Suburban growth does not just happen. It is planned for and guided by many hands at many different levels of local government.
It can be a tricky business balancing limited resources against the residents’ expectations for continual improvements in their community’s quality of life, Tinley Park Mayor Ed Zabrocki said. It is a complex task that typically goes unrecognized by the people it affects, he said.
“I don’t say this disparagingly, but most people have very little concept of all the different functions the villages and other governments have and that they must perform in order to make this area the kind of place you want to live, raise your kids and all that other good stuff,” said Zabrocki, mayor since 1981.
“To tell the truth, it can be confusing to try to figure it all out and sometimes we get a little confused ourselves,” he said. “In Tinley Park we have parts of two counties, four townships, four congressional districts and 13 different school districts. So just keeping track of who you are supposed to be working with on which project can in itself be quite a job.”
Long-range planning the key
Since the time the Orland Park and Tinley Park areas began to expand roughly 30 years ago, long-range planning has been a priority.
Sometimes it works out well.
“One of the things I think the Village Board showed foresight in planning was to bring water and sewer service to the Will County part of the village,” said Mike Mertens, Tinley Park’s economic development director.
Twenty years ago, Tinley Park officials went out on a political limb to sell bonds to run sewer and water lines to an area slated for future commercial growth southwest of 183rd Street and Harlem Avenue along Interstate Highway 80. Officials reasoned that the immediate availability of the utilities would attract developments that would in turn repay the cost of the bonds and bring jobs and other sources of revenue to the area.
Substantially, that is what has happened, although it did take a while.
“Ten years ago the vast majority of the development you see there today did not exist,” Mertens said. “But when the developers started to become interested in the area, getting utilities was not one of the big obstacles they faced.”
Another advantage for that area’s developers has been that the portion of the original utility installations they are required to repay the village in order to connect is less than paying for new lines today.
Tinley Park also likes to get its own funding breaks when it can.
A major project now under way is the $3 million renovation of the Metra commuter facilities in the village’s historic downtown.
With the help of a $1.1 million federal grant channeled through the state, plans call for replacing the current 1,800-square-foot station with a 2,300-square-foot station that will be located further east and more centered in a reconfigured parking lot.
On the west end of the project area, along Oak Park Avenue, a brick plaza with benches, a water fountain and a clock tower is being installed in an area dubbed Tinley Square.
The village also has announced that a series of bronze statues will be installed on the plaza, paid for by donations from local businesses and developers. The statues will depict life-size family-oriented scenes, such as a father with his small daughter on his shoulders and a grandmother reading to small children.
Projects dovetail
The renovation project meshes with a village-sponsored project to provide financial incentives to nearby businesses interested in remodeling their building facades to reflect the look of a century ago.
“We have spent a lot of resources on Oak Park Avenue because if the core of your town dies, that blight spreads, and we want to prevent that,” Zabrocki said.
Other kinds of financial leveraging have paid off for Tinley Park as well, in terms of managing financial resources.
“We do a lot of what we call `shelf projects,'” Zabrocki said.
The village long has been in the habit of having plans for road improvements and similar projects that one day could qualify for federal- or state-funding assistance drawn up by the village engineer or other appropriate official–even though the funds were not then available.
“Sometimes a government funding source will pop up with a very small window of opportunity,” Zabrocki said. “And what do you know? We just happen to have the engineering all done and sitting on the shelf–so we get the money because we are ready to move on to the next phase.”
Tinley Park has been particularly successful in using that strategy to obtain grant money for roads, the mayor said.
Road projects crucial
Road improvements are highly sought after and seemingly always in critical need.
“Probably our most pressing necessity in this area is for a better road network,” said Orland Hills Mayor Kyle Hastings, a commissioner on the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission.
“I don’t want to say there wasn’t the right planning for roads out here, but it is important now that we develop a better road system because the one thing that is for sure is that traffic will never just get better by itself.”
The traffic pinch is particularly sharp in Orland Park.
“Our traffic situation is clearly an issue,” Village Manager Rick Boehm said.
It is not so much the village’s residents who add to the congestion on such major routes as La Grange Road, Boehm said. Much of the traffic is generated by people from other areas who make Orland Park a shopping destination or who are just traveling through on the way to other developing areas to the south and west such as Frankfort, Mokena and Lockport.
“We had a traffic study done as part of phase one for the widening of La Grange Road,” Boehm said. “Out of about 1,100 license plates we checked, approximately 80 percent were from outside of the community. Those are people who may be coming for shopping, but I believe a lot of it is pass-through traffic.”
Wider roads are not the only solution being looked at to ease road congestion, Boehm said. Another tactic is the Orland Park Village Board’s focus on preserving open space.
“We all know what a wonderful job the Forest Preserve District did in preserving open spaces,” Boehm said. “Those spaces are a treasure we can add to.”
Besides the esthetics of saving trees and providing more land for active and passive recreation, open space slows the influx of residents who need to be absorbed into the community.
“Open space means not only less people on the road, but less of a demand for services on the village and the schools,” Boehm said.
Over the years, local schools have had their own struggle to match resources with growth.
In the past, the districts have used split sessions, large class sizes and school boundary shifts to accommodate a flood of students.
In Orland Park School District 135 and Kirby Elementary School District 140, which between them serve most of Orland Township, accommodating student growth fueled by new homes continues to be the priority it has been for decades.
In Community Consolidated School District 146, which serves the east side of Tinley Park and small sections of Orland Park and Oak Forest, at one time contemplated year-round classes in order to stretch the use of its buildings.
More than population growth
But substantial new growth and skyrocketing enrollment has been finished in District 146 for some time. Instead the district has faced resource challenges differing than its neighboring districts.
“We’re at a place now where enrollment is stable in our school district with around 2,500 students, although you see some shifting around in terms of how old they are,” said Gerald Hill, now in his fifth year as the district’s superintendent. “And our projections are to be pretty much at that figure for the next five years.”
However, even though the student population was no longer growing bigger the district’s facilities were growing older.
The current Central Middle School, despite many additions and retrofittings, was getting too tired out structurally for another overhaul. The remodeling the school needed would have cost about 80 percent of the cost of a new building, Hill said.
A new middle school that would handle the 6th grade as well as the 7th and 8th grades was decided on. Moving the 6th grade to the school frees up space at the elementary feeder buildings, Hill said.
“Even though our enrollment may be stable, program demands are increasingly consuming our space and other resources,” Hill said.
One example of a growing resource demand is the special education program, which services students with disabilities.
“We have a full-inclusion school program, so first of all we need space for the students and the staff that works with them,” Hill said. “But we also need smaller areas for things like small group sessions and conducting conferences with parents.”
The problem was where to put a new middle school.
Ironically, a little over 20 years ago the District 146 School Board gave the village a prime school site it was sure the district would never need. The land, which the village originally had obtained for the district from a building developer, is now the location of the Village Hall on Oak Park Avenue.
When it turned out later that a school site was needed, the district had to struggle to find an acceptable location and to acquire the necessary small parcels of land further south on Oak Park Avenue.
Room for improvement
This fall, the new Central Middle School will open on its 26-acre site at 18146 S. Oak Park Ave. The size of the property alone will be an improvement over the current 3.3-acre site the middle school is on.
Hill said the larger site offers more opportunities in terms of outdoor programs and extracurricular activities as well as providing much-needed parking space.
“With the new location we were able to address a lot of nagging concerns,” Hill said.
The school is designed to accommodate the latest in technology for the pupils as well as to play an active part as a community facility, Hill said.
The district plans to make its athletic space available to the Park District and other community sports organizations. A new school theater also will be offered for community use, and the school’s technical equipment will play a part in the community-education programs the district hopes to hold.
“One of the major goals of the school board is to share more of what we have with the community,” Hill said. “We would like to make this new school as much of a resource to the people here as appropriate.”
