2026 may be the last year Brookfield has an active beautification commission before the group sunsets.
A proposal to phase out the commission was one of the main discussion points of the group’s most recent meeting on Tuesday, July 7. The next day, Village Trustee Katie Kaluzny, who is the village board’s liaison to the group, said many of the commission’s duties have “evolved over time” until the commissioners found themselves without much to do.
“The things that they had worked on over time have evolved, too,” she told the Landmark while at the July 8 French market. For example, “This used to be Progress Park and a garden they got the Governor Hometown Award for and then maintained over the years, but now it is [the Brookfield Shops], so it does not need the commission to maintain and beautify it still.”
Other examples of the beautification commission’s duties that have moved away from them included being in charge of planters along Grand Boulevard, which became obsolete when the 3700 block was redone last year, Kaluzny said.
“Places that they used to beautify as a regular project have gotten permanently beautified,” she said. “They used to maintain parks or do a lot of cleanup and do Adopt-A-Spot as a different project, but public works is awesome, and they’re cleaning all the parks a lot. People would go, and volunteers would say, ‘There’s really nothing to clean.’”
Members of the commission did not respond to requests for comment from the Landmark over email.
Another program the beautification commission manages is the village’s public art mural requests, but just one submission was made and then withdrawn in 2025, according to agenda documents from the commission’s July 7 meeting.
On top of the group’s struggle to find programming to control, Kaluzny said it may not even be able to officially meet by the end of the year.
“It’s been a little harder to recruit new people because there isn’t as much to do,” she said. “People have terms expiring coming up, so we won’t have a quorum later this fall. If people aren’t renewing [their terms] and we’re not actively recruiting, then [we won’t be able to meet].”
According to the agenda documents, the commission already has two vacancies, one lasting more than a year so far and the other lasting three months.
Kaluzny said the beautification commission’s phasing out will be the latest in a series of transformations it has undergone since its inception in 1999 as Brookfield’s recycling committee.
“We talked about recommending to the board not to amend the code to remove it altogether but to maybe have it go dormant by the end of 2026 and not budget a new budget for it until we figure out where it should go and what the board’s thoughts are on moving forward,” she said. “It’s been 30 years. If the reason it was made isn’t a current need, then let’s figure out what the current need is, and then find and recruit new people that are fitting of that need and want to move that piece forward.”
Some projects the commission is now responsible for, like Project N.I.C.E., will be moved fully under village staff’s umbrella moving forward, according to agenda documents. Other responsibilities, like doling out Brookie Awards to businesses to recognize facade improvements, will be discontinued.
“I’ve been talking to [the commissioners] over time, like, ‘Are you going to renew? If you did, what would you want us to be doing?’ I don’t know that anyone has put their finger on what that thing is,” Kaluzny said. “We all enjoy what we’re doing, but is it really advancing the beautification of Brookfield as it was, maybe, when it started? I don’t want to have people volunteering [just] to volunteer. I want to make sure people are feeling good about their time.”
