighting the stadium is serious business. We are talking about turning darkness to light – at least for 10 evenings each year (more, according to neighbors). It is an awesome, godlike concept. And not only that, we are contemplating adding traffic to Linden Avenue, a street filled with residents who have only recently discovered they live across the street from a high school’s athletic fields. “Honest to goodness, when I bought this house I thought it was a nature preserve,” we thought we heard a witness say at the most recent Oak Park Plan Commission hearing on the subject.

Then again we may have been hallucinating since this most excruciating public debate has dragged on since 2001.

And yet, have all voices been heard? We would urge the plan commission to reverse its hasty decision to move from testimony to deliberation of this supremely important matter. Surely there are additional experts whose voices must be heard.

We’ve heard from Dr. Thunder (no we’re not making that up). What about Dr. Lightning?

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