Vicki Scaman and Ravi Parakkat, the two candidates for Oak Park village president, were combative Monday night during an election forum sponsored by Wednesday Journal.
Scaman, the current village president, and Parakkat, a current trustee, were critical of the others position on plans to build a new police station, thoroughly remodel the current village hall and how to pay for both projects.
The event, held in the Veterans Room at the Oak Park Public Library on Lake Street, drew over 100 community members looking to hear what the candidates had to say, with a few dozen more watching from home via a livestream. Laura Maychruk moderated the forum. Maychruk, the former owner of The Buzz Café, hosted candidate forums each election season in her Arts District coffee shop.
Village trustee candidates Jenna Leving Jacobson, James Taglia, Chibuike Enyia, Lucia Robinson and Joshua Vanderberg spoke during the event’s first hour, as the five of them compete for three available seats. Enyia and Robinson are both current board members, while Taglia is a former board member who lost his last bid for reelection.
Scaman and Parakkat took the stage during the event’s second hour as they both vie for the president’s seat, with the losing candidate set to give up their seat on the village board entirely.
All the candidates answered questions touching on a few hot-button Oak Park issues, including the Oak Park Police Department’s staffing crunch, housing and homelessness, economic development and the potential construction of a new police station and remaking of the village hall building and, of course, how leaves are collected.
The village president candidates traded barbs on the village hall issue during the longest back-and-forth exchange of the night. Parakkat has made his vow to block any full reconstruction of the village hall building a focal point of his campaign.
“I’m not talking about the police facility, that is absolutely required,” Parakkat said. “The village hall is a facility where the average Oak Parker spends less than five minutes a year. To spend $150 million on that, and $150 million is just a conservative estimate. By the time you look at financing costs, interests, location or the logistical shifts required to move people to a new location and bring them back it is going to push close to $200 million and we don’t have a good handle on that. To sit here in 2025 and not have a handle on that and not know how it’s going to impact our residents, that’s poor governance.”
Scaman accused Parakkat of purposefully inflating the potential costs of the combined police station and village hall in his response to make the project seem more unwieldly than what’s been planned.
“What you’re hearing from my opponent is sensationalism,” Scaman said. “We hired an architect that we truly believe is sincerely working with us and listening to the fact that we need a lower number. But the majority of that number will be for the new police station. The (past architect’s) numbers we heard for a new police station were between 76 and 86 million dollars, so that’s the major chunk of whatever it is we’re going to spend. But all you’ve been hearing from the board table is that we’re still looking for a lower number.
“Putting out this false information is truly not how you want your village president to operate.”
Parakkat said the village has already spent millions on architects for the project over several years, and that the village can’t afford to mismanage or overspend on such a big project.
“I’m not willing to hope for the best in the future knowing that this decision is going to land heavily on community members and price many people out,” Parakkat said.
The sitting village board of trustees will spend one of its last meetings together on March 18 discussing the future of the municipal campus.
The village trustee candidates were mostly in agreement with each other on the issue, recognizing that a stand-alone police station is a “need” and not a “want,”, but that the board should keep the village hall renovation to what’s most necessary, namely making the building more accessible to people with disabilities.
When Maychruk asked the trustee candidates who’d they support in the presidential election, only Enyia was willing to go out on a limb to endorse either candidate, throwing his support behind Scaman.
“She has always had a very good perspective on things and will continue to be a voice that I can bounce things off of and be like a mentor to me on the board,” Enyia said. “Ravi is a very, very great individual, it’s nothing against him personally. It’s been a pleasure to serve with him and I wish he was running for trustee again.”
The election will be held Tuesday, April 1. For more information on where and how to vote, and for more coverage of this candidate’s forum, check in with Wednesday Journal’s online election coverage.