Haven’t written a column for a while. Been busy. What am I going to write about? Maybe the pool controversy. No. Too easy. Like shooting fish … Man, I am rusty.
So let’s start with this declaration. Everyone involved here is good and decent. They want kids to learn to swim and probably most of us like a good swim meet, though honestly, I’ve never been to one. Don’t expect I ever will. All that chlorine.
Everyone involved is concerned about doing right by taxpayers though there is a wide divergence on what such fairness looks like. People planning this and battling this are pretty smart, with the possible exception of the early architect who mis-measured what would remain of left field if the nearly adopted plan to build a pool on the tennis court site had gone through. An alleged effort to convince the IHSA that OPRF baseball would adopt a “left field out” rule went nowhere.
So where are we on a Monday afternoon after a judge issued another continuance in the hearing over the legitimacy of the mammoth petition drive aimed at forcing a referendum on the plan to borrow a chunk of the money to build the pool on the current site of the school’s only parking garage?
Uncertain. That’s where we are.
A few observations on what I am now ready to call the most screwed-up public planning process in memory. And I go back to when there was, for several years, a gigantic hole in the ground at Lake and Forest where an ambitious developer had gotten the OK to build twin 55-story apartment stories until a citizen-inspired court fight led to a ruling that the tall buildings would cast a shadow over Wright’s Unity Temple.
The school board is completely right that any pool should be financed with a combination of money currently in the vault and some form of long-term borrowing so the parents of yet unborn swimmers help to pay for this thing.
The school board did a lot of right things in the past three years to salvage its reputation after aggressively overtaxing the villages for a decade and building an unconscionable cash reserve. But it would be poisoning the waters all over again if did not honor the clear wishes of frustrated taxpayers and give them a vote — or start over and make a new plan.
Knocking down a 300-car parking garage and pushing all those cars onto the already clogged residential streets is nothing but an insult to neighbors. That those neighbors were asleep at the switch for months as this plan was moving toward approval is odd and perplexing.
The only logical place on campus to build a pool is on the tennis courts. The village is lousy with unused tennis courts. Let students hike over to Scoville Park to volley and serve, thrust and parry. OK, the only sport I know about is baseball.
Convening, as is planned, all the taxing bodies to start over and contemplate some sort of community center, likely on Madison Street, that would include a gym, a track and a big old community — but high school swim meets first — indoor pool is both logical and disturbingly hilarious. That is exactly what the park district wanted to do a decade ago and the whole “Those Things That Are Best” crew was uninterested in talking.
But any such discussion would have to take a hard look at why Oak Park, with 10 elementary schools, a YMCA, private health facilities, a gymnastics center, a giant high school, really needs another gym and track. Lots of things would be nice. But who’s got the scratch at a time when everyone says supersized property taxes are a big worry?
That’s it. Glad no one ever elected me to untangle what really is a mess.
