Dear President Scaman and the Board of Trustees,
First off, I want to thank all the members of the current Oak Park Village Board for your work (often unappreciated) on behalf of the residents. Public service in Oak Park is not for the thin-skinned. I salute your diligence and patience.
In reading the many letters, social media posts, postcards, and flyers regarding the proposed multifamily zoning expansion, I sense that your current work on this critical housing equity issue is not fully understood and, quite frankly, not trusted. I also sense a groundswell of opposition relative to a perceived lack of “transparency” — whether that perception is true or not.
I recently received a direct-mail postcard asking me to voice opposition to changing current residential zoning. Direct mail to thousands of addresses is expensive. It seems that people are getting organized and are committing significant money to the cause. This indicates that without broader civic buy-in, even well-intentioned policy risks lacking the democratic legitimacy required for long-term success by the public.
As a Home Rule municipality, the Oak Park Board of Trustees has no legal obligation to put any measure to a binding referendum. However, when monumental shifts in our housing fabric are fast-tracked with compressed public dialogue, confusion and anxiety fill the vacuum. To ensure that any progress made on housing diversity is sustainable and permanently woven into our community, it is your duty to anchor this process in broad public trust.
If the board votes to implement these sweeping zoning changes without deep, collaborative resident input, the predictable democratic remedy for opponents will be to organize and replace the current board with new trustees tasked with repealing the measure. A policy built on a fragile civic foundation can be easily undone. A truly open and transparent process is the only way to forge a lasting consensus that serves all Oak Parkers.
“Transparency” is a word that gets used a lot to reduce anxieties around difficult processes. It is time to put that word into practice.
Noah Sullivan
Oak Park