As the Park District Turns
“It’s certainly no secret Nancy Kaszak would have an intensely personal motive to do this,” Colette Holt was saying. “The whole thing is frankly too transparent for words–Nancy sending her lawyers in to rifle through my office a few days before the election.” She told us, “It’s just a very ugly time at the Park District.”
Two years ago the Kellogg Foundation awarded nearly a million dollars to the Chicago Park District to establish a “model for citizen participation through the effective operation of Local Advisory Councils for the District’s parks and play lots.” In May of 1991 Holt took over this project. So scant was the progress made, and so savagely was Holt being pilloried by community groups, that last December 31, the foundation’s grant half spent, Superintendent Penn decided to stop throwing good money after bad and suspended the operation.
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Penn brought in two consultants to examine what went wrong and to suggest ways to salvage the half million in Kellogg dollars that remained. The consultants, Holly Delany Cole and Kenneth O’Hare, were blunt: their report last July described the Kellogg project as a botch from start to finish, a poorly conceived and administered fiasco that “has failed to meet any of its stated objectives.” A major stated goal was to train advisory-council members to participate in park affairs. Halfway through the project, just $2,518.31 had been spent on training, 2 percent of the training budget. Although 3,892 advisory-council members were supposed to be trained, only 157 had been–and all they’d received was a three-hour introductory course on roles and responsibilities.
Eldridge insists he was not one of the candidates. He did not deny something we’ve heard, which is that Bobby Rush was. But he said Holt did no work for two of the four candidates and helped the other two strictly on her own time. He argued that the former assistant didn’t allege that anyone but herself had been made by Holt to do political work, and that because she did the work, there’s no evidence that Holt would have punished her for refusing to.
No way, Holt told us. “I’m not leaving the Park District at the end of the month. That’s certainly been what some people would like to have happen. What Justice Simon is talking to the Park District about is a vicious campaign of vicious charges. . . . There’s been no discussion of my leaving. To the contrary, we expect to clean this matter up. I’m surely hoping we can do this on an amicable basis.”
Oddly, the day we spoke was different. Mayor Daley had just held a press conference, and the Tribune’s John Kass had popped a question about the parks. The mayor said he wasn’t satisfied with the way the parks were being run, and it sounded as if Penn’s job was on the line. Now Tranter’s phones were ringing off the hook as every news shop in town pursued her obligatory comment.
Braun was unavailable for follow-up questions; as O’Donnell reported Monday, the senator-elect and Matthews are traveling through Matthews’s native South Africa together (to get married? Kup wondered). Braun has always defended Matthews as her political savior–her campaign was near collapse when he took it over, and even other campaign officials who soon detested him were initially impressed–and her romantic interest in him is no secret. If the allegations in O’Donnell’s piece hold water, it appears Matthews was hitting on the help as the candidate fell in love with him. An invigorating position to be in, we suppose.
