Oak Park village trustees reviewed a consultant’s report on the village’s racial equity needs with an hours-long discussion last week.
The Racial Equity Assessment Report was prepared by the University of Illinois Chicago’s Great Cities Institute, a university agency that’s worked on a number of high-profile consulting projects with governments around the state. With help developing the report from village staff, UIC presented a variety of overarching suggestions for village policy, including updates to its messaging around racial justice, internal policies and data transparency.
“Racism exists every single day in the village of Oak Park,” Village President Vicki Scaman said. “We are constantly making policy and putting money behind programs and recognizing that what the brochure looks like and how it operates in real life do not always match for the most vulnerable among us.”
The data that UIC staff collected from their resident surveys suggested a disparity between white Oak Parkers and Oak Parkers of color in the sense of “belonging” that they feel in the village.
“Even with that awareness of the need for equity and inclusion, Oak Park today is still not a welcoming place for all, and not all residents feel a sense of belonging in the community,” UIC staff wrote in their report. “There are significant economic divides, including by household income, between homeowners and renters, and in quality of life or social vulnerability. These can have cascading impacts on which resources and opportunities are available to Oak Parkers, and which residents feel a deep sense of belonging in the community.”
Within its report, UIC staff encouraged the village to address two persistent “narratives” the consultants came upon during their community surveying — first the perceived divide between North and South Oak Park and second the idea that while Oak Park is broadly perceived as a diverse, welcoming community, it does not acknowledge the reality of community divisions and disparities, according to the report.
“Talking openly about these narratives can also contribute to all Oak Parkers’ feeling a sense of inclusion in the community because it makes them feel visible and validates their being part of the community,” UIC staff wrote in their report. “Internally, current village leaders can open dialogue with volunteer commissioners and nonprofit partners about harms caused during previous administrations or by previous village employees in order to gain goodwill and focus on the future.”
Some trustees said the village needs to move faster on racial equity issues, expressing some frustration with the village’s reliance on consultants’ reports that take years to produce.
Trustee Cory Wesley said he worries the village is “leading the country in discussing these things” but doesn’t move fast enough to make substantial change.
“I think I was hoping to see something that gave me a bit more direction, I don’t know what the next steps are other than more discussion,” he said.
Trustee Brian Straw said he’d hoped the village staff would move quicker on bringing more information about the next steps the board can take to eliminate exclusionary single-family zones from the village’s zoning code. Both Straw and Wesley had voted against ratifying the village’s zoning code recently, in protest of the way they said the zoning policy discourages ethnic minorities from settling in Oak Park.
UIC Senior Fellow Kathleen Yang-Clayton told the board that she sympathizes with those concerns, but that the scope of work agreement limited the type of answers that this report was supposed to provide.
“This is more of a roadmap,” Yang-Clayton said. “Our scope of work was not to produce policy recommendations, broadly speaking, it was to actually assess what is going on both internally and externally in the village of Oak Park and so that is what we remain focused on.”
UIC received a contract worth $150,000 from the village in May 2023 to produce this report. Work developing the report over the last two years included community surveys, interviews with village staff and stakeholders and research to create a “snapshot” of equity issues in Oak Park, according to UIC.
The report is one element of a broader village plan to ensure equitable access to government services, address historical equity failures in Oak Park, support integration and diverse community entry points in the village and enhance cultural competency among village staff. Village Manager Kevin Jackson said the village is moving towards publishing a Racial Equity Action Plan that will provide a more comprehensive roadmap to addressing equity issues.
Still, he said the village has made good progress on its equity goals since he’s been in office.
“We have been moving on equity since 2022 and all of that institutional assessment happened when I hit the ground here and that is why we did the restructuring that we did in order to put us in a position to actually advance equity,” Jackson said. “There is something to be said about having the vision and in delivering on that stewardship that leads us into the future and also make sure that there is a plan that guides this work into the future when it is all said and done and so moving forward with the strategic plan, I think will be helpful.”
Earlier in the meeting, Yang-Clayton had complimented Jackson’s leadership on racial equity issues during his service as deputy city manager for the City of Long Beach, CA as a great example of how to push for equity in municipal government.
In its presentation submitted to the board alongside the report, village staff also relayed its opinion on the viability of a municipal reparations program in Oak Park, saying that it does not see a traditional reparations program making sense for the village at this point.
“To date, staff’s analysis is that Oak Park does not meet the strict scrutiny standard that would serve as the basis for a municipal reparations program,” staff wrote in its board presentation. “While the village may not meet the standard for a traditional reparations program, that does not mean that the village cannot acknowledge harm and offer reparative justice-based programs in line with Oak Park’s vision for racial equity. Staff hope to begin facilitating community engagement and education sessions in Fall of 2025.”
Village staff said it published a request for proposals earlier this year looking for a consultant to assist with research on historical documentation to support a municipal reparations program, but that the RFP received no responses.
Wesley said he would’ve liked to have been better informed about the status of that work and said that he’d want the village board to be updated more regularly on the work that consultants and staff do to prepare reports.