When the deal for retirement and rental housing in downtown Lombard fell apart two weeks ago, it was particularly galling to Village President Richard Arnold.
His only promise in his 1985 campaign for mayor was to solve the nagging, expensive problem of what to do with the old village hall and vacant Lincoln Elementary School. He had been jubilant Dec. 19, when the contract was awarded –and at a better price than expected.
A retired official of Lombard Elementary School District 44, Arnold once had been principal of Lincoln.
”He accomplished this in less than a year,” said Lorraine Gerhardt, village clerk. ”An amazing thing. It gave the whole village board a sense of real fulfillment and accomplishment.”
Arnold, who doesn`t like the enmities among his six trustees to spill over into public, had worked hard behind the scenes to get the board to agree in December to accept from among four bids on the property the one that he favored.
There is little love between some of the trustees, and Arnold winces when they go at each other.
Indeed, after it was reported that the original deal had unraveled, some trustees started pointing fingers at each other.
In early February, less than two months after Arnold and the board thought they had the right developer and the right project to give downtown Lombard a shot in the arm, the developer, Browning Property Co. of Dallas, said it couldn`t fulfill its part of the deal.
The board was informed in a closed meeting Feb. 6 that Browning wanted out but would assign the contract to whomever the village designated. A former Browning executive who had a big hand in winning the contract, William Molleck, asked to take it over. His former boss, John McQuade, also gone from Browning, jumped into the race, trying to get the contract for himself and a partner, Inland National Development Corp., Oak Brook, a major Chicago apartment manager and builder.
Village officials made a considerable effort to see that no one learned of the Browning flipflop until new bidders were lined up and checked out. A financial check on Browning had not been done. This time they wanted no slip- up.
When the story was published, officials angrily accused each other of leaking it to the press.
Gerhardt, a 40-year resident and thrice-elected village clerk, said:
”For 20 to 25 years, various village boards have made attempts to develop some sort of program that would upgrade downtown Lombard.
”Each attempt always was fraught with dissension as to what the business people and citizens wanted. Inevitably it just dissolved.
”In the 1978 attempt, it turned out that all the business people wanted was new sidewalks. So the village put in new sidewalks.”
”Each new board has come in with enthusiasm. Each failed,” Gerhardt said.
That, she said, is why Arnold experienced such frustration and why he moved so quickly to push through a new deal last Thursday night. The vote was 7-0. There was no discussion, except for Trustee Peter J. Davis Jr.`s motion to reassign the contract to Molleck`s firm because this would give the project ”continuity.”
As was the case in December, the work had been done in closed sessions.
Paul Kufrin Jr., who was a trustee for six years and lost to Arnold in a three-way race for village president last year, said: ”I notice that Davis had his motion all prepared and read from a sheet. This indicates that too much of this is going on behind closed doors.”
Kufrin said that if the board he served on had not opposed a tax increment financing (TIF) plan for the old Village Hall-Lincoln School sites, the property ”would have been given away and the present board would not have been able to bring in these dollars.” He was speaking of the $880,000 offered by Browning.
Mardyth Pollard, former two-term mayor and one-term clerk, said, ”We spent close to two years on the TIF proposal. There was a lot of
misinformation about TIF and the business people started arguing among themselves. That blew it up.”
She said the board withdrew the plan at the request of Downtown Lombard Unlimited, a business group.
”Seven years ago a mall concept for downtown died,” Pollard said.
”I firmly believe, and many professionals tell us, that before you can do anything to upgrade the business aspect you have to bring in bodies to shop in them. You definitely have to get the housing there.”
In 1980 Lombard built a $2.5 million Civic Center, or village hall, on a campus it already owned roughly in the center of the village.
It did that after an architectural study on remodeling and enlarging the existing Village Hall, at 48 N. Park Ave., stated that the costs would be roughly equal to those for a new one, according to Eileen Moeller, village financial officer.
Sales tax revenue from Yorktown Center was used for the new building and the police station nearby, with about $4 million poured into the campus. The Public Works Departmebnt has been there since 1973, at the south end, and a pumping station with twin reservoirs is in the middle.
The new Village Hall has a large auditorium/village board room and a large courtroom, now vacant because of resident objections to all the traffic that was produced when court sessions were held there.
The old Village Hall building has been an albatross, sitting on land that produced no tax revenue. It requires maintenance and is opened just once a year for a Halloween horror house. The school also eats up tax money and produces none.
