On January 8, 2009, the Park District Board voted to take the south garden plots. The vote was 4 to 3. Their plan calls for adding more plots in the area west of the current north plots, made from what is now a woods. They also plan to add plots in the northeast area of the North plots, an area which now floods heavily.
The Situation
This vote is final. We are finished with the Park District and now must appeal to Naperville City Council if destruction of the south plots is to be avoided. Under the new plan, gardeners are to be allowed one plot only. This will be introduced in the 2010 year. We do not know when Naperville City Council plans to vote on this proposal.
In the meetings we learned that the Park District has not done any of the investigatory work necessary to make this move. Included are traffic and water flow studies of West Street under the new terms of use. This was pointed out to them by gardeners in the January 8th meeting. They had earlier refused to do investigatory work related to our option 2A, which called for using existing fields in Naperville for youth football, permitting the Naperville Central teams to practice on Knoch Park.
On February 17th the gardeners took our issue to City Council (hear our speeches and their debate at our page Gardeners' Speeches). Although taking the Gardens is not yet an "agenda item" for the council, we appealed to them to force the Park District to conduct a traffic study. They agreed, and assigned this task to the Park District. This may prove to be an impediment to placing athletic fields on the current South Garden Plots. The closeness of the athletes, who could bring as many as a hundred cars to that area to the entrance to Edward Hospital's emergency entrance is a major safety item. We hope that the traffic study will show that it is unsafe to load that area with so many cars at specific times of the day.
We ask all gardeners to log in at our "Join Us" page and to become active in this continuing struggle. We lost by 4 to 3. This was much better than we had predicted earlier, due to our group efforts.
We also encourage gardeners to write to city council members as well as to the newspapers covering Naperville, the Sun and Daily Herald. Addresses are located in our Express Your Views section.
Copyright 2008, Save Naperville Gardens on West Street E-Mail: Info@NaperGardens.com
