I am 78 years old. I have lived in my Oak Park single-family home for over 50 years and have lived in Oak Park for over 73 years. For all that time, and for previous decades, the homeowners of Oak Park have raked their leaves into the street and the village has picked them up, normally by using a contractor. This service has worked perfectly over the decades.
Now the current village board has proposed changing this system for the flimsiest and most ridiculous reasons possible. While I am limited by space to go into all of their superficial reasons, I will comment on just three. First, is the person who parked his/her car on top of a pile of leaves, which set the car on fire. Rather than holding this individual responsible for their actions, the village board has proposed penalizing every homeowner in Oak Park for this person’s mistake. Furthermore, to my knowledge, this sort of fire only happened once in the past 75 years. And the only damage done was to the car of the person who parked it in the wrong spot.
Second, is mulching or composting leaves if a disabled or elderly person is unable to carry out the task of picking up and stuffing multiple bags with leaves. I have an environmentally-friendly, battery-operated lawnmower that is great for cutting grass when it is dry. It does not have enough power to mulch leaves. Some leaves take 6-12 months to break down into compost. I have a huge Northern Red Oak in my backyard, and I am assuming other Oak Park homeowners also have our namesake oak trees on their properties. Oak leaves take 3-4 years to break down (Nature Notes: Why does oak leaf litter linger, 1/1/22). For approximately $400 I would have to get a gas-powered mulching mower at Home Depot to replace my battery-powered mower to comply with the village board’s “environmentally sound” suggestion to mulch leaves.
Third, the village board is changing a longstanding and highly successful program based on the hypothetical scenario that children might play in the leaf piles in the street and might be hit by a car — again, a situation that, to my knowledge, has never occurred during the past 75 years I have lived in Oak Park.
Christopher Goode and Adrian Marquez previously pointed out in last week’s Viewpoints section the extreme cost to the homeowner of purchasing the bags needed to comply with this proposal, which could be hundreds of dollars per year. In addition to their point, it should be mentioned that people like me, who would have to hire somebody to bag leaves, would have to pay around $20 per hour for that help. This is an additional cost of a couple hundred dollars a year.
Maybe the village board could order Oak Park’s Streets and Sanitation Department to bag all the leaves in all the streets of Oak Park, then determine the collective cost to homeowners of the bagging program being proposed.
Finally, as a village board that purports to be progressively searching for affordable housing, why is it assessing an annual tax of hundreds of dollars on single-family homeowners? Is this additional tax (in dollars and man hours) supposed to make Oak Park housing more affordable?
I am absolutely opposed to this unreasonable policy idea.
Alan Krause is a longtime Oak Park resident.