Surely we’ve all had the experience where endless delays and determined procrastination led to better-than-expected outcomes. It has happened in your marriage where just endlessly avoiding an issue — money, sex, children — has led to blissful day ends where you just can’t believe how profound your love has grown.
That pain in your chest will go away if you wait just a little while longer. The complicated personnel issue at the office is certain to resolve itself if you can only ignore it another month. And that summons you received from the village government related to those unpaid parking tickets will likely resolve itself if you just let it ripen a while more.
Now here in Hometown USA we are again working to prove my theory on the municipal level. After two years of planning where to put a new swimming pool facility at OPRF, the school board came to its moment of truth last Tuesday and promptly took seven different headers into the deep end. No pool this year, folks. No decision on how to pay for a pool. No way forward on the major interior renovations planned for the school once the old pools were decommissioned.
But that’s OK. Delay is good. Already two OPRF school board members have suggested they have secret pool locations on the four-square block campus that no one has ever even thought of. Can’t wait to hear those ideas. Plus now that the pool decision has gone sideways, we will hear from dozens of previously somnambulant taxpayers who have a great idea, or who oppose swimming on religious grounds or who want the entire board to resign in shame.
This is sure to lead to a better pool outcome.
In River Forest, meanwhile, we are moving into year three of a plan to retool various aspects of the land around Roosevelt Middle School. You know, rearranging playgrounds and drop-off points, some signage and a few parking spaces. It was a run-of-the-mill summer project, the sort that gets 4 inches at the foot of a news story and an autumn ribbon-cutting that no one goes to see.
Now though we are on Version X of the plan; the village, library and park district are now in on the planning and various factions of neighbors will have to initiate weapons searches before the next block party.
But the delay is certain to produce the world’s best-ever outdoor classroom and every parking space will be just as parallel or perpendicular as the gods intended in their grand plan for River Forest.
We’ve seen the advantages of years of public kvetching over the design, materials and siting of the so-called Whiteco Building in downtown Oak Park. Yes, we built a replica of the Pravda — Pravda, not Prada, got it? — headquarters on Harlem Avenue. It will be there in all its concreteness long after Putin serves his 10th term as Russia’s tsar.
Oak Parkers, elected and self-appointed, fought so long over the demolition of the Colt building on Lake Street that the entire world economy collapsed. But don’t worry, it’s all for the best, and a really big and ordinary looking development will soon, relatively soon, rise on the site. Probably.
Making timely decisions is overrated. Better to let things percolate and then cascade off the rails for a time. It’s like when you’re raising your kids and they’re about to do something dumb for the 10th time. Sure, you could jump in and stop them. But think how much more profound the impact will be when they’re on that gurney in the ER.
