Rethinking Crandall-Arambula?

NE Side robberies have residents more than alarmed: they are sick of it and won’t take any more of it.  More than 230 showed at Hatch school for a meeting with police.  The ubiquitous Deputy Chief Scianna led discussion.  Janice Sanchez is resident in charge.  She was delighted at the turnout and residents’ response.  NE Side is adjacent to the high-crime thickly populated N. Austin neighborhood (of the city, Chicago), some of whose residents apparently look on Oak Parkers as easy pickings, coming at them in alleys when they put cars in garages at night.  They show guns and get money.  One woman spotted them as she backed into her garage — never back in: you can back out in the morning when the coast is clear — and changed course, heading back into alley, which she exited with horn blaring.  OP’s top cop has told residents to skip overnight parking ban and put the damn vehicle in front, which is common sense.  Neighborhood watch is in high gear.  Stay posted.

Elsewhere, recently elected Peter Barber has questions and objections at OP elem school Dist. 97 board meetings.  Board is attacking something called “accountability,” which seems to be willingness of professional educators to bring citizens into the act, as through board’s writing questions for teacher– and principal-evaluation questionaires.  This board is setting goals — it’s a school district, for gosh sakes: it doesn’t know its goals?  Another new boarder, Julie Blankemeier, is “skeptical” about said goals, which seems reasonable.

On the village board side, (also) new trustee (all from last spring’s elections) Greg Marsey alluded to a goal of village government, “to make business districts more attractive.”  This is our local mercantilism, which is clearly the path that OP has chosen.  Streets are torn up and remade, buildings are bought and managed, cul-de-sacs are installed, downtowns are sometimes redone (but not The Avenue, OP & Lake St., the true heart of the village).  What if the village let the market decide such things?

Meanwhile, Ken Trainor chronicles an episode in mercantilism in his very readable, very informative story about the bus trip to Lake Forest and points west and south to LaGrange and Elmhurst, in which a non-profit planner seeks business for his organization — oops, does the civic-responsible thing — by showing trustees and village staffers how quaintness survives business expansion.  The story has only one damning feature: Trainor uses a neologism, “kibbutzing,” when he means discussion.  Neologism because a kibbutz is a settlement in Israel, noun not verb, and anyhow he means “kibbitzing,” which means looking over the shoulder of a card player or eavesdropping but commonly, erroneously is used for discussing.  Tsk, tsk.

St. Edmund is the Church of the Comparatively Cramped Pew. It's a situation I have recognized at the local Presbyterian church turned Latin-mass Catholic, where pews have been shoehorned in. Not cramped, however, is St. Catherine of Siena, a mile to the east of St. Edmund. It's also about twice the overall size of St. Edmund and has wider aisles. God fits in anywhere, of course, but what about us worshippers?

How govern OP?

This by former OP trustee Barbara S. Ebner appeared recently in both local papers.  It is a good response to new leadership ideas in the Village board:

Please allow me to affirm that I am a true believer in the Council Manager form of government. It has stood us in good stead for 50 years and has moved Oak Park far ahead of its neighbors who retain the use of the aldermanic form. It has allowed us to become the diverse, welcoming, prize-winning village we are, while our neighbors to the south suffer from scandals, intrigue and party politics.

In that regard, several disturbing recommendations were made at the village board’s study session last Monday night. They were made by new trustees, and I would like to believe they were made from innocence, not as an attempt to change the government form. To my knowledge, we have had no referendum on changing our form of government. You were elected to serve under this form.

I will only address two of the issues that I see as challenging governance under our current Village Manager form. There are others, and I hope they will also be addressed.

First, a recommendation was made to discuss the forming of a Personnel Commission, although no specifics were given. Since commissions are formed to make recommendations to the board, such a commission has no function. One of the basic tenets of the Council Manager form of government specifically places all hiring and firing of staff in the hands of the professional manager. The single employee of the board, the Village Manager, is the only person such a commission would be responsible for. Unless, the board was to require a search for a new Village Manager, such a commission would have no tasks.

Second, 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.

Trustees are elected to serve all of Oak Park. Their major function is to set policy, and approve a budget which reflects these policy decisions. Directing individual activities to a specific geographic area of the village can only mean making these individuals spokespersons for individual areas. In other places they call them aldermen.

It immediately puts trustees at odds with one another. Arguments over how many pot holes were tilled, streets repaved, etc. in a given area would only be the beginning. This is not the goal of our form of government. It can only make meetings longer, make it necessary to have more meetings and provide more acrimony, not less. This is exactly the situation that takes away time and energy from your ability to govern under the Council Manager form of government.

Allow me to quote from a document from the international Council Manager’s Association (ICMA org for those interested). "The council is the legislative body; its members are the community’s decision makers. Power is centralized in the elected council, which approves the budget and determines the tax rate, for example. The council also focuses on the community’s goals, major projects, and such long-term considerations as community growth, land use development, capital improvement plans, capital financing and strategic planning. The council hires a professional manager to carry out the administrative responsibilities and supervises the manager’s performance."

First, do your job! Then allow the Village Manager to do his.

Wed Jnl column up

See Wednesday Journal for my column on New leadership village board commentary.