The long, loopy process of finding a place to put a new swimming pool at OPRF took an unexpected detour Monday night. Straight to the parking lot behind Oak Park’s village hall. No, that’s not where the swimming pool would go, though that’s what I first thought Anan Abu-Taleb was telling me one day last week as he explained his latest brainstorm of intergovernmental collaboration on pep pills.
No, he said, the village hall parking lot would be where the high school’s 10 tennis courts would wind up. The pool would then go on the OPRF tennis courts on the main campus. Everything, everyone and every tax dollar would stay in Oak Park, he said.
Who’d build the underground parking beneath the tennis courts at village hall? I asked. Unclear, he said, though I’d say he has some thoughts. Was this the way village government would finally unload its money-sucking parking garage on the high school’s campus? I asked. Unclear, he said, though I’m positive he has some thoughts.
Now how all this creativity was received on Monday evening as both the village board and the Oak Park and River Forest High School board first officially heard the barebones scattered, I am not sure. But as I talked separately to OPRF board president John Phelan and Oak Park Trustee Bob Tucker on Friday, there was certainly admiration for the broad strokes.
“There seems to be real potential,” said Tucker. “It’s pretty creative. Kind of cool,” he said of Abu-Taleb’s brainstorm. Tucker said that Anan had already polled his board and found genuine openness. He said that some limited outreach had also been made to village hall neighbors who seemed to like the notion of tennis courts on the village hall parking lot and green field — a lot more than the roundly rejected plan of 18 months ago to build the elementary school and park district headquarters on the site.
For his part, Phelan had not yet on Friday talked to most of his board, though he planned to make those calls over the weekend. The village hall site was intended to be one of multiple options presented to the OPRF board on Monday. Phelan said he was “enthusiastic” about the village hall plan and offered that “actually being friends” with the leaders of other governing bodies led Anan to feel free to suggest this idea. “I was actually calling him up to ask him for the name of commercial real estate brokers he’d recommend” to help the high school find other parcels to purchase. That’s when Abu-Taleb offered up this complex scenario.
Phelan said he liked the relative proximity of the proposed tennis courts to the high school — other prospective sites included Maywood or Galewood — plus the synergy of partnerships with other local taxing bodies. And, he said, it would give villagers “a reason to go to village hall beyond paying parking tickets.”
Details on costs were to be determined, he added, though both he and Tucker noted that village government already has a capital improvement plan to spend some $1.2 million to repair the limited and little known underground parking area adjacent to the village hall police department quarters. That is money that could go toward a much bigger, perhaps 200-car, parking facility under the tennis courts.
“This needs to make financial sense and the neighbors need to be fully engaged,” said Tucker. “But I think it creates a real neighborhood amenity,” he said of the courts which would be quite widely available to citizens.
As I write this on Monday, I don’t know if this concept was embraced or derided before our public officials in the evening. But Abu-Taleb and Phelan get points for being in there pitching, looking for shared solutions in a village where that has not often been a priority.
