New VMA election slate awaits 
community's reaction

Analysis
By ERIC LINDEN

With a selection committee of the Oak Park political group the Village
Manager Association announcing a slate for village hall elections next
April, Oak Park observers now are waiting for a reaction from residents.

Will the religious right in the village oppose the slating as village
president of openly lesbian Village Trustee Joanne Trapani as they
opposed her slating and election to the village board four years ago?

How will the Oak Park business community react to the passing over in
presidential slating of Village Trustee Rick Kuner, a staunch business
ally?

How will developers react to the slating as a village trustee candidate
of Oak Park Township Assessor Galen Gockel, who is on record as siding
with some development opposition expressed by local groups of residents?

Will there be any reaction--and does it matter--that for the second time
in the last three village hall elections only whites were slated for
village offices by the VMA selection committee?

Will, as is happening in elementary school board elections that also
will be held next April, an opposition slate to the establishment
present itself?

Or will Oak Park residents collectively yawn as they did in the village
board election two years ago, and leave the VMA slate unopposed for
election?

The VMA selection committee of Oak Park residents--which includes some
members of the political group and some who are not VMA members--has
been meeting weekly on Sundays since September in preparation for
choosing a slate of candidates for offices now held by Village President
Barbara Furlong, Village Clerk Sandra Sokol and Village Trustees Gus
Kostopulos, Kuner and Trapani--whose terms are expiring in April 2001.

As first reported by oak-park-journal.com last night, the committee at
about 10 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 10 announced the following slate:

* Trapani, who was elected in 1997 and at that time became the only
openly gay elected official in Illinois. On the board, she currently
chairs the Public Safety Committee, which oversees policies for the
police and fire departments. And she works full-time as a Human Rights
investigator with Cook County government.

* Diana Carpenter, who has been chief of the Austin Boulevard Alliance,
a volunteer group of residents that works to strengthen the area on and
around Oak Park's eastern border with Chicago's Austin community and
also to maintain and improve ties between residents of Oak Park and
Austin who live in the Austin Boulevard area.

* Gockel, who has had a lengthy career of public service in Oak Park,
dating back more than 30 years. He began serving eight years on the Oak
Park District 97 Elementary School Board in the 1970s. Since 1993,
Gockel has been the elected township assessor, a paid position in which
he assists residents with various property tax issues, problems and
questions. Gockel this year declined to seek another four-year term as
assessor, and he had bee preparing for a run as village president by,
among other things, forming alliances with local citizen groups and by
commenting on various public issues in Oak Park.

* Kostopulos, who has served on the village board since being elected in
1997. An architect with a private practice in Downtown Oak Park,
Kostopulos previously served a long-time stint as a member of the board
of the Oak Park Residence Corporation and Housing Authority, two
agencies that work in various ways to improve housing conditions in Oak
Park.

* Sokol, who has been village clerk since being elected in 1993.
Previously, she worked in the appointed post of community rep in village
hall's Community Relations Department, which works to address
neighborhood relations and to enforce Oak Park's Fair Housing Ordinance,
among other duties. Sokol is married to University of Illinois-Chicago
professor David Sokol, who also is a former Oak Park village trustee.

That slate now is to be ratified by the full VMA membership. At a
meeting on Wednesday, Dec. 27, the political group is to vote on whether
or not to approve the recommended slate, which the VMA membership then
would campaign to elect next April. In its history of nearly 50 years in
Oak Park, the VMA selection committee's slate always has been ratified
by the VMA members, but a rejection is always possible.

The full-time, paid village clerk is the secretariat of village
government and runs licensing and other clerical functions at village
hall. The president and trustee posts, meanwhile, are designed to be
part-time and pay token remuneration of $900 per month for the village
president and $600 per month for village trustees.

Whoever is elected to the seven-member village board next year will join
three holdover village trustees who were elected in 1999 and whose terms
will expire in April 2003. Continuing to serve on the village board are
Barbara Ebner, another former member of the Housing Authority-Residence
Corporation board; William L. (J.J.) Turner, who formerly served as an
elected member of the Oak Park and River Forest High School board; and
Carolyn Hodge-West, who chairs the village board's economic development
committee. Turner and Hodge-West are African American, while Ebner and
the others slated in the VMA's process are whites.

Passed over for slating in this election, according to sources in the
in the VMA, were a sitting village trustee, at least one African
American resident, two former village trustees and a former chairman of
the Community Relations Commission who has had public differences in the
last year with Furlong. Those passed over included, according to the
VMA:

* William Fillmore, who was elected to the village board in YEAR and
served four years. An executive with the Salvation Army office in
Chicago, Fillmore currently writes an opinion column in the Oak Leaves
newspaper that is published by the Pioneer Press chain and circulated in
Oak Park. Reportedly, Fillmore was the only African American to
interview for VMA slating and was a late addition to the slating
process.

* Kuner, who was elected to the village board in 1997 and took a lead on
various housing issues before the board. Some village hall observers
have believed he had been Furlong's personal choice to succeed her as
president. Kuner had wanted to be slated for village president by the
VMA selection committee and it is not unique in VMA selection history
for a sitting trustee to be passed over for the top spot on the village
board.

* Robert Milstein, who was not reappointed by Furlong this year when his
post expired as a member of the Community Relations Commission, a
volunteer panel of Oak Park residents. Milstein was not reappointed by
Furlong, which is her choice, after he criticized the village president
and village government in a series of commentaries published in Oak Park
newspapers.

* John Troelstrup, who was elected a village trustee in 1993 and served
on the village board until 1997. An attorney in private practice in
Downtown Oak Park, Troelstrup declined to run for re-election in 1997
and instead launched an unsuccessful election campaign for village
president, making a rare independent bid against the VMA slate. Furlong
defeated Troelstrup in the 1997 election by a margin of more than a 2-1
margin.

Contrary to what was reported in a story on Dec. 11, the Oak Park
Village Manager Association political group did not release or comment
on the prospective village board candidates who appeared before the VMA
candidate selection committee. There was a misunderstanding, and Eric
Linden regrets the error.