A routine village council discussion about options for locating new water reservoirs led, on April 14, to frustrated council members pressuring Mayor Rory Hoskins to convene a meeting for a thorough conversation about the future of the village-owned Altenheim property.
After the village’s engineering firm, Christopher B. Burke Engineering, gave another presentation about site options for new water reservoirs, Maria Maxham, commissioner of accounts and finance, said she wants a public meeting to talk about what should happen to the Altenheim property.
“I’m not opposed to locating the reservoirs on the Altenheim,” Maxham told the Review. “I think it’s probably going to end up being the best decision, but I can’t support that until we have some sort of discussion as a group about what we’re doing and getting us all on the same page.”
“It’s been a real struggle. In fact, to this point, it’s been impossible to make that happen,” Maxham said during commissioners’ comments at the end of the April 14 village council meeting.
At the meeting, Maxham said that she requested through Village Administrator Rachell Entler and in text and email requests directly to Mayor Rory Hoskins that he put an item on the village council agenda to discuss future land use of the village-owned Altenheim property. Though nearly all agenda items require council action, there is the option to add a discussion agenda item.
“For months, I’ve wanted to talk about it as a council, and for months it hasn’t happened. And frankly, I think this is completely irresponsible,” Maxham said. “I couldn’t fix this privately, and I don’t know how else to make it happen. I want an answer, and I think the public deserves to know that we are being blocked from having a basic and very necessary conversation about the Altenheim.”
Hoskins responded during his commissioner’s comment.
“There are a ton of interests in [the village-owned Altenheim land] and we’re not rushing anything. We knew we were going to have the discussion tonight by Burke Engineering,” Hoskins said, adding that commissioners could’ve shared their ideas about the Altenheim during that time.
“I’ve always wanted the commissioners to talk among themselves, to the extent that it does not violate the Open Meetings Act, and come to some kind of general agreement. I would like to be able to at least take a very high-level sketch of what the village proposes to do to the Altenheim board and ask if it’s something that they can live with,” Hoskins told the Review. “We may call a special meeting before that, but that’s what I would have liked. And it just doesn’t seem like the commissioners were really engaging in discussions with each other.”
Other commissioners supported the idea of a formal conversation during their commissioner comments at the end of the meeting.
“It’s just so much easier to shoot ideas when we’re all sitting across from each other and it makes it more efficient,” said Ryan Nero, commissioner of public health and safety.
“I also share Commissioner Maxham’s frustration with a lack of conversation on some of these really big issues,” said Jessica Voogd, commissioner of public property. She said she’s experienced a similar feeling in getting the village’s buildings assessed.
“For years, I was pushing to have this building assessment done because we knew we had all of these buildings that were aging to the point of $500,000 band aids,” Voogd said. “We obviously want to know what’s going on at the Altenheim, and that’s been just sitting there with a big question mark on it for decades. We do need to start talking about, not only that but … what these properties look like.”
And Maxham thinks village council meetings are the perfect place to do that.
“Our meetings are so short,” Maxham told the Review of the typical hour-long village council meetings. “We could easily tack on an hour afterwards to say, ‘Today we’re going to talk about facilities, or today we’re gonna talk about the Altenheim.’ Because these are things that we have information about, but individually looking at that information is getting us nowhere.”
The Altenheim’s status
The northeast portion of the Altenheim, at the corner of Madison and Van Buren, seems to be reserved for Opportunity Knocks’ garden and farm. Though the land use agreement hasn’t been finalized yet, Entler said she’s working on a timeline to get the nonprofit planting as soon as possible.
The village council will also need to vote on whether to buy the 260-foot long, Altenheim-owned stretch of land on Van Buren for a bike path. The village must use the $247,500 Invest in Cook grant by December, or else it loses the funding.
Tied to the purchase of the Van Buren bike path is the land that the Altenheim wants to buy from the village in order to create a buffer around the building and an area for green space.
“If we can tie this into one transaction, that would be the best way to move forward,” Entler said.
And of course, the village council needs to vote on whether new water reservoirs should be built on over an acre on the south end of the village-owned property.
“None of these things am I opposed to at all, in any way, shape or form,” Maxham told the Review. “But what I am opposed to is us slowly, piece by piece, allocating the land that we own, selling it or leasing, without saying … ‘Let’s sit down as the council to make sure we’re all on the same page in terms of what we’re allocating and what we have left, then how we want to start the process of deciding what to do with the five-odd acres that’s going to be leftover.’”
According to Entler, the village is undergoing an appraisal of the village-owned Altenheim property, something she says is necessary before the village can buy or sell any of that land.
“It makes sense to have these appraisals done to be able to tell the commissioners, ‘This would be the value of this land, and this is what we would be keeping and how that would affect the bigger portion of land,’ as far as what the council wanted to put up for development or not,” Entler told the Review.
“You have to sell property at market rate values or close to market rate values. You can’t give someone an unreasonable discount just to make something happen,” Hoskins told the Review of the necessity of an appraisal.
While the village-owned Altenheim land is being appraised, the next steps in deciding on the future of Forest Park’s water reservoirs are for commissioners to choose their location and solicit funding.
James Amelio, group lead at Burke Engineering, said commissioners should decide by mid-July on whether to locate the new reservoirs on Altenheim land or on the village-owned parking lot at the Blue Line terminus. That would mean the design of the water reservoirs could start in September. After the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency approves the project plan, the village can go out for bidding in early 2027, starting construction that spring.
“Until we have it complete, the current reservoir is in service,” Amelio said. “We all know we talked about the condition of it, hence the urgency to stay on-script.”
“We can’t delay it anymore because otherwise everything we’re doing and all the planning is completely inefficient,” Maxham said at the meeting about discussing the bigger picture for the Altenheim.
“I want to have a group vision, or at least a group discussion, before we piecemeal decide what to do with different parts of the land,” Maxham said to the Review. “I think it’s part of being proactive versus reactive.”
Hoskins told the Review that there’s an opportunity for a bigger picture discussion, “but we still have to be flexible as a council because you just never know what’s going to come up.”
