Parks and Recreation: The Pit

An update on the Fifth Ward School and my Open Meetings Act Complaint regarding the SAP Committee

First, an update on the Fifth Ward School. The District has again fallen behind on their promises regarding this project. Here is the Bid Schedule that Cordogan-Clark presented to the Board in March 2024 (a mere two months ago!). You may notice that the public notice for bidding was to begin on 5/17/2024.

Yet, here we are on 5/23/2024 and if you look at the District’s RFP website or the Cordogan-Clark portal, there are no public jobs listed in Evanston or for District 65. So if public notice was issued, it was not very public. However, the District did vote on paperwork to make Cordogan-Clark the construction manager on the project (you can see their costs in that document).

One thing that caught my attention; the bidding and work schedule is staggered. I’ve spoken with multiple folks in the construction business who have suggested that this is high-risk idea. Consider what could happen:

1. Board bids out work for demo and ground improvements, starts work

2. Board bids out work for foundations and structural steel, starts work

3. Board bids out work for construction and interior, but the bids come in too high and cannot finish with the $44m they have available, which means they’d have to go to the voters and ask for a referendum.¹

In the best case the board will have to make sacrifices involving the interior finishes, dump the LEED status, and end up with a very bare bones school. In the worst case, the Fifth Ward gets their very own “Pit” from Parks and Rec while the Board has to ask the voters for more money. ²

Yet, the Board plans to continue with a naming committee to present at the 6/10/2024 meeting to name the building and select a mascot. The District did the invisible building awards thing last June, so maybe they’re going to do it again.

To quote Mouse Rat,

The pit
I fell in it, the pit
You fell in it, the pit
We all were in that pit

Fruit of the Poisonous Tree

Speaking of committees, I wrote about this yesterday and I am going to highlight this again. I went through the full set of SAP Committee Minutes. I now strongly argue that the Board used the SAP committee to circumvent the Open Meetings Act and outsource the hard conversations to a non-transparent public body, which they are a member of. I’m sending a complaint over to the IL Attorney General’s Public Access counselor today, and you can read my (in-progress) draft if you’re bored.

Consider the following:

• Only two of the meetings have a list of actual attendees: 8/12/2021 and 10/21/2021. Attendance in all other meetings is unknown.

• In both cases above, three active board members (at the time) were listed as present (Anya Tanyavutti, Marquise Weatherspoon, and Sergio Hernandez). For District 65, 3 members being present constitutes a meeting under the Open Meetings Act.

• According to the District records, the SAP Committee contained a variety of other elected officials in Evanston, including;

  • Bobby Burns, the Evanston 5th ward alderman elected in 2021

  • Tom Suffredin, the Evanston 6th ward alderman elected in 2019³

  • Stephanie Mendoza, the Evanston City Clerk elected in 2021

• At least one meeting had some pretty serious discussions about terminating Bessie Rhodes and it got moved to the parking lot, whatever that means: 4/25/2023.

• The Committee hired consultants to work on the project, adding up to almost $150,000. You can see the output of the consultants in these minutes: Sagebird: 8/12/2021, TregoEd: 3/21/2023 - This is important because spending public funds is a key determiner if a committee is a “public body” under the law.

In general, these meeting minutes are not very good. It’s not clear who attended what meetings, what exactly they discussed, or how they got to any of the decisions they made and presented to the Board. If you find anything notable in the minutes, please leave a comment.

1. Which they should’ve done to begin with!

2. Those of us in the 3rd Ward may remember we had our very own pit at Main and Chicago for about a decade after they knocked down the old building there and the economy tanked in 2007. Eventually the pit was filled in and became a place where people let their dogs poop, which was even worse. Thankfully, now it’s a real building.

3. He is listed as being on the committee on the 8/12/2021 meeting and nowhere else.