Good to see headway on plans to renovate Oak Park’s village hall and construct an entirely new police station on the campus at Madison and Lombard. The village board has approved an architectural firm to craft a schematic design for the project. It will lay out construction phasing options, narrow in on estimated pricing, and begin to give a sense of scope for the work.
We are fans of collaborations and encouraged that River Forest’s park district is well into negotiations with Dominican University to use a rebuilt softball field at Keystone Park as the home diamond for the school’s women’s softball team. Dominican would pay $200,000 of the $460,000 cost of installing synthetic turf and other field upgrades. Stunningly to us, the softball season starts in wintery February and ends in May so conflicts with other uses are limited.
As we’ve watched nearby city neighborhoods turn a little less blue in the recent national elections, notable that Oak Park’s blue bubble remained intact with more than 90% of voters choosing the Harris-Walz ticket over Trump-Vance.
Remarkable to think that if you go back to the 1960s, Oak Park was a reliably GOP village.