‘Friction’ over former mental health center site leads to fireworks between Village, Tinley Park-Park District
Tinley Park’s plan to create new Independence Day event causes park district to cancel its own event despite hosting it for 4 decades
What you need to know: Amidst continuing tension between the Village of Tinley Park and the Tinley Park-Park District over the possibility to acquire the 280 acres of land located at the site of abandoned Tinley Park Mental Health Center, Village officials approved putting on a fireworks display on July 3 and ending its partnership with the park district regarding the Fourth of July celebration. As a result, park district officials have canceled their annual Independence Day celebration after four decades at McCarthy Park.
TINLEY PARK, Ill. — This July 3, that loud boom you hear outside your window may not be the thunderous clap of a firework bursting colorfully in the night sky. Instead, it may be the destruction of a decadeslong partnership between two governmental agencies that until recently had worked together to put on the annual Independence Day celebration at McCarthy Park.
The culprit may be the 280 acres or so of land located at the site of the abandoned Tinley Park Mental Health Center, which both the Village of Tinley Park and the Tinley Park-Park District are interested in acquiring from the State of Illinois.
Regardless of the reason, the Village of Tinley Park announced its intention to strike out on its own for the Fourth of July during the Tuesday, Jan. 17 Village Board of Trustees meeting. Board members voted 5-1 to approve a $50,000 contract with Mad Bomber, an Indiana-based company, for a July 3 fireworks display at the 80th Avenue train station.
Alongside, the fireworks, the Village intends to host a picnic-style event — starting at 5:30 p.m. — with food vendors, contests, games, bounce houses for children and other kid-friendly activities, and live music. As such, Village Manager Pat Carr told trustees during the meeting that the Village would not be partnering with the Tinley Park-Park District on Fourth of July events this year.
“We’re doing our own event,” he said. “It’s to help lead up to all the events that we’re going to be having here in the coming years. We’re going to handle it ourselves.”
That admission led to Trustee Diane Galante — the lone board member to vote against the fireworks contract — to ask why the Village was doing its own thing instead of continuing to aid the park district’s event.
“Regardless of if the park district pays for it or we pay it, the taxpayers pay it,” she said. “We’re one community. Creating our own Fourth of July [event] when we already have a beautiful [event from the park district], I don’t understand that.”
Galante said the Village’s decision would “split the community” and wanted to know how much the event would cost the Village in total — not just the cost of the fireworks.
But Mayor Michael Glotz countered by stating he believed the decision was about making the event safer for residents. He said traffic complaints have come in over the years, as well as issues related to ambulances or police cars getting through if emergencies occur and the closure of 80th Avenue for most of the day.
“The complaints that have come to [the police] have been excessive constantly,” Glotz said. “Moving it to the 80th Avenue train station … no streets are blocked in the Village of Tinley Park, and all of the police and the firemen that are there will be at the event for the Village. There is no difference. It’s the same thing, other than us picking up that small difference for the fireworks. We are not inconveniencing the entire Village of Tinley Park to shut down 80th Avenue.
“I think it was a great idea, thinking outside of the box, from our staff and marketing department.”
Glotz also said it was his belief that by the Village putting on the event on July 3, the park district would likely forgo fireworks on the Fourth of July.
He was proven right, as the park district issued a statement on Friday, Jan. 20, announcing its plan to cancel its Fourth of July activities “in light of the Village of Tinley Park’s recent decision to create a duplicate firework show the day prior on July 3.”
“For over 40 years, the park district has hosted this event, which the community has come to expect and enjoy,” the statement read. “The Village’s decision forced the park district to make the difficult decision to cancel its event in order to save taxpayer dollars instead of paying for two duplicate firework shows.”
Moving in opposite directions
If it was not for the publicly available documents shared on the Village’s website in advance of board meetings, Tinley Park-Park District Executive Director Shawn Roby would have been in the dark about the Village’s plans for the Fourth of July.
In an interview with Richard Free Press on Friday, Jan. 20, Roby said no one from the Village reached out to him or other park district staff to inform them of the Village’s plans to run its own Independence Day celebration. The closest thing Roby said he got was a short message in early January from Carr that simply stated that fireworks would be discussed at the Jan. 17 Village Board meeting.
“We were supposed to sign a new three-year deal,” Roby said of the fireworks. “Our cost of fireworks this year was about $31,000. It’s been a beautiful show, with lots of compliments over the years. We ramped up the next couple years, up to about $34,000. But we’ve always split that cost with the Village, and then the Village has always handled the safety aspect — the EMA, the police, the fire — [while] the park district always handled the bands, the sound stage and the event staff itself. When you start to put the costs down on paper, it probably evened out.”
But Roby said when he looked at the materials posted to the Village’s website for the Jan. 17 meeting, he saw the Village intended to award a contract for its own fireworks display and had plans for a different Fourth of July event.
Roby tuned into the board meeting to learn more about those plans.
“That was the first we ever heard of it,” he said. “And we were shocked to hear about safety issues [brought up during the meeting], because we did a debriefing [with the Village] in September 2022 as we do each year. Even in the leadup to last year’s fireworks show, we had multiple meetings with the Village. I’ve never been told anything about safety or issues like that.”
Roby also disputed the notion that there were issues with closing part of 80th Avenue, as he said that was not a request that came from the park district but rather the police department.
The next day, on Jan. 18, the Tinley Park-Park District’s Board of Commissioners met and decided to cancel nearly all the park district’s July 4 events, according to Roby.
“We don’t want to waste taxpayer dollars,” he said. “Unfortunately, as we found out on [Jan. 17], they are duplicating an event — with no knowledge to us. We have been partnering with them on this for years. Unfortunately, it fell apart.”
While the park district’s fireworks contract had yet to be negotiated — meaning no money was spent on that — there will be some costs related to entertainment acts and other vendors that the park district will now have to eat or redirect to other events.
“We did sign the band, and I think the park district is going to reconsider using the band for [another event],” Roby said. “Anything else, we are in that process now, because this was just thrust on us on [Jan. 17].”
In the interim, only one aspect of the park district’s Fourth of July plans is expected to move forward — the Stars & Stripes 5K race. However, the timing of that may have to change due to other complications with the Village, Roby said.
“If they are having their event on July 3, running our race on July 4 doesn’t make sense, because people will be out so late the night before,” Roby said. “We are going to try to get a permit for the July 4 race, but instead for Saturday, July 1.”
But he said the park district has had problems securing a permit for its annual Running o’ the Green 8K, which was initially planned to go the day of the Tinley Park Irish Parade.
“[The Village] rejected the date, citing that they have manpower issues,” Roby said. “But we’ve been running that race the day of the Irish Parade for 10-plus years. So, we’ve been told we can have a different date, but we have to resubmit our paperwork. But I don’t have any confirmation on it. I’m concerned that we may have the same problem with the Fourth of July [race].”
Meanwhile, the response from the Village is that the new Fourth of July event is being done to ensure a safer, more efficient event.
Carr, who also was interviewed by Richard Free Press on Jan. 20, said the park district’s event had “evolved to a very large celebration” after 40 years.
“In the past few years, with active shooters, it has made all of these events more complex for us to not only staff but also to control,” said Carr, who noted the mass shooting in Highland Park on the Fourth of July last year — as well as a subsequent threat called into Tinley Park police later that same day — factored into the Village’s decision to want to change the event site.
“About [90 minutes] before it opened up, we got a call — a threat of a person who was going to shoot up the [Fourth of July event] in Tinley Park. We immediately dropped everything and chased this person down to where they lived. The person was arrested, and it ended up being a hoax. But we were within minutes of canceling the fireworks last year because of that. What that did was cause our public safety team to try to rethink how we can control this better in an event like that.”
—Tinley Park Village Manager Pat Carr on how a threat called into Tinley Park on July 4, 2022, factored into the decision to change event sites in 2023
Carr said Village staff came up with some ideas on how to change certain events to make them safer and tested them out during the Village’s Octoberfest and the winter holiday parade.
“It worked extremely well,” Carr said. “This is about safety and efficiency, but that is unfortunately being lost in the message of the mental health center. It is unfortunate because communication channels are a bit broken down here. But [Roby] and I enjoy a good relationship, and [the Village is] doing this for the safety and efficiency of the residents of Tinley Park.”
‘Friction’ stemming from the Tinley Park Mental Health Center
The drama unfolding over the Fourth of July can be traced back at least to this past November, when Village officials learned the park district informed the State of Illinois of its interest in acquiring the abandoned mental health center site along 183rd Street and Harlem Avenue.
The move, as Richard Free Press reported at the time, “blindsided” Village officials. During a Village Board meeting, Glotz went so far as to say the park district’s decision to seek the land was “disappointing” and that “they took it political.”
The former mental health center site is made up of about 45 structures. The site has underground tunnels, 10 underground fuel storage tanks, five above ground storage tanks, three landfills, 22 state-owned transformers and a lime pit.
A 2014 hazardous materials survey by Tetra Tech found as many as 95 drums of hazardous materials on the site, with hundreds of more containers filled with hazardous materials and buildings filled with asbestos. The consulting and engineering firm estimated that it would cost approximately $12.4 million to remediate the site.
A December 2019 inspection by the Illinois Environmental Protection found that “several environmental areas of concern were observed and noted by the Agency’s inspectors. The inspection report stated that the inspectors did not enter most of the buildings because of “the presence of asbestos containing material” or because of visible black mold. But in the water treatment plant building, an inspector equipped with a respirator was able to observe three pallets of aluminum sulfate, broken bags of potash, four dozen cans of paint thinner and old fluorescent bulbs still installed in the ceiling. Inspectors also reported finding “rolled up comforters and other bedding in the tunnel that suggested the tunnel has been used as a shelter by vagrants.”
In February 2020, former U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush asked the U.S. EPA to take over the remediation of the site. In May 2021, Glotz held a press conference near the site asking the State of Illinois to either clean it up or sell the land. Both requests went unanswered.
Then, in February 2022, the Village thought it had a deal completed with the State that would result in the land being purchased by Tinley Park. But that evaporated when state lawmakers failed to introduce it to the General Assembly in the spring.
Still, Village officials kept vigorously pursuing the site — which is why the park district’s actions in November were so upsetting to some Tinley Park officials.
While Roby did not want to speculate if there was tension between the park district and the Village over the possible mental health center site acquisition, he did say issues have been sprouting up since the park district’s interest became public.
“What I will tell you is that the Fourth of July is not the only thing that has recently happened that you might be able to draw conclusions from,” Roby said. “As an example, we have a fuel agreement where our fuel usage and the Village’s fuel usage were put together to buy fuel futures contracts. So, you lock your gas price in for 12 months. It is a great idea, and it is a great cost savings to the town.
“We were provided a letter in December from the Village indicating they were canceling our agreement with them, effective at the end of [that] month.”
Roby said it was an annual agreement, and the park district was not invited to participate in the next one.
“Maybe they are not doing it [anymore],” Roby said. “I don’t know the answer to that.”
He also said a handshake agreement with the Village to pay for road salt — which had been in place since 2014 or so — was ended.
“All of this has transpired in the recent months,” Roby said.
Carr confirmed that the park district’s agreement with the Village on the fuel had ended. But he said it was because the park district’s consumption had caused the Village to go over its limits, leading to higher costs.
“It’s based on the amount of gallons that we use, and if we go over that amount, it kicks into the market rate,” Carr said. “With the park district being lumped onto that, we were going over our allotted rate, forcing us to go into a market rate. This was a cost-savings strategy to take the park district out and have it to ourselves. Of course, that will cause friction because it will try to be paralleled with the mental health center property issue.”
Carr did admit, however, that there is “friction going back and forth as it relates to communication [with the park district] regarding the mental health property.”
“But these are two separate items,” he said.
Carr also said planning for the Village-led Fourth of July event began soon after the 2022 celebration. So, why did Village officials decide not to reach out to the park district to let it know of the change.
“First and foremost, it’s our event,” Carr said. “We were doing the planning for it happening on our property and funding the event [ourselves]. We did not intend to utilize the park district in that aspect of it. [Now that] we came up with the final plan and we had [that ready], we encourage the park district to collaborate with us for that event. But this is our event. We have the manpower and the facilities to plan for it — unlike the park district that utilized us to do that planning for them.”
A growing divide
It has become clear that the Village of Tinley Park and the Tinley Park-Park District are at odds over the mental health center property, and that the divide has grown so large it is swallowing up other partnerships and events.
“I don’t know if the park district is going to get involved in the Fourth of July any longer,” Roby said. “If [the Village] is taking it over and moving it from the location it has always been, there is going to be a fairly significant number of residents who are going to be completely dismayed by the loss of the show. You have six or seven neighborhoods over [by McCarthy Park] that are going to lose all that. It’s going to be difficult.
“When you take away an event, that is the worst thing you can ever do — because once an event leaves, it is hard to get back.”
Where does that leave residents who are becoming frustrated by the government agencies squabbling over who should run what events or deciding who should own a large, contaminated, dangerous site? What would it take to get both sides back on the same page — doing the work of the people safely, cost-effectively, and efficiently?
“As public servants, our priority is the safety of our residents,” Carr said. “As the working part of the Village, that is what we are tasked with — providing a safe venue, a safe event. We know we are going to get criticized as public servants. That’s our job. But at the end of the day, we are doing those jobs to keep the residents safe and put on a good event for them. And, hopefully, some people will walk away from it having enjoyed the event that they were at. That’s what our job is as public servants and workers of the Village.”
It is a sentiment that Roby shares.
“At the end of the day, ultimately, we work for the taxpayers, and we want to save the taxpayers wherever we can,” Roby said. “As a taxpayer myself in town, everybody wants their government agencies to work together.
“As a resident here, I’m sad that this is the case that we are unable to work together. The park district has multiple times now since the announcement of our interest in the mental health site attempted to meet. That has been rejected twice. We attempted to have these discussions long before we even got to this point.”
Roby said the park board “would happily work with the Village to solve these problems.”
“Unfortunately, I don’t know that we are necessarily getting reciprocal effort,” he said.
But Carr said he still has an open line of communication with Roby.
“From one administrator to another, that conversation is still there,” Carr said. “He and I will still continue to talk and discuss and figure out how we can collaborate with each other.”
Time will tell if the two agencies move past their issues and resume working together in the best interests of the taxpayers — or if the explosions in the sky on the Fourth of July are merely the first salvo in an ongoing feud.
Editor’s Note: At the time of publication, Richard Free Press had several Freedom of Information Act requests out to the Village of Tinley Park and the Tinley Park-Park District regarding communication between the entities, complaints to the police about previous Fourth of July events at McCarthy Park, contract costs for fireworks displays in past years, and discussions about acquiring the abandoned Tinley Park Mental Health Center site from the state. Richard Free Press is still actively reporting on this story, and updates will come once more information is available.