Oak Park politics continued. Venerable Village Manager Association paid the price of past unpopular decisions. How went its successor New Leadership Party? Aftermath of defeat of longstanding winners.
A few months after the VMA defeat in 2005 at the hands of the New Leadership Party, the reconstituted village board provided food for thought, and your columnist likened himself to Will Rogers, who famously said, “All I know is what I read in the papers, and that’s an alibi for my ignorance.” But from what I read, said the columnist, it was clear enough that new leadership was making a splash at Village Hall.
For instance, the new president, David Pope — ex-VMA trustee, ran as Independent — discussing a request for free money by a business owner willing to move to the 6200 block of North Avenue, where business was sparse and parking plentiful, had the gall to say he believes in “the market,” adding self-deprecatingly that it’s an “odd peculiarity” of his.
For sheer inexactitude, however, one had to take notice of must chide New Leadership trustee Martha Brock, who complained at a meeting that she couldn’t attend a seminar on African American economic development, when she meant to say the village would not pay her way.
Another raised eyebrow goes to Brock for urging less executive-session time for the sake of increased openness in government -- without addressing legal mandates in the matter, as whether the board has a choice in when to go or not go executive, and whether a cut-off on discussion would improve decision-making.
No one took her up on the idea, so it was not to worry.
She also urged calling a “community meeting” whenever incidents occur such as recent D’Agostino slaying, so that citizens would know that trustees care -- apparently to calm widespread fears that they do not care.
Again, however, complexities: Such a meeting would presumably be called by the board president, maybe in a conference call (executive session!), based on severity of incident or crisis of community confidence in trustees as parent figures.
This could take some debate, and if the debate went too long would (a) collide with Brock’s goal of fewer, shorter executive sessions and (b) perhaps violate her wanting requirement that such a meeting happen “immediately [in] emergency mode.” It would be a case of emergency mode clashing with openness of government, alas! But who said it’s easy to govern a village?
The brutal daylight murder of Peter d’Agostino, clubbed to death on the sidewalk of a neighbor’s house, remained unsolved in August of 2009, notwithstanding a $25,000 reward announced by his family and Oak Park police in June of 2006, a year after the slaying.]
Meanwhile in the spirit of innovation, New Leadership trustee Geoff Baker said the (non-New Leadership) village clerk should participate in board deliberation, providing “her input at every step.” The clerk had not done this historically, however, keeping quiet at meetings, her job description being that of elected staff.
It’s one reason voters had not turned a clerk out of office in at least 35 years. As mostly behind-scenes administrators, clerks had been judged on managerial ability with no points for public speaking and no demerits either, which is crucial. A talkative clerk would get quoted too much and maybe end up in defensive, if not emergency mode, distracted from her governmental duties.
Profiling shoppers . . . Continuing along, in trustees’ debate about proposed tenancy on Lake Street of Corinthian College, a trainer in medical technology of job-market newcomers -- a matter for the board because it was a zoning issue -- trustee Brock opposed the tenancy, citing “classism” in Oak Park. She threw down a challenge: “We can either be stuck in being all about us or look at how we can reach out.”
Trustee and VMA holdover Ray Johnson agreed, calling the Corinthian tenancy -- in the once-Marshall Field’s building at Harlem and Lake -- a means not only of increasing daytime activity but of “fostering diversity downtown.”
It would clearly do that, in that ninety percent of Corinthian students would be earning less than the minimum wage, as the president of the Taxman Corporation, a developer, testified, opposing the college. “This is not the shopper profile we’d like to bring to downtown Oak Park.”
The board voted 4-3 not to allow the college as a tenant.
Some weeks later, the immediate past village president, Joanne Trapani, who had not run for reelection, turned up in a neighboring town, Elmwood Park, where she was announced at the Aug. 1 meeting of that town’s trustees as new member of its Plan, Zoning and Development Commission (PZD). She had bought a house in Elmwood Park ten days after the April 5 Oak Park election, in which her (VMA) party had crashed and burned.
Finally, a former Oak Park trustee objected to a current trend. . . Barbara Ebner wrote the Wednesday Journal saying the village-manager concept -- the heart of Oak Park’s governmental exceptionalism since the ‘50s -- was jeopardized by New Leadership trustees’ suggesting regionalization of trustee accountability, a ward system.
In the Wednesday Journal, Ebner:
. . . a recommendation to give responsibility for a specific geographic area to each member of the board was made. Although the Council Manager form of government allows for such divisions, there is no place for such a system in Oak Park. We are a tiny, land-locked community. We have made diversity our single most important goal. Our geography is probably our least diverse aspect.
It would make aldermen out of trustees, each responsible not to the whole village, but to just part of it.
This indeed got to new incumbents’ mindset, even philosophy, demonstrating how complete had been the recent electoral revolution, at least in germ.
— more to come from A Short History of Oak Park, Volume 1, 2004-2005 —