With upcoming municipal elections in April, in the coming weeks, the Review will profile candidates running for the Park District of Forest Park’s Board of Commissioners.
The first will center Tim Gillian, who currently serves as president of the park board.
Tim Gillian has a long history in Forest Park.
He attended Proviso East High School. From the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, Gillian volunteered as an auxiliary officer for the Forest Park Police Department. During the same time, he and his brother-in-law ran a paving business that they started themselves.
Gillian’s career as an elected official started in 1995 as the village council’s commissioner of streets and public improvement. Gillian was also a Proviso Township trustee from 1999 to 2011. After 12 years as commissioner, he was hired as village administrator in 2009 and served until 2021.
Gillian retired that year, and in late 2021, was appointed to the Park District of Forest Park’s Board of Commissioners. He’s served as president, a position that the board annually votes on, since last summer.
Gillian said there are several qualities from his time as an elected official that he hopes to bring with him to the park district board, if elected.
“Most of the problems that we see [on the park district board] are things that I’ve dealt with extensively on the village side, or even as an elected official,” Gillian said.
As village administrator, he balanced seven department heads, five elected officials and 15,000 residents, which he said often have competing interests.
“I juggled them all day long to keep everybody as happy as possible while still moving in the proper direction,” Gillian said.
And he often did so without much money to work with. The village ended its last fiscal year with an $11 million deficit.
“The village has no money, and trying to still accomplish big things with no money was always a challenge. But we did it,” Gillian said. “We still leveraged grants and all kinds of other stuff, just like we do at the park, to get stuff done.”
If reelected, Gillian has a few goals he’d like to accomplish.
One is having someone at the park district help with mental health resources and social services.
“I want to put a mental health person on our staff and have open office hours so that a resident can just walk in and say, ‘I need help,’” Gillian said. “I don’t know what form that will take yet, but park districts now more than ever need to change with the community needs.”
He’d also like to start a program that offers free swim lessons to one grade of local students at a time. They would get two free lessons at the Forest Park pool to learn about swim etiquette and basic instruction.
Both a mental health service and free swim lessons would likely require collaboration with local schools.
Finally, Gillian said he’d like to add on to the Roos Recreation Center. The park district is working with architects to create a plan to build an extension off the back of the building’s north side. This would create more room for day camps for kids after school and in the summer.
Gillian considers the park district board’s recent successes to be adding property to its portfolio, upgrading its pool, adding pickleball courts, and redoing the pocket parks.
On the park district board, Gillian was the one who started the conversation about transferring the village-owned pocket parks to the park district.
“And since I’ve been on the board, we’ve completely rehabbed three of them [with] millions of dollars,” he said. “That affects day-to-day lives.”
And he hopes to continue impacting the daily lives of Forest Park residents.
“For more than 40 years, I’ve been involved,” Gillian said. “Why am I running again? I’m not done yet.”