Public swimming pools, whether indoor or outdoor, are a high-value asset. They cost a lot to build, a lot to maintain, and in a landlocked village, space for them is at a premium.
That’s likely why the Park District of Oak Park is proposing to subtract one outdoor pool to construct an indoor facility it claims the public wants and needs. Well, voters will decide on March 17 if they are ready to take on yet higher taxes to pay for a $40 million project that eliminates the outdoor pool at Ridgeland Common.
District officials faced some skepticism at a public meeting for residents last week. There were fair questions about the wording of the referendum question, which does not specify a location for the indoor pool and concerns about losing one of the two outdoor pools. Credit to the park district for answering those questions.
Most interesting to us was the out-of-the-blue comment from Jan Arnold, the park district’s executive director, that she has had informal conversations with Jacki Iovinelli, her counterpart at the Park District of Forest Park, about some level of collaboration that would allow Forest Parkers access to the proposed indoor pool in Oak Park at resident rates while allowing Oak Parkers to access Forest Park’s quite wonderful aquatics center on Harrison Street.
Over the decades, this page has been enthusiastic about creative collaborations between local governments to save taxpayer money while upgrading services. Why can’t Oak Park and River Forest merge into one fire department? Why can’t village governments in Oak Park and River Forest absorb the services provided by township government? There are lots of missed opportunities.
Perhaps the most notable failure to communicate was between Oak Park’s park district and Oak Park and River Forest High School many years back when the parks wooed and nearly begged OPRF to join them in jointly building a shared pool and indoor rec center at Ridgeland Common. This was near the end of the school’s era of supreme arrogance and led to the painful decades-long fight over how to finally replace the obsolete twin pools at OPRF.
We like the pool in Forest Park. It’s spacious, regularly updated and works for all ages. There are already Oak Parkers paying the non-resident rate to enjoy the facility.
We’ll need to see the equivalency of sharing resident rates between the two villages while Oak Park taxpayers are still paying the tax hike over the next 20 years to build an indoor pool.
So for now a distraction to the question on the table: How will Oak Parkers vote and how strong a case can the park district make over the next seven weeks?
