For whatever reason, Mother Nature decided that 2008 would be a year to remember in the Landmark circulation area. In June, she provided the warning; in September the blow.

Residents awoke on Father’s Day, June 15, to the sound of winds whipping through the trees and rains flying every which way but straight down. Gales in excess of 60 mph snapped trees limbs and blew over trees in all three towns, blocking streets, cutting power and damaging homes. Clean up efforts took days to complete.

But Father’s Day was nothing compared to the weather of Sept. 12-14, when the entire Chicago area was deluged by rains that resulted in near-record flood levels.

Some 400 people were evacuated in Riverside from blocks near the Des Plaines River and a portion of South Hollywood was under water. Major thoroughfares such as First Avenue, Ogden Avenue, Cermak Road and 31st Street were closed to traffic due to flooding and almost the entire residential area of Riverside Lawn was under water.

In addition to the damage done to homes and apartment buildings, flood waters surged into the basement of Riverside-Brookfield High School, leaving extensive damage and dirt. The high school was closed for an entire week while work crews shifted their attention from renovation to reclamation. An estimated 1.5 million gallons of water inundated the lower level.

The flooding also shut Brookfield Zoo for the first time in its 74-year history on Sept. 14 as storm water filled basements and zoo exhibits.

FUBAR

As 2008 dawned there appeared to be hope on the horizon at the Arcade Building in downtown Riverside. The president of the company overseeing a renovation there promised a “coming out party” for the building in spring.

“I’m trying to wrap up and be out of here by the end of April,” said Don Price of Wexford Development Group.

In August it was announced that the only ones coming out to the party would be the feds. In a sweeping investigation of financial fraud, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed suit against Wextrust Capital, which owns the Arcade and many other properties.

A federal judge promptly froze all of Wextrust’s assets, and the little renovation work that had been occurring there stopped. Since that time, the receiver of Wextrust’s assets has been rolling up huge attorney’s fees, but not much has happened with the building.

Despite news that it might be put up for sale, the Arcade will officially become vacant when Grumpy’s-its final tenant-moves out after today. Meanwhile, village commissions have appealed to the National Trust for Historic Preservation to declare the Arcade an endangered building.

Summer intrigue

The summer months are generally sleepy ones when it comes to news stories about school districts. Not in 2008 and not for Riverside-Brookfield High School.

Graduation day, instead of closing the book on the school year, was just the beginning of a drama that would play out until the end of July.

The story broke in early June when the school board met in executive session to investigate claims that Superintendent Jack Baldermann had an improper romantic relationship with a school staff member. That same night, far away in Green Bay, Wis., a school board there announced that Baldermann was a candidate for their top job.

Within a week, Baldermann had been suspended from his job for two weeks and a private investigator was called in to put the pieces together. It wasn’t until mid-July that the District 208 school board announced its decision to keep Baldermann on, albeit with a shorter contract and without a pay raise due to him.

Ticking time bomb

Riverside officials have been warning of a coming financial reckoning for at least two years. At the end of 2007, they set the clock ticking for the moment of truth. It nearly came in 2008. It is on the calendar for 2009.

Riverside, like many local governments, is having trouble reconciling the revenues it receives and the expenditures it makes. Unwilling to keep spending down cash reserves to pay for operations, the village board decided to ask voters to approve a property tax increase in November. Failing to do so would have dire consequences. No recreation department. Decreased fire and police staffing. No historical museum.

Voters didn’t bite.

While trustees backed off on the police and fire cuts and decided to partially fund the museum and recreation department, those cuts will all be back on the table at the end of 2009 if things don’t change.

That is, unless the village elections in April result in a change in local government. A group of newcomers running on a no-referendum, cost-cutting platform could seek to change the financial equation in Riverside. Either way, it looks like another year for belt-tightening in Riverside.

Justice served, mainly

In January 2007, Riverside and Brookfield witnessed a pair of horrific crashes. In 2008, justice was served.

On April 4, Judge Carol Kipperman sentenced Brookfield resident Thomas J. Postulka to 12 years in prison for killing Francis and Helen Lilly. In court, Postulka sobbed as he apologized to the Lilly family for driving drunk and hitting the elderly couple with his car while they were crossing Prairie Avenue to get to church.

Two days prior to that incident, Postulka had been arrested in North Riverside for DUI.

Then on July 7, Kipperman sentenced Lyons resident Michelle Anguiano to 60 days in jail and three years’ probation for driving so recklessly that she lost control of her car while speeding down East Burlington Street in Riverside and crashed into a tree, killing two friends in the back seat.

While neither drugs nor alcohol played a role in the crash, Kipperman called it “more than just an accident” and expressed dismay at what she perceived as no remorse on the part of the 19-year-old Anguiano.

But a man convicted in September for reckless homicide in connection with the death of a 53-year-old Riverside woman in March of 2006 escaped jail time.

Stephen Pocina crashed his SUV into the Harlem Avenue Metra station in Berwyn early on March 3, 2006. Kathleen Talmage, who was working as a ticket agent inside the station, was killed. Pocina, a former Riverside resident, fled the scene and remained at large for three weeks.

Investigators believed Pocina was drunk at the time of the crash but could never prove it.

The headlines wrote themselves

In February, Thomas Hurlburt, the superintendent of Brookfield-Riverside School District 95, announced that he’d be forming a committee to study changing the name of S.E. Gross School.

The school was about to undergo a large renovation, which included new exterior signage, so now was the time to see if anyone thought changing the school’s name might be a popular idea.

It wasn’t.

Alumni, students, the president of the historical society all protested the idea, saying it dishonored the legacy of the man who established the town (though he called it Grossdale, and residents in 1905 changed it to Brookfield because they hated him so much) and donated a considerable sum of money for the school’s construction in exchange for a promise that his name be affixed to the building forever.

The district sent out surveys to residents of the district as a way to test the waters further. Some 70 percent were against the name change.

On March 20, the board officially abandoned the idea, setting in stone the fact that the school was, indeed, Gross.

On the house

As the national economy began to show signs of a slow down in 2007, everyone expected there to be an impact on the housing market, which had been booming for a decade in the near west Chicago suburbs.

Almost as if with the flip of the calendar page to 2008, the bottom seemed to drop out. Foreclosures skyrocketed and home sales slowed to a crawl as local real estate agents and potential home sellers began to wrap their minds around the prospect of falling home values. The inventory of homes on the market continued to climb. Despite low interest rates and a buyers’ market, no one was buying.

By summer’s end it was apparent why. No one could get a loan. The global financial market melted down with major mortgage lenders like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac being taken over by the federal government and financial behemoths like Lehman Brothers going bankrupt.

A quick look at property transfers published in the Landmark in 2007 and 2008 paint a pretty clear picture of the local impact. From Nov. 16, 2006 to Oct. 31, 2007, according to records the Landmark received from the Cook County Recorder of Deeds, Brookfield saw 304 property transactions. From Nov. 1, 2007 to Oct. 31, 2008 there were just 180 recorded, a drop of nearly 41 percent.

Riverside saw a 26.5-percent drop in the number of arms-length transactions recorded, while North Riverside saw a 30.5-percent fall off in property transactions.

Roadmap to the future

One of the biggest stories in Riverside in 2007 was the brouhaha over a proposed tax increment financing district for the village’s downtown. So when Brookfield proposed its own TIF district for Ogden Avenue in February, one might have expected that village government might run into a few roadblocks on its way to TIF-dom.

One would have expected wrong. The idea of an Ogden Avenue TIF received virtually no opposition from residents, even by ones whose homes were included in the TIF map. Other taxing districts in the TIF, including all the school districts involved expressed no opposition to the TIF. Instead, all pointed to the current state of Ogden Avenue as the reason why the TIF was needed.

Given the current financial state of the country as a whole, it’s tough to say exactly when the Ogden Avenue TIF will bear fruit. Likely it will be years. But the groundwork has now been laid for the economic redevelopment of Brookfield’s busiest commercial thoroughfare. Better late than never.

Money in the bank

Despite attempts to brush it off as a clerical error, the village of Brookfield’s failure to levy the full amount of taxes owed the library at the end of 2007 had a real impact on 2008.

While the mistake may not have hurt the village with respect to its 2008 budget, the fact remains that Brookfield is out nearly $600,000 because of the error.

With the village’s cash reserves continuing to dwindle and a call from staff for the village board to create a “lock box” cash account to cover emergencies, it’s clear just how important that extra half million dollars is. The village plans on setting aside $200,000 to begin the lock box account in 2009. It could be over double that had the taxes been levied correctly.