Oak Park’s Village government is broke. Revenues – because of decreases in property transfers, building permits and retail sales – are not keeping up with expenditures. Reserve funds are inadequate or nonexistent because village budgets for years assumed that the real estate boom would go on forever and that the village playing developer would reap great, rapid dividends.
Unfortunately, the boom is over and shows no sign of reappearing soon. All the TIF money (over $100 million) has been spent. What we have to show for it are one block of new street with heated sidewalks, several really tacky new condo or apartment buildings and a lot of vacant storefronts and offices. In a few weeks, we’ll have a big new surface parking lot replacing four historic buildings which used to be occupied and paying taxes. This lot is likely to remain for years, because village hall couldn’t get a developer to build what it wanted, even with a more than $30 million taxpayer subsidy.
Like almost everyone over the past months, village government has to spend less. Most institutions, like most rational individuals, are looking at all their expenses, focusing on the necessary ones and foregoing those unnecessary or unproductive.
Oak Park’s government has taken a different, more imaginative approach. It has reduced basic services (snow removal, street repair, fully staffing the police force) and focused on more development subsidies for outsized, impractical projects, hiring consultants to tell us things we already know or parrot village propaganda and lobbying to “cap the Ike.” They also spend our money to tell us service decreases are really improvements. All we have to do is shovel our walks (or be fined), drive more carefully and be more attentive while walking and driving around town and we’ll be fine.
Almost no private developers are building apartments, condos, stores or offices in these times. Oak Park’s government stands alone in seeing and concentrating on economic opportunities invisible to most.
Could it be that village hall doesn’t worry about risky development because the good money they’re willing to risk throwing after bad is ours instead of theirs?
Are they like some other clever financiers who’ve been assuming they wouldn’t get caught cooking the books because their investors (in this case, we taxpayers) were dumb suckers who would never notice?
If you believe all Oak Parkers should sacrifice basic quality of life in the grand hope that building vast new complexes that no conceivable existing market can support will create a brighter future, vote for our VMA opponents who offer a “steady hand” as we speed toward a brick wall.
If you want to acknowledge reality and make necessary changes for Oak Park to continue to be a great place to live in these hard times, please vote for us, the It Takes a Village slate, on April 7.
Candidates running for the Oak Park village board on the It Takes a Village slate include Julie Samuels, John Franklin and Kathryn Jonas for trustee, Gary Schwab for president and Sharon Patchak-Layman for clerk.