A Northbrook trustee leaving the Village Board after three terms said that he won’t miss the intensity of neighborhood concerns over planned developments in their area.
“Twelve years of NIMBY was enough,” Todd Heller said in a recent interview, referring to “not in my backyard” issues. “Much of what you see as a board member is people coming in and expressing their opinion of how something will affect their little corner of the world. That was the reason I wasn’t going to run again. I had had enough of that.”
Heller had said in 2016 that he was conflicted about running, then decided to go ahead and submit his name to the Northbrook Caucus slate-makers for a fourth term. After a tie with Community Relations Commission Member Jason Han at the first, caucus committee, level, he was defeated in a vote of the full caucus. Han, former Northbrook Plan Commission member Muriel Collison, and 8-year incumbent Kathryn Ciesla were sworn in as trustees Tuesday.
As Heller left the dais, so did another 12-year trustee, Michael Scolaro. Scolaro said in a recent interview that the demands of his job had burgeoned, and he no longer had time to devote to Village Board work. But Scolaro, 58, said he also came to the conclusion that the board was aging, stocked with trustees who had served for years. Three members were older than he and Trustee Bob Israel.
“I realized it was the end when Kathryn asked a question that none of the rest of us even thought of,” he said. Ciesla – more than 10 years younger than he – had asked about the possibility of electric car-charging stations at the big Northshore 770 mixed use development, then in the planning stages. The idea was rejected, but that wasn’t the point, he said.
“We live in a different world, where the preferred form of transportation is Uber or Lyft, and we’re constantly confronted with new technology,” he said. “The board needs to lead that, not follow it.”
As he and Heller, 63, leave, the voters have replaced them with younger representatives, including Han, who is 36, and Collison, 40.
Heller said last year, when deciding whether or not to run, that he, too, was concerned about whether it was time for a replacement. But as his time on the board came to an end, he said, “I get it. We should have new people come in. I do believe that that’s appropriate. What I don’t believe is that someone who has lots of experience, because they’re older, should be booted out, or should get out.”
Heller served for a decade on the Northbrook School District 27 Board before moving on to the Village Board. He said despite his distaste for NIMBY issues, he appreciates his constituency in Northbrook, “a wonderful little corner of the world,” he said.
“I’m knowledgeable, and I really care, and I’m good at public service,” he said. “There ought to be some way of using that.”
He said one way he might be used in the future was to help with village labor negotiations. He recently finished leading talks that resulted in a seven-year pact with public works employees. He said that the key was developing an atmosphere of trust on both sides.
“This is the real work of the Village Board,” he said, referring also to his own forte, public works and safety. “You turn on the faucet, and you expect there to be water.”
Scolaro’s forte had been economics. As the eight-year chairman of the board’s finance committee, the asset banker started the board planning two years ahead instead of one, 22-year Trustee A.C. Buehler said.
Buehler, at a May 9 Board meeting, Scolaro’s last, also credited Scolaro for getting a handle on major purchases by “taking the CIP (Capital Improvement Plan) tool which we had been looking at as a long-term shot-in-the-dark, a what-are-we-going-to-do-in-the-next-ten-years type of thing … and turning it into one of the long-term primary budgeting tools. I don’t think anyone else could have pulled it off.”
Buehler also praised Heller as a consensus-builder. But Heller himself had often been left to champion some causes alone, including those of businesses who sought to move into the village and keep their doors open late.
“I don’t believe that because something stays open until 9 o’clock or 10 o’clock, that’s wrong or evil,” Heller said. “I think that’s really for the convenience of the people.”
He was also sometimes alone in battling property tax breaks for businesses looking to move or expand into vacant buildings, and said recently that he still thinks that businesses should usually pay their own way.
Both Scolaro and Heller were credited by their peers for their ability to change their minds. And in earlier interviews, both mentioned the same incident as their biggest regret of their Village Board service: allowing the prospective developer of the Center of the North Shore to clear-cut the site, shortly before he lost his financing in 2008.
“We gave leverage to a developer literally for no reason,” Scolaro said. “In retrospect, we should have waited.”
Heller said, “It was something I wished I didn’t do, but I don’t think it did any damage, and the village didn’t lose money. It didn’t effect the property much, it just looked bad for a period of time” until another development group built Northshore 770 at the Dundee Road/Skokie Boulevard site in 2015.
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The two men also agree that they now have more free time. At the first full Northbrook Village Board without them May 23, Heller and Scolaro plan to mark the occasion together – on a golf course.
Twitter @IrvLeavitt