The two most recent presidents of the village of Oak Park have at least one thing in common: They don’t much like the term village president. Both David Pope and now Anan Abu-Taleb prefer the title of mayor.
Words matter. Titles matter. And so do motivations.
So while there has been some pushback on Abu-Taleb’s very public declaration of his preference and his active and seemingly successful lobbying of his board on the subject — title, office space at village hall, administrative support, a pay raise for the person who succeeds him — there has also been support for the concept from a lot of citizens.
After 65 years in which Oak Park’s leaders have seemed perfectly comfortable with the “village president” honorific, why do we have back-to-back disgruntlement from Pope and Abu-Taleb? I’d say it’s because we have back-to-back presidents with a strong interest in playing beyond the borders of this village. And when you get outside Oak Park, the more common term, the more immediately understood term is mayor.
David Pope was and is a regional thinker. He knew that issues of public transit and highway rebuilding, environmental sustainability, gun safety and any hope of avoiding being swamped by pensions and the mire of state politics all needed a shared effort among West Cook or metropolitan-wide officials or alliances of mayors across the nation. He thought big and, I think, he found the village president title limiting and lacking in clarity when he took his Oak Park exceptionalism message elsewhere.
Anan Abu-Taleb has actively different priorities than Pope. He’s de-emphasized leadership on shaping the rebuilding of the Ike. I’ve never heard him talk about gun control. The realm where Anan wants relevance and influence is in the development community both in Chicago and more widely. He wants to make calls and have them returned. He wants builders and architects and financiers to hear that his “Oak Park is open for business” message is coming from a person capable of making things happen. And he believes that mayor is the more easily understood title to send that message.
Is there some ego at work here? Sure. And while you don’t expect or want to find a village president/mayor without an ego, an over-inflated sense of importance that becomes detached from clear purpose can be highly destructive in small town governance. I’ve seen it happen too often in towns we serve.
For Oak Park, the challenge is not in having a person known as the mayor. That’s fine. The challenge is to protect the Village Manager form of government where there is a line — not an impossibly strict or impermeable line — but an acknowledged and revered line between mayor/trustee leadership and the professional village manager and her staff.
Anan Abu-Taleb looking to remake Madison Street and using his contacts and his influence to spur that effort is all good. Anan Abu-Taleb walking around the police department in the middle of the night chatting up sergeants would be a very bad thing.
Oak Park’s deserved reputation for good government — clean, purposeful, transparent — is high on the list of great assets. Doesn’t mean our local government is perfect, that there aren’t fair things to fight about or moments we go off track. But so long as clean, effective governance keeps turning up on the goal lists for village boards and is part of the ongoing conversation, we’ll do all right.
And it won’t matter if we have a mayor or a president.
