Work to start in the fall for improved Palos Park playground

By Jeff Vorva 

There will be a wait before playtime.

Palos Park village Council members voted on April 10 to accept a proposal from Westchester-based NuToys Leisure to replace playground structures and surface at Village Green Park. The bill will run $226,887.

But it’s going to take a while before kids will be running, jumping and swinging on the new toys.

“Right now, it’s scheduled for the end of September to start,” said Rick Bieterman, the sales representative for NuToys. “That’s a sign of the times. We’re normally a six-week delivery but we’re looking three or four months right now.

“With the rubber surface, we have to do that before the temperatures hit 50 degrees. That has to be done. We usually do that up until about the middle of November.”

The improvements will feature structures for kids of various ages to play on and will be compatible for those with special needs.

Heading to Springfield

Mayor John Mahoney, Mayor-elect Nicole Milovich-Walters and Village Manager Rick Boehm will go to Springfield on April 18 and 19 to help try to get more money from the Local Government Distributive Fund, which designates a portion of state income tax revenues to communities such as Palos Park.

In recent years, the percentage of those revenues has been shrinking.

“It used to be 10% of all income tax to be distributed to municipalities on a per-capita basis,” Mahoney said. “That percentage is now about 6.26%.

“We’ve been working hard the last couple of years to get the legislature to raise it back to the 10%, even if it’s not all at once. We’ll accept it if it’s over a several-year period. We will be working on that in Springfield. It will be our main topic.”

Palos Park bits

• The Kaptur Administrative and Police Center will have its carpeting replaced by Oak Lawn-based Key Carpet Corporation. The carpeting was damaged by water after a pipe broke on Dec. 25. The $39,990 bill will be paid by a grant from the Intergovernmental Risk Management Agency.
• For the 30^th year in a row, the village has been named a Tree City by the Arbor Day Foundation.
• The Public Works Department will be getting a Ford F 550 truck with a snow plow and other important gadgets for $139,874.26 through the Antioch-based Kunes Auto Group.
• The council approved a construction engineering proposal from Baxter and Woodman not to exceed $111,650 for the main water extension to the Cog Hill Property.