READERS ' FORUM

Illinois Parks and Recreation magazine presents a platform for you to express and exchange your ideas and opinions on current issues affecting park, recreation and conservation districts. Let us know what you think. IAPD/IPRA membership responses will be printed in the next issue of the IPR. Please address all comments and responses to: Editor, Illinois Parks and Recreation, Illinois Association of Park Districts, 211 East Monroe St., Springfield, IL 62701.

Here's one commissioner's views . . . what are yours? Ralph Cianchetti is a commissioner of the Park District of Highland Park, a trustee of the National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA), and immediate past president of the Illinois Association of Park Districts (IAPD).

By Ralph Cianchetti

Those who argue the proposition that park commissioners should be paid in cash for the time and effort they put into board service seem to be saying — to me, at least — that money is the only meaningful compensation this world has to offer, that the personal fulfillment that comes from overseeing a sound program of parks and recreation for one's community is somehow inadequate compensation.

Tremendous responsibilities

Of course, we park commissioners take on heavy responsibilities and work hard. We attend many meetings and spend hours pouring over budgets, reports and other materials in the course of performing board duties.

Sure, it's crazy to win an election to a position of responsibility demanding considerable time and energy, and do it all for "free".

But that is precisely our strength — we serve; we are not making a living. We do what we do for reasons other than making money, and I'd like to believe that the most impelling of these reasons is a desire to give service.

Besides, how much compensation could we expect? Certainly not enough to make any real impact on our incomes.

Important considerations

In my community of Highland Park, members of the City Council are paid a mere $300 a month to take on some king-size headaches. Could we, as park commissioners, expect more?

Is it worth a couple of hundred measly dollars a month to have the public go over your budget with a magnifying glass to learn the size of the raise commissioners have voted themselves?

Do you want to listen to the public howl when you do give yourself a raise, however modest and however deserved?

Do you want to throw away the moral position that derives from serving your community in a demanding, unpaid position?

When my friends ask me what I make as a park commissioner, and I reply "zero", they look at me wide-eyed, shake their heads and walk away, I am convinced, with a new respect for me and for what I represent.

Spirit of Voluntarism

We park commissioners stand in the great American tradition of voluntarism. One of our country's great strengths has been the willingness of countless ordinary citizens to come forth and voluntarily shoulder the burden of public service. The welcome result has been an extraordinary enrichment of American life, both public and private, with an incredible array of facilities, services and programs whose fortunes have been guided by devoted and effective volunteers.

Can I earn any greater compensation than the enormous satisfaction I derive from looking over the beautiful acres of Sunset Valley Golf Course, a project that I have been close to for the past ten years, and noting the many improvements when fellow golfers tell me what great shape the course is in?

Or in being at Twin Pools with my grandsons on a brutally hot day and noting the hundreds of Highland Parkers who have found delicious escape from the heat in the park district pool?

Or watching the kids having a great time clambering all over our new and intriguing Builders' Village in Sunset Park?

I am proud of these and of many more fine aspects of our park district operation, and I am proud to know that I have had a hand in setting the policies and in establishing the budgets that have maintained our many facilities and programs at a first-class level.

Invaluable satisfaction

Oh, yes. We park commissioners earn a compensation more precious than mere money. We earn the priceless personal satisfaction that comes from knowing that through our leadership, our communities have developed parks and programs for people of all ages; citizens who can enjoy the substantial physical and

Illinois Parks and Recreation 10 September/October 1988

emotional benefits of a wide variety of recreational activities.

We may not hear "thank you" all that often, and we may have to suffer the unhappy few who only know how to complain. But we know — don't we? — deep down that our communities are better places to live in because of our volunteer service on park boards. Can we ask for any greater compensation?

Recently U.S. Representative Henry J. Hyde addressed the House of Representatives to recognize the organizers of the Illinois Prairie Path. The following is an excerpt of his remarks from the Congressional Record, Tuesday, July 26, 1988.

By U.S. Representative Henry J. Hyde

"Mr. Speaker, it was 25 years ago this year that May Theilgaard Watts, a naturalist at the Morton Arboretum, suggested in a Chicago newspaper that an abandoned railroad right-of-way connecting Chicago with DuPage and Kane Counties be converted to a footpath.

Her vision for a prairie version of the famous Appalacian Trail was motivated by a desire to save for future generations the beauty of forests and meadows untouched by commercial development.

In a ceremony today at the White House hosted by President Ronald Reagan, the heirs to Mrs. Watts' vision received public recognition for their work on the Illinois Prairie Path, a 55-mile network of trails used daily by bicyclists, walkers, joggers and equestrians.

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of the Interior, the Take Pride in America Award was presented to F. Paul and Jean Mooring of Wheaton, Illinois, who represented hundreds of contributors and volunteers that built and have maintained the path on a shoestring budget.

As many as 300,000 people a year use the Prairie Path, a testament to the foresight of our suburban pioneers in the Rails-to-Trails conservation movement.

I commend the leadership and the many volunteers that brought this path to fruition and suggest that my House colleagues take a moment and read an article on the Illinois Prairie Path published in a recent issue of Trailblazer, the newsletter of the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy."

The Illinois Prairie Path

There is no rail-trail in the U.S. which has received as much tender loving care from as many individual volunteers over a longer period of time than the Illinois Prairie Path.

Between 1963, when Morton Arboretum Naturalist May Theilgaard Watts originally proposed the concept of a rail-trail through Chicago's western suburbs, and 1987, when management of the Path was formally taken over from a nonprofit citizen group by DuPage County, thousands of volunteers invested hundreds of thousands of hours and dollars in every aspect of trail work from attending public hearings to negotiating leases, hauling trash to building bridges, lobbying politicians to cajoling private corporations, purchasing crushed rock to leading natural appreciation walks.

"We are human beings. We are able to walk upright on two feet," Watts wrote in her classic letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune. "We need a footpath. Right now there is a chance for Chicago and its suburbs to have a footpath, a long one."

A quarter century later that vision has largely come to pass. The 44.5 mile-long, pitchfork-shaped Prairie Path stretches from Maywood to Wheaton, then splits into four spurs which reach the Fox River in the towns of Elgin, Geneva, Batavia and Aurora.

At least 300,000 bicyclists, walkers, runners and equestrians utilize the path each year, enjoying its chunks of native prairie, the site of an Indian settlement, a mill pond that once powered a pioneer grist mill, several peaceful wetlands and numerous parks. The Prairie Path also manifests its urban roots, passing through a string of town centers and paralleling existant railroad corridors on which commuters and freight trains regularly race and rumble past.

The trail has been a massive experiment in private citizen action, replete with heartbreak and triumph. Unlike neighboring Wisconsin and Iowa which have incorporated their many rail-trails into state-run and county-run park systems, for two decades neither the State of Illinois nor the County of DuPage expressed much interest in taking a leadership role with the Prairie Path. In fact, the private group, somewhat confusingly called The Illinois Prairie Path (TIPP), would probably still be operating the trail today if it had not lost its insurance coverage, forcing the county to take over primary management.

The joys and tribulations of creating the Prairie Path are exemplified by the stories of two of its many bridges. Volunteer Bridge in Wheaton, a monument in name as well as structure, was an old railroad facility restored and extended over two city streets and a park entirely by volunteers under the direction of a volunteer structural engineer and fabricated by high school welding students. Valued at about $250,000, the job cost $25,000, all of which was donated.

In contrast is the bridge over the east branch of the DuPage River. First constructed as a high water bridge by the Illinois National Guard, it was soon dismantled by vandals. Then Sierra Club members reused the timbers in a new low water bridge — which was washed away in a flood. Rebuilt by the DuPage County Forest Preserve District, the third bridge was burned by an arsonist — as was the fourth. Finally, in 1978, TIPP paid $22,000 for a 50-foot all-steel footbridge which was installed above the 100-year flood line and still stands today.

As the Illinois Prairie Path enters a new phase of public control — and as TIPP changes roles from developer to advocate — the verdict on the issue of "public vs. private" is not yet in. By any measure, the Prairie Path is immensely successful (real estate pages regularly promote houses as being near it), yet in some of the towns it traverses, the "park" is barely a footpath squeezed through parking lots. It has been proven that volunteers can accomplish miracles on shoestring budgets, but it is not necessarily clear that parks should be so underfunded. It is obvious that volunteers cannot carry out as much physical labor as professionals with heavy equipment, but it is equally obvious that had it not been for the dedicated citizens who gave time and money there would never have been an Illinois Prairie Path.

Whatever the final verdict, the Prairie Path has irrefutably borne out May Watts' pithy observation which is cast on a stone pedestal in Wheaton, "Footpaths are defended with spirit by their users."

Illinois Parks and Recreation 11 September/October 1988