Editor’s note: This story has been correct Darnell Johnson’s name. Wednesday Journal regrets the error.
Vicki Scaman and Ravi Parakkat describe each other’s behavior on the campaign trail the same way — “that’s not Oak Park.”
With the months-long campaign now less than a week from the finish line, both candidates for village president are saying that their opponent has not lived up to the village’s values. Oak Park politics watchers have observed a notably tense campaign for the village’s top job, as a long-term rift between the two village leaders plays out in public.
Both candidates, Parakkat a current village trustee and Scaman the incumbent board president, agree that their relationship had been fractured before either announced plans for seeking election.
“There are fault lines here”
The two have been on conflicting sides of several key issues including 2023’s local migrant crisis and discussions of Parakkat’s idea to potentially develop the former Mohr Concrete site into a “sustainability incubator” in 2022.
Parakkat said that when Scaman called on sustainability professional Darnell Johnson to comment on his Mohr site proposal during a board meeting, he felt he could no longer trust Scaman’s leadership.
“Thirty minutes before the board meeting, she calls me and says that she is bringing Darnell Johnson into this discussion because he’s got a perspective,” Parakkat said. “That was the start of me realizing, from a governance perspective, that there are fault lines here. And I’ve seen that play out again and again with every subsequent decision.”
Scaman said that Parakkat’s reaction to Johnson’s involvement went beyond the pale.
“He was abusive to me,” she said. “In that meeting, I think I cried. It was a Zoom meeting so I don’t know that anyone noticed. I thought that I was trying to be helpful in bringing Darnell Johnson in to give us this advice and Ravi thought I was trying to take over his idea.”
The Mohr Concrete site on Harlem Avenue was eventually sold to a developer, but is now in foreclosure.
“You can’t take back some of these words”
Scaman said she’s felt attacked by Parakkat in a way that she hasn’t seen occur in a village president’s election since she’s been involved in local government, and that the criticism hasn’t been in good faith or fair to the job she’s done as village president.
“In 2021, it was two women running and the biggest attack I received was my opponent saying that I was status quo, which is extremely mild compared to today’s situation,” Scaman said. “This is the first time since I’ve been paying attention to local politics, which is 20-something years, that there’s been the intention to spin stuff. I don’t like to say my opponent is lying, but I think he’s been creatively misleading.”
“He doesn’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with how he’s putting information out there. He seems to see it as he’s got ambition, I see it as he’s being opportunistically misleading. So, we have different levels of integrity in our guts.”
Parakkat said he feels like he and his supporters have been the victim of toxic treatment by Scaman supporters, both online and in person. Parakkat said he’s heard from a business which told him they’d been told to take down the Parakkat sign in its window. He said he has also heard from another resident who said she was afraid she’d lose her neighbors’ help with child care if she publicly supported Parakkat.
Parakkat also said he was deeply hurt and personally offended by a comment in a private Facebook group that labeled him a misogynist and a Hindu-supremacist. The comment came in the course of a back-and-forth between Scaman and a resident on March 13 discussing the village board declining to adopt a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Parakkat was especially hurt that Scaman had reacted to the comment with a heart emoji.
“This thing really hurt me personally,“ he said. “It is really disheartening for somebody who’s come from the other side of the world to come into this community, and then to be in this position. I’m here because I believe in Oak Park’s values.”
After several days of consideration, Parakkat posted a screenshot of the comment and Scaman’s emoji on his campaign Facebook. Scaman originally commented on the post accusing Parakkat of a “smear campaign,” but edited her comment and apologized.
“I do not embrace name calling. I was responding to a question. (the rest of my comment was not helpful and I apologize),” she said in her edited response.
Parakkat, commenting on the overall tone of the campaign, said, “It forgets the fact that we are all neighbors, that this is a small community, that our kids go to school together and you can’t take back some of these words, you can’t undo these actions,” Parakkat said. “Those divisions that are driven in the name of an election cycle can create lasting damage. That is the problem I see with the tone of this election.”
“It’s not what anyone seated at the board table wants to do”
Scaman said Parakkat has built the core of his electoral strategy around misleading voters about what the forthcoming village hall renovation and construction of a new police station will cost, mischaracterizing her and other current trustee’s positions in the process. Scaman maintains it is her will now, and the will of the entire board, that the entire combined project be completed for as close to $100 million as possible, and that she would reject a proposal from the architectural firm working on the project that comes in too high.
“To say ‘village hall’ but not include the words ‘police department’ into the math and let people believe that $80 million of it isn’t for a new police station, that it’s $150 million for this legacy project for village hall, it’s instilling fear in people,” Scaman said. “To claim that one of the candidates is going to so irresponsibly throw money at something without the proper analysis, the spirit of that is not Oak Park. And it’s not what anyone seated at the board table wants to do.”
Parakkat has said Scaman will push for a $140 to $150 million project to rebuild village hall and build a stand alone police station on the patch of greenspace across the parking lot from village hall. He said that with construction and interest that final costs are likely to balloon to nearly $200 million. He said that Scaman is the one misleading voters by flip-flopping ahead of the election.
“People are changing their positions for the convenience of an election that’s around the corner,” he said. “Even then, at face value, $100 million translates to $180 million by the time you’re paying interest plus everything else that goes along with that. You’re still looking at a $200 million project, and I don’t subscribe to that.”
Part of this conflict stems from different interpretations of the significance of the July 5, 2023 board vote that set the stage for the next two-and-a-half years of back-and-forth between the village and its architect, and much of the bitterness of this campaign. That night, the board was to determine how the village would plan to move forward with providing the Oak Park Police Department new accommodations, as the board had reached consensus that officers were working in abominable conditions in village hall’s windowless basement.
The board considered five options that night. They ranged from demolition of the current village hall and construction of a new municipal building and police station to a new police station and renovation of village hall’s lower level, to building a new police station and not renovating village hall. Price ranges presented by the architectural firm stretched from $70 million to $138 million.
The costliest option, demolition and new construction, won out that evening with Scaman and Trustees Lucia Robinson, Cory Wesley and Chibuike Enyia supporting the proposal for a new village hall alongside a brand new police station on the same property. The vote set the vision for the project, although trustees described that preliminary step as a limited action that gave room for the village to react to resident perspectives, as Robinson articulated that night.
“This discussion is limited in just moving to the next step,” Robinson said.
In Scaman’s view, that’s exactly what’s happened, as the board has pushed its architect JLK, which is a different firm from the one that provided the cost estimates in 2023, to bring the cost of the project down from that 2023 estimate. Demolition of the village hall has also been taken off the table, in favor of renovation.
Parakkat still believes that selecting the most expensive option on the table that night damned the village to overspend on the project and is still a key example of Scaman’s “poor governance.”
When the firm’s representatives were last in front of the board in December, their projected cost for the entire project was around $120 million. They were supposed to speak before the board again on March 18, but that discussion has been pushed to a lame duck session after village staff wanted more time to review the JLK proposal.
Voters will have to go to the polls without the benefit of those insights.
