Oak Park’s village board made the right decision last week when its members unanimously voted to block construction of an enormous Interstate-highway-sized gas station on Harlem Avenue near the Ike.
The QuikTrip proposal was wrong for Oak Park in every dimension save one. It would have produced substantial tax revenues – property, sales, gas, transfer taxes.
That makes this discussion not about QT but about Oak Park’s economic development leadership and how it first withered and over the past two years imploded due to poor leadership at the board level and the top staff level. The Mohr Concrete site debacle is just the most obvious manifestation of the failures.
What needs to be fixed?
On the senior staffing level, perhaps, things have stabilized. The promotion of Craig Failor, a village hall veteran, to head overall economic development is steadying. The hiring of John Melinaphy to lead development projects brought on a person with genuine history and connections in this work.
Village Manager Kevin Jackson gets credit for these decisions. Doubts remain, however, about how he let this vital department disintegrate over the previous two years.
At the village board level there are immediate and mid-term choices to be made. Since the spring, Village President Vicki Scaman has floated the idea that village government should buy the Mohr site. We agree. Should have happened several years ago. The site currently is what Trustee Cory Wesley rightly described as a “public nuisance.” It is also the village’s single largest and best situated location for notable development.
Leaving this opportunity to the private sector has so far resulted in an inept and inexperienced commercial developer controlling the property for an extended period while being unable to bring forward a viable plan for a mixed-use development. The follow up was a gas station better suited for Mokena, or is it Minooka?
Oak Park made some bad and expensive choices 20+ years ago when it purchased a whole lot of property in downtown and along Madison Street. Took decades to unwind those errors though it did result, under Anan Abu-Taleb’s leadership as president, in notable residential and commercial projects.
But that does not mean a focused purchase of this single property doesn’t make sense. Buy it. Create a consensus on what would be a positive development for the village, for the residential neighbors, what would generate long-term tax dollars for taxpayers. And then work, in what may be a dismal environment for development, to find a buyer who will execute the village’s plan.