Letter to the Editor: Expanded HPHS Parking Lot is 'Fundamentally Flawed'

The following letter was written and submitted by J. Paul Forrester.

I write regarding the City Council’s recent and complicit approval of the District’s repugnant plan to take significant and important “buffer” green space for an expanded commercial-scale parking lot that will be lit 6 nights a week to serve the already grossly over-dense HPHS campus. Having attended and participated in the more than 11 City Council and Design Review, Plan, and Transportation Commission meetings involved and having spent dozens of hours in such meetings as well as having read hundreds of pages of related transcript, there are several points that should be made regarding this fundamentally flawed decision. Our community is entitled to much better from our elected representatives.

Important points to be noted include the following:

1. The District initially ignored established Illinois law and only managed to apply for required zoning approvals at the last minute and then subsequently refused to make publicly available the required traffic management plan, thereby effectively truncating the usual and appropriate periods for review and consideration by the City Council and its advisory commissions, as well as the public;

2. The approved plan is not the “best” or even a “good” plan. It is simply the cheapest way to satisfy a myopic insistence by the District on maintaining an unjustified 631 parking spaces;

3. The consulting traffic experts reluctantly and conditionally offered only weak and likely illusory support for the District’s plan;

4. The expanded parking lot will materially and negatively affect the value, use and enjoyment of properties in the vicinity of HPHS and, as a result, violates the explicit related requirements of Highland Park’s zoning code and established legal protections for legislative action like the special use permit at issue in the District’s Planned Development application;

5. The District’s persistent failure to be a “good neighbor” and “partner” by, among other things, refusing to engage in meaningful dialog with HPHS neighbors, deliberately and callously pitting HPHS parents against neighbors, politicizing what is a community-wide issue, and holding a traffic congestion “solution” hostage to approval of the massively expanded parking lot has been effectively rewarded by the City’s approval and the opportunity for meaningful and broad-based community action to improve the chronic and dangerous traffic congestion in and around HPHS has been wantonly wasted by the District and the City; and

6. The District’s plan and the City-required advisory task force lack meaningful traffic improvement goals and required and necessary funding to be effective and, as a result, are vacuous substitutes for actual required measures that might, and that should have been required by the City of the District in order to, improve traffic congestion in and around HPHS.

There is still time to take corrective governmental action to correct this fundamentally flawed decision. Responsible leaders would try to do so. Hopefully, there are some among the current City Council and the Board of District 113.