Taxpayers revolt against Oak Park swimming pool project

Bill Dwyer for Chronicle Media

Cook 122315 OPRF pool flap PHOTO 1Petition filed to force referendum on $37.5 million proposal

A long and contentious process to replace Oak Park and River Forest High School’s antiquated swimming pool will not likely be resolved anytime soon, following a petition drive to force a referendum on the issue.

After a more than two-years-long process that considered several sites on the two-square block OPRF campus, school board members earlier this fall settled on a $37.5 million plan to build a 50-meter indoor pool on the site of a village-owned parking garage at Lake Street between East Avenue and Scoville Avenue.

On Oct. 14, the D200 board unanimously approved funding the pool project with $20 million in working cash on hand and $17.5 million in nonreferendum bonds. Critics say the plan is too expensive and would eliminate hundreds of essential parking spaces.

Objections to the Lake Street parking garage site first surfaced a year and a half ago, with commenters telling board members in April, 2014 that the loss of the garage’s 300 parking spaces would create a parking nightmare in the surrounding neighborhood.

At that time, school board members rejected a proposed underground parking facility beneath the pool complex, citing the more than $50 million price tag.

Since then the plan has faced continued and growing resistance from neighbors, village taxpayers and even the high school’s faculty senate. Now some village trustees are having second thoughts and want more time to consider the impact of the plan.

On Dec. 11, a group of taxpayers filed 4,300 signatures on a petition calling for any bond issue to be placed on the March 15 primary election ballot in a binding referendum.

The latest development places the projected August 2018 opening date for the new pool in jeopardy. The school district has until Dec. 28 to draft a resolution to place the bond issue on the March 15 ballot, otherwise it must wait until the Nov. 8 general election.

School board president Jeff Weissglass said in a Dec. 7 memo to board members that the village and school district “have been discussing the sale of the garage and the development of a parking plan over the course of the last year.”

Weissglass said that Oak Park Village President Anan Abu-Taleb recently informed him that “some members of the Village Board are reluctant to move forward without a referendum since they have not had an opportunity to study in depth the full set of issues concerning the pool project.”

Weissglass told school board members he would be taking those concerns into account, saying “we will need to consider the implications as we move forward.”

Abu-Taleb said that he saw his role as “support(ing) D200’s needs and being supportive to the community as a whole.” He said any decision on how to respond to the referendum petition was the school board’s to make, and defended the board members, saying, “I think in general they have been transparent and done a lot of work.”

“Right now, some people in the community have a different perception,” Abu-Taleb said.

Monica Sheehan, one of the petition drive’s organizers, is one of those people. Following the petition filing last week, she acknowledged the school’s need to replace the old pool, but balked both at the cost and at tearing down the parking structure.

“Everybody believes something needs to be done,” Sheehan said. “It’s a matter of where and how much money.” She said the planned 50-meter pool is far larger than required by the Illinois High School Association, and much more expensive. Other school districts, she noted, have recently spent between $11 million and $18 million on new pools.

In September 2013, preliminary estimates for a new pool were pegged at $15 million to $20 million.

At the D200 high school board’s regular monthly meeting Dec. 17, Weissglass noted that “there is no vote tonight with respect to the bonds.” He said that if the pool project went forward as planned, bonds would likely not be issued until next December after construction plans had been finalized.

Weissglass also said he couldn’t speak to the referendum petition process, saying it was “in the hands of the board of elections.”

“If the petitions are not successfully challenged, then the referendum goes on the ballot without the board taking any action,” he said.

Numerous taxpayers urged during public comments that board members start over.

Oak Park resident Al Berggeron noted that only 7,100 votes were cast in the last school board election and called the 4,300 referendum petition signatures “a mandate from the community to go back to square one and study the alternatives.”

OPRF faculty senate chairman Sheila Hart told the board that her colleagues were concerned that the school board did not accept a January 2015 joint faculty-administration pool committee recommendation for a new pool “with on-campus parking.”

Hart said the board’s current plan “exacerbates the already strained relationship we have with our neighbors.” Eliminating the garage, she added, “will diminish our status in the broader professional community,” and “limit our school’s ability to host state, district and other events.”

Bruce Kleinman, another referendum petition drive organizer, noted that he attended an OPRF “future needs” planning workshop Dec. 14 at the high school, at which desired student experiences were discussed.

“One experience that was not mentioned was the experience of adapting to the environment,” Kleinman said. “Everyone put the burden on the environment to adapt to our needs, and nobody, but nobody thought about the need for us to adapt to our environment.”

“That to me would be a very important experience for our students … to realize that resources are limited, and that we need to work within the framework of these limited resources to satisfy the diverse needs and wants.”

“We need an updated pool, there’s no question about that,” Kleinman said. “But we also need parking and open space. There’s no question about that either.”

–Taxpayers revolt against Oak Park swimming pool project–