Public pressure works. The River Forest Tennis Club, which seemed to be on a glide path to putting lights on each of its 10 courts on Lathrop Avenue, has now pulled back that application. In its place, the private club told its members last week it would now seek approval to light only six courts, none of them immediately adjacent to the homes on Jackson. The new application is expected to go before River Forest’s Development Review Board in mid-January.
This is progress. Is it acceptable to the wider residential neighborhood that surrounds the tennis club? We’ll find out in the weeks ahead.
Still problematic is the hearing process that any version of an application must go through. As we noted last week on this page, village code says hearings on zoning requests for an institution related to recreation must be heard by the review board. Trouble is a majority of the seven members of that board are members of the tennis club.
It is simply preposterous that the tennis club application will be reviewed by its own members. There needs to be a fix — and before Jan. 15. One neighbor and critic suggests swapping out the four tennis club members for a bunch of golfers or video game players before the next hearing. Or could the village board send the application to the zoning board?
A final question: Does the River Forest Tennis Club have any members who do PR? If they have such a practitioner, we hope they’d advise its leadership it would look better, more transparent, if they returned a call to a reporter from the local paper.