Many years ago my mother, Bertha Gimbel, encountered a dynastic (sound familiar?) political situation in Lincolnwood. The village clerk had been in his position for over 20 years and viewed the residents as pesky annoyances. He viewed his position as a sinecure.
My retired, school-principal mother, who had a double master’s degree in education and many years’ experience as a school administrator under her belt, often raised uncomfortably precise questions in public meetings that the clerk chose to blithely ignore. His misogynistic dismissiveness pissed her off, but her dangerous questions annoyed him even more.
Well, my mother didn’t suffer fools easily.
Finally she had enough of his nonsense and decided to do something to square matters with him. She ran against the long-term sitting clerk as an independent, engaging the women of the Lincolnwood community. She won with a mandate from the community and served two terms, retiring after also serving as the president of the Illinois Municipal Clerks Association and mentoring the former, long-serving Oak Park Village Clerk Sandra Sokol as well.
It is with this family history in mind that I am profusely grateful to a few gritty River Forest citizens for their monumental research efforts in unearthing the recent, blatant conflict-of-interest scenario involving a member of the village’s Economic Development Commission, which catalyzed a pointed ethics complaint that came before the River Forest Board of Trustees at the meeting on Monday the 10th.
Listening to, and watching, as the events unfolded before my eyes during two recent village board meetings, my heart sank at the board’s callous indifference to a variety of River Forest residents’ observations and the almost casual disregard to the litany of facts, suggestions, and detailed historic evidence they provided that culminated in, at least to my way of thinking, an appearance of impropriety.
The local Ethics Commission had discovered (to its dismay) that it was powerless to do anything substantiative about a situation that anyone appointed to that commission would have thought to be its raison d’etre. With an empty charge such as described, I would have resigned on the spot.
If my mother were alive, she would demand that I engage on issues like this that seem to be common these days in River Forest (let’s not forget the egregious, never-ending Lake and Lathrop development debacle). As a resident, constituent, taxpayer, and voter, I can’t help but want to call to light these insulting injustices to, hopefully, improve the village governance which the president, four trustees, and the village attorney seem to have forgotten how to attend to.
Corey D. Gimbel
River Forest