Forest Preserve Commission Meeting March 8, 2012

The meeting was well attended and started on time. One of the first orders of business was to vote to acquire land that is surrounded on 3 sides by existing Forest Preserve and which is the home to Commissioner Timothy Schneider's mother. She is 89 years old and is in poor health, and has resided in the home for over 62 years. Commissioner Schneider recused himself from the vote and all ethical considerations appear to have been taken properly. Mrs. Schneider will be able to live in the home indefinitely in a lease-back arrangement -- which has been done in the past with other elderly sellers as well. The purchase of this land is an example of the Board carrying out a land acquisition strategy which was articulated in their current budget plan, while cutting back on other expenditures the hope is to take advantage of a down market in order make sensible land purchases.

Amid other routine business, the Commission also accepted a report chronicling the year, and celebrating 10 years of ecological restoration work at the Miami Woods and Prairie. Stewards Kent and Jerry Fuller have made a practice of document the efforts of hundreds of volunteers spending thousands of hours in that area, and they have also reported on the effects of this work. Stewardship and restoraton work have large acknowledged benefits to our ecological systems as well as the quality of life but are rarely documented in this way. The Commission thanked and congratulated them for all their work and Commmissioner Suffredin noted the great diversity of people who are involved as volunteers, and the important value contributed by the workers.

The last major item of business was the authorization for Superintendent Arnold Randall to enter into an Intergovernmental Agreement with the Public Building Commission of Chicago for the purpose of managing the assessment of the existing condition of the roughly 152 buildings owned by the District. No inventory or assessment has been done in recent memory and this work will help the District identify and prioritize capital investment in the future. The Public Building Commission of Chicago was created in 1956 for the purpose of managing capital programs and projects for governmental agencies in Chicago and Cook County, so it is the appropriate entity to do this work for the Forest Preserve District. The contract is not to exceed $300,000 and the work is to be complete by March 30, 2013.