Oak Park’s village board of trustees has settled on its goals for the future.
Village staff produced a list of 25 key goals across several categories following discussions at a village board retreat over the summer, with the board reviewing the set of goals again last week. The board goals will serve as guidance for legislative action until after a new board is seated following the village’s 2027 municipal election.
Oak Park last set board goals in January 2024. Village Manager Kevin Jackson said the village had achieved about 70% of the 25 goals that the board committed to at that time, with several of those uncompleted objectives now being “carried forward” into the new set of goals, he said.
Jackson said staff felt the village had still performed well considering some of the obstacles that Oak Park faced over the last two years. Challenges included the “10 months” village staff spent addressing fallout from “the migrant crisis,” when the village scrambled to find accommodations for hundreds of migrants who were dropped off without notice outside of Oak Park Village Hall in late 2023, Jackson said.
“So those are things that sometimes you just can’t predict that’s going to happen that actually impacts your work program,” Jackson said. “So when we did our reflections internally, we’re like, ‘oh, wow. You know, we still got 70% done despite that.’”
The board goals were divided into seven categories: “community health and safety,” “community affordability,” “racial equity,” “sustainability and resilience,” “operational effectiveness” and “vibrant, diverse, connected neighborhoods.” The village’s health and safety goals will include reducing crime, growing the village’s ECHO social services response program, supporting vaccine education efforts through the Oak Park Public Health Department and progressing traffic safety initiatives like the Oak Park Bike plan and the Vision Zero plan.
“Operational effectiveness” was a new addition to Oak Park board goal categories and centered around maintaining village technology and “core service” delivery.
“One of the things that I really appreciate about this is a lot of these priorities sort of lean on each other and speak to each other across these groupings,” said Trustee Brian Straw. “I’m also just very excited about organizational effectiveness. It’s kind of boring, but in local government, a lot of times boring is good. I think that we are a board, we are a community that wants to do a lot of good and important things, but we have a priority of going and doing the things that everybody expects, like maintaining roads in good condition, picking up the trash on time without damaging garage doors, you know, all that basic stuff.”
The board’s racial equity goals include supporting fair and equal housing and home ownership opportunities and completing a village racial equity assessment, one of 2024’s board goals that’s still not been delivered. Oak Park’s vibrant neighborhood goals will revolve around completing high profile streetscaping projects on Oak Park Avenue and Chicago Avenue.
The board also settled on community affordability goals including limiting the village tax levy, supporting senior residents as they age in place and seeking cost savings through collaborations with other governmental bodies. Village sustainability goals will revolve around its commitments to the Climate Ready Oak Park Plan, which committed the village to cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030.
Several trustees brought up the idea of each board member ranking which of the 25 goals were most important to them to help support village staff in prioritizing legislative goals.
“There’s nothing on here that anybody’s going to look at and say, ‘this isn’t important,’ but the question is, what is more important to me than to you,” Trustee Cory Wesley said.
Village President Vicki Scaman said that figuring out how to prioritize the litany of goals over the coming months would likely start a task for the board’s “reimagining government committee,” made up of her, Straw and trustees Derek Eder and Jenna Leving Jacobson.
“We have seven highly intelligent people here,” she said. “We can figure it out, alright.”
