Political Accountability to Citizens, a federation of about a dozen groups of homeowners opposed to road widening, promised blood at the March 15 Republican primary for the County Board. A candidate`s stand against road widening had become a test for the group`s political endorsement.
It seemed to work. Several antiroad candidates, including Patricia Hedstrom and Michael Formento from District 4, won County Board nomination. But PAC began to dissolve.
”We started off together and we lost each other because each of us started supporting these candidates,” says Jim Player, who led PAC and remains head of the Winfield Road Preservation Association. ”A lot of us saw what Formento and other politicians were going to do for our roads, and so we said, `We don`t care about the other (guy`s) roads.` ”
The narrow self-interest, Player says, doesn`t make a convincing case against Du Page`s sweeping proposal to improve traffic by widening two-lane roads.
Like Wheaton`s Citizens to Save President Street and Save Our Residential Environment (a Winfield village group), the Winfield Road Preservation Association still says that Du Page County`s ideological commitment to widen roads as an answer to traffic problems doesn`t make sense.
It increases traffic, Player claims. Whatever decrease in traffic delays that results, it won`t be worth the danger to children near the roads, not to mention home values, he says.
”If we do all these roads now, what are we going to do in the future?
Make `em six lanes?” he asks. ”And are we going to have some new kind of bus or mass transit?
”No matter what they try to do to solve traffic problems, if they continue to allow subdivisions to occur and continue to allow office complexes to go up, they`re going to drive out the very people who had nothing to do with the problems.”
To Player, 39, who lives in unincorporated West Chicago, that explanation comes from a lifetime of watching Du Page develop into a giant bedroom suburb. The watching changed to doing one day in November, 1986, when Player heard from a neighbor that Du Page County planned to widen a section of Winfield Road where he then lived.
The Winfield Road group secured petition signatures and mailed them to elected officials. Through an up-and-down two years of meetings in which hundreds of residents showed up, and others in which nearly no one did, Player has remained optimistic: ”Now I think people understand there`s more and more repercussions from something like this.”
