Special-recreation funding pushes park district’s tax increase to 6%, causing two commissioners to protest

Disagreements on Monday about how much the Wilmette Park District should contribute to a fund that supports individuals with special needs led to two park commissioners voting against the district’s 2024 tax levy.

Commissioners Mike Murdock and Patrick Duffy, the Park Board’s vice president, were the dissenting votes on Monday, Dec. 9, when commissioners approved the levy on a 5-2 vote.

The 2024 levy is for $7.7 million, which is a 6.1% increase from last year, which excludes any amount that Cook County may add once the levy is on file, according to Park District Executive Director Steve Wilson. That amount could reportedly bring the levy up to 7.04%.

The levy includes $644,343 for the special recreation fund, which Wilson said funds a number of initiatives including the park district’s contribution to the Northern Suburban Special Recreation Association, “fees to provide individuals with disabilities an opportunity to participate in the district’s programs,” and costs related to compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Murdock called the amount of the tax increase “truly unprecedented” and said he was “quite frankly shocked” the board was considering the increase.

Wilson explained that the special recreation fund is not capped by the CPI, and the park district has a target fund balance of 25% of annual expenditures. During the pandemic, the reserves grew above the target due to a lesser need for staffing, and the district chose to limit the levy. Now, Wilson said the district wants to return to taxing an amount to cover projected expenditures.

“In the last several years, we’ve taken a taxy levy approach of taxing less than our annual expenditures to bring that fund balance back down to be in line with the target fund balance,” Wilson said. “We are now there, and therefore, this year the proposed tax amount within that fund is to cover the annual expenditure that is planned for 2025 and to keep us at the target fund balance of 25 percent of those expenditures.

“Therefore, it’s significantly higher than prior years where we were spending down a fund balance.”

In response to a question from Commissioner Cecilia Clarke, Wilson said he doesn’t anticipate future levies having an increase like this “assuming there’s no drastic change to the needs of the Northern Suburban Special Recreation Association or to the inclusion aides in our program or some large capital project with a large expenditure for ADA.”

Murdock said he would support a lower tax increase around 5 percent, but he didn’t support anything higher. He said since the special recreation fund was overfunded in recent years, he would support underfunding it this year.

“If this fund were to be underfunded for the next year as a way for us to keep the tax increase to a reasonable level, we would still be in compliance with our fund balances across the overall district,” he said, later adding that he is a “huge supporter of the special recreation fund.”

Wilson also said that the Wilmette Park District is “by far the most inclusive agency” when it comes to special recreation, noting that they both fund the salaries for inclusion aides and the payroll taxes that are associated with them.

Duffy suggested that, if the park district ends up having issues with funding, they could transfer money from other accounts to cover it.

“There’s still money to cover that,” he said. “It’s not like we would stop services for anyone.”

But the board’s majority disagreed with that idea.

“If one more family moves into our neighborhood with a child with special needs, we will need to be borrowing funds from other accounts in order to cover the costs of that child, and I don’t think that that is fiscally responsible,” Commissioner Allison Frazier said.

Board President Kara Kosloskus also noted that, in the big picture, the park district’s portion of a Wilmette taxpayer’s bill is around 4.2 percent.

“As a rough guesstimate, if someone paid a $20,000 annual tax bill, the difference between 5 or 6 percent of our portion of our tax would be $40 for the year,” she said.

Kosloskus called the levy “a reasonable catch-up situation that I support.”

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