The Oak Park Village Board agreed to award an additional $1 million in pandemic relief funds to the Park District to accelerate reconstruction plans for Andersen Park.
Village trustees in March had awarded $1 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds to the Park District for lost capital improvements revenue. Recently, the district returned to the Village Board with an urgent request for an additional $1 million to facilitate reconstructing Andersen Park, at the corner of Division Street and Hayes Avenue, in 2023 instead of in 2024.
The board approved the request at its Nov. 29 meeting.
The work would entail improving the playground at Andersen, which hasn’t had an improvement since 2005, Park District Executive Director Jan Arnold told the Village Board.
Park District officials told village trustees that ARPA funds did not cover park districts, and park districts were not eligible for other pandemic relief options, such as Paycheck Protection Program loans or CARES Act support. And given that park districts rely not only on property taxes but also program and user fees, the Oak Park Park District has experienced lost revenues. Owing to the pandemic, the district’s revenues in 2020 were $6 million less than its budget, according to officials.
Today, the district is about $10 million poorer because of the pandemic, Worley-Hood said.
“(Park District) staff adjusted many expenditures during 2020 to 2022 to reduce the overall financial impact (of the pandemic) to the district, and part of that was $2 million that was not able to be transferred to our capital improvement plan in 2020 due to the direct implications of COVID,” Jake Worley-Hood, the Park District board vice president, told village trustees. “The inability to transfer that $2 million to our capital improvement plan extended the timing on quite a few park improvements. Projects at Longfellow (Park), Andersen, Barrie (Park), Dole (Center), Cheney (Mansion), the GRC — the Gymnastics and Recreation Center — and Rehm (Park and) Pool were all delayed due to lost revenues.”
The Village Board was supportive of providing the Park District with its entire $1 million request.
“This is really the second part of an original request that we received at the beginning of this year, so it’s not …the Park District coming back with an additional request. But it is … in line with the board saying (in March), ‘We are willing to give you half of it now, (and) let’s sort of table the discussion for the second half later,” Trustee Lucia Robinson told colleagues. “It’s clear to me that although the Park District didn’t receive any pandemic relief funds in the form of PPP (loans) or any direct ARPA funds, it certainly felt the impacts of the pandemic. And so it’s an opportunity for this board to extend some pandemic relief to another board that perhaps under different criteria would have in fact received its own pandemic relief…stream of funding.”
And Trustee Ravi Parakkat noted that without this funding, the district would “have to go back to citizens from a (tax) levy perspective” for the work at Andersen Park.
“From that perspective, this relief actually helps the community more broadly, and then all the factors you mentioned, Jake, about capital improvements, and keeping up to date is important to the community at large,” he said.
The Village Board has about $3 million in ARPA funds that it plans to award to local nonprofit groups and government entities. According to a document that the village released in November, the village has received about $6.92 million worth of ARPA funding requests from various local groups, including the Park District, against that $3 million in ARPA funds.
As a result, with the awarding of an additional $1 million to the Park District, the remaining groups, which include the West Cook YMCA, the Housing Forward homelessness prevention group, the Wonder Works Children’s Museum and the Historical Society of Oak Park and River Forest, now have requests for $5.92 million against what will be about $2 million remaining in ARPA funds to be awarded.
Earlier this year, the village’s Community Development Citizens Advisory Committee played a key role in granting the first round of community requests for ARPA funding. In this second round, the committee again will review the requests and provide recommendations to the Village Board. However, the Park District asked for its request to be heard separately before the Village Board.
“We are going to have some tough decisions still after we hear back from the great asks that are still coming forward … and then we’re going to have to make some tough decisions, as a board, on how to address those and pay for those,” Village President Vicki Scaman said.
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