THE LANDMARK VIEW
Talk about a win-win situation. In the resolution of the great Downtown Riverside Parking Struggle, it’s tough to find a loser.
To begin with, after having a bitter taste left in their mouths in 2009 when the village board rebuffed their pleas for a parking lot at 61-63 E. Burlington St., the Riverside Chamber of Commerce will finally get the prominently visible lot they’ve been seeking.
Officials have long heard the anecdotes of businesses on the verge of opening in Riverside that walked away because of the perceived lack of parking downtown. That complaint will presumably disappear now with a parking fixture on the eastern edge of the central business district.
Other winners include Village Manager Peter Scalera and Public Works Director Ed Bailey, who worked on a last-minute deadline last December to put together the grant application that led to not one, but two grants from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency to fund the construction of both the parking lot and the re-paving of two alleys in brutal disrepair near Harlem Avenue.
That Riverside came away with more than a half-million dollars for these two projects and was one of 14 municipalities out of hundreds applying for the funding, is a testament to their good work on this.
Riverside itself is a winner, since both projects will be examples of sustainable infrastructure that serve as models of how to reduce storm-water runoff and help reduce flooding. They also further the village’s dedication to sustainable initiatives and will hopefully serve as a launching pad for other such grant-funded initiatives in the future.
Trustee Ben Sells comes out a winner with this decision as well. A proponent of both green initiatives and the heretofore ill-fated parking lot, it was Sells who pushed the board to move ahead with the grant applications, and it was Sells who responded quickly and effectively to urging from a village resident to seek the grant funding.
In what turned out to be a good bit of political maneuvering, Sells’ success in getting the rest of the board to go along with the applications was no-lose for him. If the applications had been turned down, there would have been nothing lost. In getting the grants, it assured the construction of the parking lot because it would have been made no sense for the village board to turn down a grant for which they specifically applied.
But opponents of the parking lot back in 2009 can claim a victory, too. There was an opportunity to build a parking lot using Metra grant funding, but that would have meant having much less control over the lot and would have necessitated a paid commuter lot there. The village’s share of the cost would also have been higher.
With the IEPA grant in hand, the former opponents can now rightfully claim that they waited until the right circumstances came along and that the parking lot will truly benefit the business community at no cost to the village’s general operating fund.