Will More Sparks Fly at this Monday's Board Meeting?

Forest Park will hold its Village Council meeting Monday night with few items on the agenda. But a light agenda hasn't stopped a hostile back-and-forth between Mayor Anthony Calderone and Public Property Commissioner Chris Harris during the past two meetings.

The conflict from the July 23 Forest Park Village Council meeting spilled over into the Aug. 13 meeting, as Harris closed the short session by blasting Calderone as an “autocrat with a perverse sense of democracy” and accusing the mayor of ignoring and stifling dissenting opinions.

“A mayor with a 53 percent majority may want to embrace the other 47 percent that he recently labeled … the ‘vocal minority,’” Harris said. “But according to our mayor, and these are his words, we need to make sure we ‘weed out the vocal minority.’

“I say don’t back down. I say now is the time to be even more vocal. Some of you may feel uncomfortable in the firing line of a bully. Well, unfortunately, I embrace it.”

The Forest Park Review previously reported that tension had broiled at the July meeting over a dispute between Harris and Village Administrator Tim Gillian involving whether or not to outsource various village landscaping contracts to McAdam Landscaping—Gillian’s view—or to use existing staff, as Harris wanted.

Gillian, who was on vacation at the time, had left a memo saying he was receiving conflicting directives from budget hearings and from Harris. The McAdam motion eventually passed by a 3-2 vote.

But following the vote, Calderone suggested that Harris had overstepped his duties as public property commissioner in attempting to command Public Works, saying “we may need to revisit the powers and duties of one department.” He had later asked if dissenting commissioners were “taking hallucinogenics” and had referred to himself sarcastically as “the mean evil emperor,” the Review reported.

At the August meeting, Harris announced that he and Gillian had since talked out their conflict and come to an understanding but implicitly labeled Calderone’s remarks as “grandiose public displays, outlandish exaggerations and theatrical grandstanding.”

The mayor did not respond and immediately closed the meeting following Harris’ remarks.

The only other items on the agenda for the Aug. 27 meeting are two requests to hang promotional banners (Opportunity Knocks for the OK Classic Softball Gam and St. Johns for an unspecified pair of autumn events), a solicitation request from local Girl Scouts and a mayoral signature ratification for a LumQust energy audit.