Park Board Hears from Historic Preservation Commission on Village Green Proposal

Below are links to the Plainfield Township Park District’s meeting of June 10th, 2015. Total run time is roughly 1 hour and 20 minutes. All commissioners except Peter Hurtado attended. Note that the sound of heavy rain pounding on the roof at times makes the recording very difficult to hear. Unfortunately, there’s nothing I’ll do about that! Sorry.

PTPD mtng June 10th 2015 part 1 of 4 (30 mins)

PTPD mtng June 10th 2015 part 2 of 4 (30 mins)

PTPD mtng June 10th 2015 part 3 of 4 (20 mins)

PTPD mtng June 10th 2015 part 4 of 4 (<2 mins)

My take:

The series of presentations from staff continued. Two items presented were the youth basketball and dance programs, which are some of the district’s strongest offerings.

The Plainfield Historic Preservation Commission was represented by HPC Chairman Michael Bortel and architectural historian and HPC commissioner Suzanne Derrick. They addressed the board about the possibility of including the Village Green Park in an expanded downtown historic district.

The gist is that not only would the park qualify for historic district status, but there are a number of homes that ring the park that would qualify, as well. The rules for forming a district say that properties within it have to be contiguous to one another, i.e., you can’t have a district formed with scattered dots of property. It all has to be connected, property to property. The idea is that by adding the Village Green, all those properties immediately adjacent to it that would further qualify to be in the historic district could be included.

If the board does not decide to join in becoming a historic district entity, then the HPC will go another direction and work in other ways to try to bring more of our downtown into historic district status.

Just to mention something else troubling: this is the third time in a row that Peter Hurtado has not shown up to a board meeting (last time he showed up was in March!) and one of at least, to my recollection, a half dozen times in the past 12 months that he’s not shown up. What’s that about? If he can’t or doesn’t want to serve, okay. But don’t just abandon the post and go back on your claim that you want to represent the people in elected office. That’s wrong. In away, that behavior makes more valuable the fact that we are working with a seven member board now, because it allows more depth of perspective and representation to occur, when one man short.

The next regular PTPD meeting is on Wednesday, July 8th. Agendas and meeting packets become available here in the few days leading up to the meeting. Also, currently scheduled for June 24th is a special meeting that will deal exclusively with the appointment to the board of a commissioner to serve the rest of the term left vacant after former Commissioner Silosky’s resignation last month. The portions of that meeting that will be in open session will include the announcement of the appointment and the swearing in of the new commissioner, whose spot will be open to election in spring of 2017.

As always, should you have any questions regarding this content, please feel free to contact me at radical4plainfield@gmail.com or via regular mail at Polito, PO Box 1071, Plainfield, IL 60544.