Buying former mental health center is nonsense
Tinley Park’s possible plan to purchase the former State of Illinois Mental Health Center property is absolute nonsense, sheer folly and a fiscal irresponsibility. To want to annex the property to have zoning power to control any development is one thing. Taking on the responsibility of ownership is something else.
First, to purchase the property would cost millions of dollars. The state would not hand it on a platter to the village. Second, it would require millions of dollars more to clean up the property and that is before any development can even take place.
Who will be financing this project? The taxpayers. Don’t depend on the federal government or the state to give any help because they are both bankrupt. If the village pursues this ill-conceived plan, it too will be bankrupt. The village would have to sell bonds to finance the project, so we can push off the debt for 25-30 years. This is in addition to all the village’s other debts.
However, the debt will have to be paid. It won’t go away and it won’t be forgiven. So that leaves me with a burning question: How will the bonds be paid off? Will the residents of the village have to pay them off? You would have to burden the people of Tinley Park with an enormous mortgage. This would be an intolerable, unbearable burden on the residents, and land the village in bankruptcy.
Why is this proposal being considered? Because there are people in the village government who suffer from an empire-building complex. It is a disease that Orland Park has, but they also have a tax base that Tinley Park does not have, and never will have.
Unlike our village planners and dreamers, our residents just want to live in an affordable, comfortable and safe community in which to raise their families. If this ill-conceived scheme comes to pass, people will be leaving Tinley Park rather than moving into Tinley Park.
We don’t need a Manhattan here; a pie-in-the-sky pipe dream. That’s like a skyrocket that soars brilliantly into the sky, only to plunge precipitously into the darkness.
Rudolph M. Unger, Tinley Park
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