Months after Oak Park Village Hall ended its legal battle with the local public high school, village officials are still feeling reverberations, in the form of a $220,000 budget hole.
After almost two years of wrangling in court, the two sides voted in December to settle the long-running lawsuit which had been filed by the high school in February 2010. That resulted in the virtual end of Oak Park’s controversial downtown tax increment financing district, which siphons property tax dollars away from the schools and other taxing bodies to be used for economic development.
The upshot was that an estimated $48.8 million will be paid out to the two local school districts, along with several other taxing bodies, between now and when the TIF ends in 2018. Along with losing out on that money for economic development, Oak Park also now has a $220,000 hole to make up in this year’s budget.
Village hall had planned to continue to use TIF dollars for various small projects related to its downtown in 2012. But now, it’s had to seek out those dollars elsewhere in the budget to make up for the lawsuit, according to Chief Financial Officer Craig Lesner.
Those costs include $30,000 to replace brick pavers on sidewalks, $100,000 to put together a plan to redo Lake Street from Harlem to Euclid, and $7,500 to pigeon-proof the viaduct at Marion Street and North Boulevard.
Public Works Director John Wielebnicki said that Oak Park expects to spend far less on road salt in 2012, because it’s been such a mild winter. That will end up saving village hall an extra $100,000 or so, but he said Oak Park will need to root out other ways to cover such costs in 2013. Plus, planned sewer work along Harlem Avenue is going to end up costing about $500,000 less than originally budgeted, he said.
Elected officials, meanwhile, are expected in the coming weeks to discuss whether the village wants to pursue the $100,000 plan for Lake Street.
Village Manager Tom Barwin called the budget problem just another unfortunate consequence of the lawsuit.
“I think the situation speaks for itself,” he said. “Obviously there are going to be some things that we’re not going to be able to pursue in the short-term that we might have otherwise pursued, but the schools are probably feeling pretty good about having $100-plus million bucks in the bank. It is what it is.”
Former District 97 president and current board member Peter Traczyk fired back at Barwin in an OakPark.com web comment when this story was first reported last week. He pointed out that previous village boards spent on projects that built mounds of debt, far past the life of the TIF. “Not every investment made with TIF dollars was a good one,” he wrote, and the schools shouldn’t be blamed for the village’s budget issues.
“Thankfully, all parties understood the impact to District 97 and Oak Park taxpayers from an early and abrupt termination of the TIF,” he wrote last week. “The settlement required good faith sacrifice on both sides. So why start blaming the village’s budget issues on the TIF lawsuit?”
