An Oak Park-River Forest High School board member reminds readers in an Oak Leaves guest essay (which ran several weeks ago in the Wednesday Journal of OP & RF) of the board’s now-weeks-old resolution to keep tax rates as they are for nine years:

In its regular January . . . meeting, the board passed a unanimous resolution . . . that it will undertake a major shift in its long-range financial planning . . .  It . . . is likely that the district will have spent its reserves and will probably have to ask the taxpayers for another tax increase by 2018.

The . . . resolution was a signal of [the board’s] intention to halt, insofar as possible, its growth in expenditures . . . over the next nine years and to keep . . . within its income, without requiring another tax increase.

The matter has special pertinence in view of ambivalence on the issue on the part of three board candidates, each a non-incumbent, at the APPLE forum of 3/3.  Ralph Lee, who wrote the essay, says the resolution has been unreasonably ignored by local media.

Spending priorities are in order, he wrote, inviting debate about “this new policy direction” in an effort to gain “approval of a majority of voters.”  Absent this approval, he said, “the board or, if necessary, . . . the voters” can devise a new one.

Politely, Lee was offering a take-or-leave proposition.

The board has also gone ahead with plans to privatize the maintenance crew, and these candidates were explicitly opposed to that.  Two mentioned the 2018 date and a third spoke of “other ways of cost containment” than privatization.  The issue is bound to arise in forums yet to come before the 4/7 election.