Why would a River Forest village president run for a fourth term? What’s the point? In Cathy Adduci’s case, we can only be amazed.
The ongoing citizen effort to impose term limits on elected River Forest village officials might seem specifically directed at her. In most ways it is. But the effort raises important questions about terms in office that, at least for local offices, need to be addressed.
I’ve been on many organizational boards. I’ve been the president of several. In a few cases I had up to two terms as organizational leader. I always refused any further terms, no matter how urgent the requests that I continue. With respect to public office, it seems to me that no individual should persist past two terms unless a dire emergency demands it.
An emergency of sorts does exist in our village, but it’s not one that needs her leadership, since she mostly engineered it.
Our village has a small town, in-group ethos. It allowed Frank Paris to hold the office of village president for 16 years, despite a reputation for nastiness and overbearing behavior. This small town, in-group characteristic reared its head again with the appointment of Marty Paris (getting the drift here?) and his group to develop Lake-Lathrop.
This award came despite a lack of evidence that he and his group had the ability or the funding to carry out such a project. And it came in the face of ample evidence from our neighbor, Oak Park, of the wisdom of approving well-heeled and highly experienced developers for a large number of significant projects. None of those Oak Park projects was what one might call a signature development in the center of the village, as Lake-Lathrop is for River Forest.
The precedent of persistence in office is a part of the River Forest fabric, it would seem. But why, one must ask, would a village president think it appropriate to run for another term, given the debacle of Lake-Lathrop, a debacle that she has led, strong-arming a village board that should have known better?
Our most important civic development in decades is now an idle eyesore on Lake Street. Adduci blames its demise on an arduous and expensive “remediation.” It’s beyond difficult to see this version of history as anything but disingenuous.
The dead-on-arrival project didn’t just happen on her watch. It happened continually on her watch, with extension after extension for a developer who was using pure flim-flam on the site, pretending that real work was being done when it was not and staging flurries of activity that would suddenly end when they ran out of money — again.
So I ask once more: why a fourth term for this person, never mind the third term she’s already in? Is it pure arrogance, residing in the sense that only she can lead our village? In deflecting the blame for the mess, she has been gaslighting those of us who have closely observed the Lake-Lathrop disaster as it unfolded in agonizingly slow, sometime risible steps, each of them more maddening as the developer was given yet another chance.
Were she to be open and frank (you should pardon the expression), she’d not only own up to her massive personal responsibility for that concrete and mud pile, but she’d also have the grace to know that it’s time to leave.
It’s not often that an office holder has a visible disgrace that demonstrates perfect reasons to apologize and exit stage left. Our village president has one at the southwest corner of Lake and Lathrop. Just take a look at it. You’ll see what I mean.
Ed McDevitt is a resident of River Forest.