Waiola Park neighbors angry over not being included in decision to construct second, temporary ballfield

Kathi Mungo said she first learned about the new Little League ball field planned for Waiola Park on April 1 when a large truck pulled to the curb on South Waiola Ave, alongside the park and directly across from her house. She said she watched as workers began unloading sand into a large pile on the parkway.

Curious, Mungo said she approached one of the workmen and asked what the sand was for. The ball field, he told her.

That didn't make sense to Mungo because the park's ball field was on opposite side of the park from where the sand was being unloaded—and it had been extensively upgraded by the Little League just last year.

Mungo said she asked more questions, but the workman seemed evasive.

"It was like pulling teeth," she recalled.

Finally, she said, the workman blurted out, "It's for the new ball field!" and he stormed off.

What new ball field? Mungo wondered. She had heard nothing about that. She returned to her house.

Later she would learn that three of her neighbors on Stone Ave, across the park, had a similar encounter with another group of workmen who arrived with heavy equipment. But in their case, upon learning of the new ball field, the neighbors protested, demanding the workers stop. They did, and soon all the workers left the park, taking their equipment but leaving the sand in a big pile on the existing ball field, right behind home plate.

Mungo said she also learned that the new ball field was to be located in the grassy center of the park, an area that she and other parents with young children favor as a play spot because it is a safe distance from both the existing ball diamond and heavily trafficked 47th St to the north.

The sand pile was still there behind home plate on April 10 when, after a week of phone calls to officials at the Little League and the Park District of La Grange, Mungo and her neighbors finally got a face-to-face meeting with them to hear for the very first time the extent of, and reasoning behind, the plans for the new ball field. They also were anxious to learn why no one ever consulted with them about the field before approving it.

It was an informal gathering on a Saturday afternoon. About 15 residents, including Mungo, met with Tom Cushing, president of the Little League, and Dean Bissias, executive director of the Park District. The group stood in the park's northwest corner aside the walking path that circles the park. The drone from traffic plying 47th St just yards away was nearly constant.

Also in attendance were Chris Walsh, one of the five Park District commissioners, and Jim Palermo, a village trustee. Palermo said he learned about the meeting from a small notice published a few days earlier on the website of the Suburban Life newspaper. This reporter also learned of the meeting from that notice, and was the only journalist present.

Cushing explained that the new ball field was needed because the ones that the league uses at Gordon Park often are flooded after a rainfall. As a result of last year's especially rainy spring weather, he said, 18 of 21 girls softball games scheduled for Gordon Park had to be canceled. So the decision had been made to move the girls games to Spring Ave school, and relocate the league's "farm" teams, composed of eight-year-old boys, from the school to a new field at Waiola Park.

The field was to be only a temporary accommodation, Cushing assured them, which would end when a planned renovation of the fields at Gordon Park was completed. That work had been delayed for more than two years as the Park District found itself entangled in a series of lawsuits filed by residents who opposed its efforts to sell a portion of Gordon Park to fund the improvements.

But the renovation plans would now proceed irrespective of the lawsuit, Walsh said, because the Park District in February received a $400,000 matching grant from the State of Illinois. Any work paid for by those funds must be completed within the next two years so at most, Walsh said, the temporary ball field would exist for three league seasons.

After listening to the project overview, the residents in general expressed two major concerns about the new ball field itself:

First, placing the ball diamond in the park's grassy center, they said, would restrict the informal play of the neighborhood children to the park's north end where, many feared, the chances of a child running into the heavy traffic on 47th St were high.

Cushing responded that he wanted to distance the ball field from 47th St for the same reason—to keep his eight-year-old players from running into the street.

"I guarantee you we use the park more than baseball does," Mungo said.

"That's probably true," Cushing admitted. In fact, the league would only use the field for a couple of hours three times a week, he said. Therefore, the ball field could still be used at other times by the neighborhood children for general play because sand would be laid only along the base paths and on the pitcher's mound, which would be level with the infield, which would remain grass.

Still, parents likely would avoid setting their small children down to play on a ballfield, Mungo said.

"The most desirable place to play ball is the most desirable place for our kids to play," she told Cushing. "That's the biggest conflict."

The second issue raised by the residents was one of safety, specifically regarding the additional automobile traffic the league's games would generate. Because Waiola Park has no off-street parking, both sides of Waiola and Stone Aves often are lined with cars during ballgames played on the existing field. As a result, those side streets narrow to almost one-lane affairs, providing potentially deadly corridors for small children who dart into them from between parked cars, sometimes in response to the tune of an ice cream truck.

Last summer, a young girl was seriously injured when she ran into the side of a moving vehicle.

"There's going to be how many more families playing at this park?" Claire Bach, a Stone Ave resident, asked Cushing. "How many more cars is that, added to the literally constant traffic from 3:45 until 7:30 at night? I mean, I park my car in my driveway to keep people from pulling in and out."

Mari Schoder, another Stone Ave resident, said she constantly fears that her 16-year-old son, a student driver, will hit someone while pulling out of her own driveway.

Cushing acknowledged their concerns about traffic safety. "I wish the ice cream trucks could come nowhere near these kids," he said. "I don't like them in my own neighborhood."

"What we are telling you is there is an existing problem," Mungo said. "By adding another field you are compounding that problem. Without addressing the existing problem and compounding it with no additional precautions being taken, it's a recipe for disaster."

Walsh noted that traffic concerns were an issue more appropriately addressed by the village than the Park District, and suggested Palermo and other village officials could help.

Put in pedestrian crosswalks at 47th St, Kris Larocco, who resides on Waiola, urged Palermo.

"A pedestrian crosswalk is already being discussed for Waiola Ave [at 47th St], with flashing lights like we did back in the fall at 9th Ave," Palermo said. He assured the residents he would communicate their safety concerns to the board, village manager and the police chief.

Despite the sparring, the discourse on the ball field and its potential impact on the park, and the surrounding streets, was generally civil and courteous on all sides. Occasionally, even a laugh was shared.

"We understand the park is needed for other families to come here for other purposes," Mungo said. "We're just looking for a compromise."

While none was found that Saturday afternoon, Bissias promised the residents that no work would continue on the new ball field until the matter was revisited by the board at its next meeting, April 19.

However, the residents' tone turned sharply critical when addressing the issue of having been left out of the process that resulted in the board's initial authorization of the project.

"We probably could have had this conversation earlier but I've been out of town since two o'clock this morning," Cushing told them. "This was the earliest I could make it here."

"Well, November would have been good for us," Mungo retorted.

It was at the Park District board's regular meeting in November that Cushing first publicly proposed the idea of putting the temporary ball field at Waiola. Walsh and his fellow commissioners approved the project at their regular meeting in December.

For the record, both the initial proposal and subsequent action item were included on the official agendas for the board meetings in question. This can be verified by viewing copies of meeting agendas that are archived on the Park District website. However, before the Park District redesigned its website earlier this year, it was not unusual for agendas to be posted late, or even after a meeting had been held, even though the Illinois Open Meetings Act has long required public bodies to post agendas on their websites no later than 48 hours prior to a meeting. The only way a resident could be assured of seeing a meeting agenda in a timely fashion was to subscribe to the Park district's email notification system.

In the case of the new Waiola ball field, Park District officials concede they made no effort to directly notify residents living near the park. This is confirmed by a review of video recordings of the November and December board meetings, which reveal that the potential impact of the new ball field on its neighbors, and other residents who frequent the park for activities outside of organized athletic events, was never addressed during the board's discussions. While there was significant concern expressed as to how the new ball field might impact the AYSO soccer league, which uses the same middle section of the park for some of its games, the words residents, neighbors and traffic safety were never uttered.

The closest the board came to addressing residents' concerns was at the November meeting when Walsh said:

"I think in order to evaluate whether we want to do this we have to understand what we are making undoable by virtue of deciding to do it. To the extent that there is competition for this finite resource between AYSO and Little League, I would like to know how put out AYSO would be, if at all. I don't know what other informal uses of this space currently there are. Maybe Dean's got some measures of that kind of thing. If we have information on that type of stuff when we make that decision, we can understand what might be sacrificed. It may be very little or nothing at all."

Bissias, in his impact analysis of the new ball field, delivered to the board at its December meeting prior to its unanimously approving construction, said only that AYSO representatives had been contacted and had been assured that the baseball field would be constructed in a fashion so as to be compatible with the soccer field.

At the April 10 meeting in the park, Walsh attempted to assure Mungo and her neighbors that their interests had indeed been represented by the board.

"Your permission was granted by the Park District," Walsh explained. "We don't have a direct democracy about every decision the Park District makes. The format by which citizens express their preferences about what they want in the parks is the decisions by which they have vested the Park District commissioners with decision-making authority."

Walsh's remark was met with open derision from the residents.

"What a terrible answer," Chuck Ferro, a Stone Ave homeowner, responded. Ferro is a former La Grange park commissioner who served from 1985-1991.

"It really is," Mungo added. "It's not healthy at all."

"The expectation is that people should have some say," Ferro said. "Whether you like it or not, there should have been some provisions."

"If people would have checked with us back in November, not that you need our permission to do anything, but we live here," Mungo said. "We can tell you more about this park than anybody on your staff."

Earlier in the meeting, Cushing said that no residents objected when the league last year reconfigured its ball fields at Gilbert Park, despite erecting a new backstop affecting views of the parks from some nearby homes.

"So in terms of the Little League not coming out and giving you a flyer or something, it's probably based on that history," Cushing said.

"I completely disagree with that," Mungo responded, recounting her difficulty in getting a straight answer from the league's construction crew.

"If no one had been around to ask, 'What are you doing?' you would have just done it," David Kane, who lives next door to Mungo, said.

"It would have been easier to ask for forgiveness than permission," Mungo added.

As it turns out, Mungo was asked for forgiveness, just last Thursday evening, by Park District President Tim Kelpsas. Mungo and a handful of neighbors selected by the Park District met with Kelpsas, Bissias, Cushing and a representative of the AYSO at a private, follow-up session to Saturday's public meeting. While not open to the public, Thursday's meeting also was held outdoors at Waiola Park as a convenience to the residents, according to Bissias.

"[Kelpsas] apologized and took full responsibility for the oversight," Mungo said Friday, referring to the residents having been earlier left out of the process. Noting that the board president was both contrite and gracious, Mungo said she felt it appropriate to give him the benefit of the doubt.

She said Kelpsas also promised to personally lobby village officials on behalf of the residents' efforts to improve traffic safety around the park. 

Kelpsas did not respond to a invitation from this reporter for comment.

There's was also progress made at Thursday's meeting towards a compromise, Mungo said. Apparently, the Little League is now willing to locate the new field away from Waiola's center and place it in one of the cornets on the park's north end. This would represent a 180-degree turnaround by Cushing, who ended his remarks at last Saturday's meeting by suggesting he would sooner cancel plans for the new field than endanger his young players with a close proximity to 47th St.

With that concession, Mungo said she is willing to support the new ball field.

"Everyone has to give a little to make a compromise work," she said.

Some but not all of her neighbors agree with her, Mungo said. A few are adamant about fighting to keep the new ball field out of Waiola.

Several of the park's neighbors, Mungo included, are likely to be at the Park District Recreation Center on Monday, April 19 at 7:30 p.m. when the board will reopen its discussion on the matter.

Comments

[William Dobias]

Welcome to the way this Park Board operates. They'd rather do things quietly than face neighbors and taxpayers with their plans. As Chris Walsh said, the only real control we have over this board lies in who we elect to it. Remember that the next time we elect park board members.

[Chris Walsh]

My "direct democracy" remark was pretty bad, and I totally deserved the lumps I took for it.

I will say that, other than that opprobrium (which I hope is as temporary as it was appropriate), the entire discussion was in my opinion quite amicable, with evident good faith among all participants.

[William Dobias]

Chris -
Opprobrium: you're being too hard on yourself and the citizens attending. This was an awful lot like the July 2007 meeting the Park Board held to let us all know they were going to sell a part of Gordon Park - whether we liked it or not - although you were more amicable than Rob Metzger and Ms. Penicook were at that July meeting

If a youngster (not necessarily a member of Little League) is hurt on a field prepared by contractors employed by the Little League, who has liability? Why wouldn't Dean Bissias employ and supervise the contractors working in his (and our) park and charge the cost back to the Little League?

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