OUR VIEWS
Big ideas, notable change, can always get derailed when you start by looking at the niggling details. So it is as the concept of consolidating several local fire departments into a single more efficient, less costly fire district gets the first hint of traction.
In these times of economic pain and shortage, considering ideas that once may have been relegated to interesting concepts for an urban studies class are now both necessary and possible. Harsh realities have pushed us out of the box of conventional thinking. We can no longer sustain the governments we have created and counted on. So we need to invent new models.
A fire protection district that covers a batch of suburban communities sharing similar housing stocks and populations is a concept worth exploring. The current formula of distinct fire departments and paramedic services bound by the narrow geography of our 125-old-year small towns is likely to prove both too expensive and too inefficient when a fair study is made.
Inevitably, turf protection – both political and employment related – as well as nostalgia and fear will surface. Fire chiefs have worked hard to become fire chiefs. Eliminating one’s job is seldom appealing. Union seniority. Cross training of paramedics. Pension funding. Railroad tracks and other man-made barriers. Sharing expensive equipment. These are all the roadblocks that will be thrown up. Our political leaders need to be strong and focused as they begin the lengthy assessment.
Consolidation has worked, with imperfections, for police and fire dispatch between Oak Park, River Forest and Elmwood Park. Several social service functions at the township level are shared by Oak Park and River Forest. Consolidating fire services, street departments, health services are all ways to consider cutting costs as we move lurchingly into our bare-bones future.
Stop with stop signs
There is a plan for stop signs and other traffic-control mechanisms in Oak Park. You wouldn’t know that after a majority of the village board predictably caved last week to neighbors in an uproar after a small child was hit by a car crossing Division Street near Field Center and Mann School.
The police chief, rightly we think, installed a temporary stop sign at the intersection on the day of the accident. The village board, meeting 10 days later, had the choice of making the sign permanent, following the recommendation of its own transportation commission to add flashing yellow warnings and cut the speed limit, or establishing the sign temporarily while further study occurred. A 5-2 majority went with the emotional choice supported by neighbors.
We’d only point out that – after decades of willy-nilly, reactive placements – the village has finally made headway in recent years in creating a logical pattern of traffic control across the village. An intersection with no history of accidents and just a block from a four-way stop was not the place to start making exceptions.
Two trustees pass
We often note the decency and sincerity of the elected officials who volunteer to serve these villages. As indicated by the previous editorial, it is often a thankless task. And so we take a moment to recognize two Oak Park trustees who have recently died. Kate McMahon and Barbara Ebner served as trustees perhaps a decade apart. Different in manner, similar in their motivation, we’ll miss these two women.