Northbrook decision: follow the money
Former Northbrook Village President Gene Marks, left, rejected by voters 12 years ago, wants back in. Ana Mendez McGuinnes, Christopher Lay and Robert Burns, left to right, are his village board slate.
“Where does Gene want me to send the money?” the developer asked me.
Dale Scheck was seeking permits to build at an abandoned Northbrook cemetery, but he got his telephone numbers mixed up. He called me, instead of calling the man handling a re-election fundraiser of then-Northbrook Village President Gene Marks.
I was then working as a reporter for a minor metropolitan newspaper, looking into the political contributions being made to Marks’ 2009 campaign. I had earlier talked to Scheck, interested in his thoughts on the ethics of a political contribution made to a government official soon to make decisions affecting his interests. Scheck insisted he was innocently donating only because “I’ve known Gene Marks for years.”
I documented his and several other questionable donations to Marks, who lost.
Marks, with a new three-person trustee slate, is running again in the April 6 election. He does not seem to have changed his fundraising etiquette much.
This time around, Colliers International/Chicago, the firm that controls the 127-acre Green Acres Country Club, the biggest piece of property up for development in Northbrook in decades, is well-represented on Marks’ United4Northbrook donor list. Six company principals, an executive vice president and the COO each gave $1,000.
The rest of Marks’ haul is being provided by others in the realty and construction business.
So his slate’s campaign is being funded largely by the people behind a project so big that it could redefine Northbrook.
What could go wrong?
Marks seems to believe that development projects are almost always positive as long as they’re impressive. During his actual term as village president, he staunchly supported the obviously shifty developers behind the obscenely overstuffed old Center of North Shore shopping center proposal. His fealty continued after it had become clear to nearly every other public official able to walk and chew gum at the same time that the team led by Ed Renko was energetically robbing Peter to pay Paul to make the project look like it was financed.
After that scheme officially collapsed, the five model citizens most closely involved in it wound up pleading guilty to fraud in federal court.
Currently, downtown Northbrook’s Meadow Shopping Plaza is up for sale. It will likely be purchased by someone eager to tear it down and build something more remunerative. It would be big fun to watch Marks’ new gang of four help decide what that would be like. Maybe Renko is available to help out.
Despite getting calls from people on both sides of Northbrook’s divide to write about Northbrook’s election, I opted to let the four local, or kind-of-local, newspapers do their thing. Over the weekend, I changed my mind.
That happened when I saw an old story of mine twisted into a pretty bow to further the Marks slate’s cause.
The story was linked to a Facebook post from his crew that referred to 2016 “Plans to build a huge development at the corner of Techny and Shermer. Plans that would require zoning changes that would dramatically affect the entire neighborhood. Zoning changes that put every residential street in Northbrook at risk. These plans were greenlighted by the Northbrook government without resident input. And this happened under the watch of the current three Northbrook Caucus candidates; Kathryn Ciesla, Muriel Collison, and Dan Pepoon,” running with newcomer Joy Ebhomielen.
“We fought for two long years against this proposal and eventually it was voted down.”
The opponents of the Heritage Woods assisted living project made a lot of noise, and I admit helping to amplify that. They were good copy. But Heritage Woods was never “greenlighted.”
It never had a chance.
The defeated developer whined about the opposition after his 2017 rejection. But he had refused to reduce the size of the building, insisting 97,000 square feet were necessary to make it economically feasible to provide 25 percent affordable units. Northbrook’s Plan Commission and Village Board both unanimously voted against allowing that in a single-family block.
The opponents, including one of Marks’ running mates, Chris Lay, didn’t “Save Northbrook” as their PR motto has always maintained. They could have sent a polite letter to the village and then put their feet up. Northbrook government, for good or ill, had their backs.
Northbrook’s village board, which often operated as if it were populated by the illegitimate children of Calvin Coolidge, went progressive in the election of 2019. The trustees soon embarked on an exhaustive and boring process to create an affordable housing code, so bigger developments might include a few cheaper units.
Such an ordinance, the trustees asserted, should be seen as inevitable, because the village’s affordable housing segment, at 5.7%, is unconscionably small, according to the State of Illinois.
Marks says he wants to repeal the ordinance, and let voters decide on affordable housing by referendum. He maintains that the code was installed sneakily, somehow.
Maybe he doesn’t understand Zoom.
He also maintains that it’s anti-senior citizen, because it doesn’t especially favor old-people housing. This is odd, because there are enough seniors already living in Northbrook to make it demographically one of the oldest burgs in Illinois.
And whatever affordable housing is created shouldn’t be spread out in the community, he says, but concentrated in one place. Nobody who understands affordable housing thinks that’s a hot idea.
He sounds like he’s confusing affordable housing with public housing. He also sounds like Donald Trump.
It seems that Marks and his new merry band have a lot in common with Trump. They seem deluded about their own importance, and the value of letting businesses always have their own way in everything. They make cockamamie claims about their opponents because like Trump, they appreciate what Mark Twain once said: A lie will fly around the whole world while the truth is getting its boots on.
Marks’ group maintains the village is going to hell because government doesn’t push development enough. The truth is that Northbrook is in good fiscal shape even with the pandemic, because of a long-fostered balance of industrial, retail and residential taxes that are the envy of other suburbs.
Money is not Northbrook’s big problem. But people who are very concerned about money seem to see it everywhere.
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Thank you Irv for your honest and enlightening article about the developers and Northbrook politics. They are not interested in anything other than their projects so it is up to our village trustees to protect our homes and businesses as they did by rejecting the Techny/Shermer project.
We must elect officials whose decisions will positively impact our town and not their wallets.
You are wrong about Heritage Woods. It definitely would have been built without massive residential opposition. The developer spent $300,000 trying to get the project approved. Why would the trustees have encouraged him to keep pursuing the project and waste all that money if it was doomed from the start? The first time the plan was presented to the trustees, they were intrigued by the idea and sent it to the Plan Commission. Why would they have done that if they didn't think it was a good idea? Of course the developer was angry. He himself said that it was all of the community opposition that defeated the project.