The retirement of a longtime member of management in a very small organization is always an opportunity to rethink roles and realign responsibilities.
Forest Park is not missing that opportunity with the recent retirement of Vanessa Belmonte as village clerk. Over time, a range of duties had gravitated to the clerk’s office that were far beyond the official municipal record-keeper job description. Most notably, the complex and ever-shifting human resource functions of Forest Park’s municipal government had landed in the clerk’s office.
Now, following the reorg put forward by Village Administrator Rachell Entler, Forest Park is elevating the talented and hard-working Letitia Olmsted to the newly created head of a finance department with the to-be-hired village clerk reporting to the finance director. The village council also took the logical step of appointing Olmsted as the village treasurer.
While the village is contracting a consulting firm to oversee HR and to make recommendations on HR issues for the next several months, it will eventually hire for an HR coordinator post that will report to Entler. Employee benefits, hiring, onboarding and exiting staff, and payroll are critical duties that require an increasingly professional approach.
The mayor and village council were enthusiastic in adopting these well-considered steps.
That noisy car wash
Three residential neighbors of Crystal Car Wash on South Harlem Avenue hired an attorney last spring. Their collective goal is to put a finish to the perpetual roar the car wash and its many free vacuum stations create just across an alley from their homes on Elgin Avenue.
The residents, who sat for an interview with the Review last week, say their attorney is having discussions with the attorney for car wash owner, Neal Rembos. Are there compromises to be found? Remains to be seen. Notable though that a core part of their argument is that the village erred in its interpretation of code when it decided that Rembos’ car wash business was grandfathered in, as the same location had long been a car wash.
Mitchell Ashcroft, Sukrat Baber and Mark Denny maintain you can’t grandfather in an active nuisance and, further, that the original car wash was effectively demolished and replaced with a different business that included two dozen free and noisy vacuum stations.
At some point, it seems village government will need to revisit this issue, do some effective negotiating and bring some level of relief to neighbors with a legitimate complaint about their quality of life.