THE LANDMARK VIEW
Back in 2008 when the Riverside village board pondered chloroforming the Parks and Recreation Department if a tax referendum failed that November, it felt like trustees were putting a gun to the head of residents.
It was a terrible idea, and one that the board ended up not acting upon even after voters turned them down at the ballot box. At the time it was proposed, we called the strategy “a loser.” There was no way the village could dismantle or threaten to dismantle its recreation department and retain credibility with voters.
In late 2008 and again in 2009, the village board voted, however, to reduce the tax levy collected for parks and recreation services as the department crafted a plan to become self-sufficient within a year.
Now it looks like the village board didn’t have the authority to even do that.
Most recently, a plan has been floated to fold the recreation department under the umbrella of public works. As a structural solution it’s neither here nor there. Either way, officials contend the work of parks maintenance will get done and recreation programming will continue. Savings come principally from lower salaries made possible by the departure of the former director.
Could it work? Sure it could. Brookfield essentially did the same thing for two years after hiring a new public works director with a parks maintenance background. The department now exists under the umbrella of the village manager’s office.
The difference there was that the Brookfield village board never contemplated dissolving the board that governs parks and recreation. That’s what’s being proposed in Riverside now, and the village board ought to abandon the idea once and for all.
Doing away with the parks and rec board will drag recreation in Riverside into the political realm and make recreation a campaign football in perpetuity. It has no business being that kind of an issue. Voters in 1937 saw to it that recreation should be governed by an independent board. In doing so it imposed, not suggested, a specific tax levy to support active recreation in the village.
Village officials can give all of the assurances they want about their intentions, but they can’t make promises for future boards or guarantee future events. If parks and rec ceases to be independent, it will truly be at the mercy of village government, just like any other line item in the budget.
Not only should the village drop any plan to usurp that board’s powers, it should also refund to the board the levy to which it was entitled during the past two years and stay out of the levying process for recreation in the future.
Recreation, under the 1937 law, was guaranteed that tax levy. The parks and rec board does not have to ask for the levy; it is entitled to it.
And while this certainly becomes an unexpected expense for the village board, it acted inappropriately in 2008 when it saw fit to slash the levy, and in 2009 when it repeated that act.
When Brookfield mistakenly shorted its public library by more than $600,000 in 2008, the village made good on its mistake, to its own detriment. Before this situation gets any worse, the Riverside board needs to do the same, and then get on with the ongoing battle with its annual budget – but without recreation being part of that discussion.