We understand the urge to see a project through. The Downtown Oak Park master plan calls for unifying the three distinct shopping districts along Lake Street — Downtown Oak Park itself, The Avenue near Oak Park Avenue, and the Pleasant District on South Marion Street — into a single marketable entity. It was to get a shared name: The Downtown Districts. And it was to sport a unified streetscape of brick streets, bluestone sidewalks and retro light fixtures, all at a price in the tens of millions.
The plan, until last November, was to pay for this splendiferousness with money from the Downtown TIF. But things change; the TIF has been emasculated.
Village government made noises that maybe it was all to the good that the TIF was effectively gone. It would require new thinking and wide discussion about economic development approaches and priorities. That discussion has yet to take place, but village government, and by that we mean Village President David Pope, has reverted to its obsessive focus on the downtown area with the old plans unfurled and a long-shot hope that the feds will ante up millions to pay a majority of the $43 million price tag. Trouble is, even if you think that would be a good use of federal dollars, it leaves Oak Park holding the note for the remaining $17 million.
There is no particular plan for where that heap o’ cash would come from, except somehow or another from our collective hides. Pope notes that the upside of distributing TIF proceeds is that the village itself nets about $7 million for the next few years. Nothing says that the downtown brick fund has any special call on that money.
We believe it is past time to widen the economic development vision to include the entire village. Has anyone looked past the fancy streetscaping on Roosevelt Road and noted what a wreck the buildings are? The Arts District on Harrison gets by on multi-colored crosswalks and a head pat.
There’s no law that defines economic development as bricks and bluestone. There are other ways to spur progress. Let’s have that conversation. Let’s talk about police and fire pension funding. Let’s invest in actual collaboration among our local governments. Let’s not leap into $108,000 contracts at the 11th hour on the hunch it might help net a nod from the feds for more bricks.
We’ve got to be better than this.