Tinley Park officials are considering a landscape-management program that could result in a more “natural” look for hundreds of open areas within the village.
Public Works Director Dale Schepers said the proposed two-phase plan would begin by compiling an accurate list and description of the individual areas by category and maintenance level.
Chicago-based Site Design Group, the village’s landscape architect, would develop the landscape management framework.
In anticipation of Village Board consideration, Schepers addressed the two-phase proposal last week at a Public Works Committee meeting.
“We have at least 350, if not 400, acres in town,” he said.
One open area, east of the intersection of Harlem Avenue and 175th Street, could be a good location for a detention pond with natural vegetation,” he said. “We want to do it right; we want it to look right.”
Acknowledging that what looks right to one person may not look right to another, Schepers said the management plan would establish objective criteria “so we know we’re hitting the mark.
“It’s a little complicated from the physical part of it,” he said, of maintaining varied ecosystems that include an 80-acre water detention area between Brookfield Marketplace and Panduit corporate headquarters.
“Step 1 will get us to the point we know what we need to budget” for a general appearance “that meets the board’s expectations,” Schepers said. He estimates the cost at $8,750.
Mitch Murdock, SDG consulting arborist and project manager, contrasted the first part’s role of “putting together an overall view for each category” with the second part’s orientation toward “specific evaluation.”
“There’s a very long, detailed conversation in between” the two steps, Murdock said.
As an example of the second step, Schepers said a particular area might go “from turf maintenance to more naturalized.”
“Or vice versa,” responded committee member Dave Seaman, who lightly underlined his less-than wholehearted support of the naturalization concept.
While Schepers was quick to assure the committee, “We’re not suggesting we replace all the turf with native plantings,” he said, but added the implications of such actions go beyond reducing a carbon footprint.
“On a 5-acre site, our potential saving is $400,000 over 20 years,” Schepers said.
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Overall, it also would enable the Public Works Department to better budget for annual landscaping maintenance, he said.
In other issues, Schepers and Murdock told Committee Chairman Tom Staunton that location had little to do with the failure of some roadway plantings to survive the winter. Schepers estimated approximately $150,000 worth of dead trees and plantings in high-visibility areas that include Harlem Avenue and 167th and 183rd streets, and blamed the “harsh winter.”
“You can see some areas where everything is dead, but then you go down and everything of the same variety is fine,” Schepers said, adding, “In my mind, it’s a function of the weather.”
Murdock said in checking the plants, he “didn’t see many things that were indicative of salt damage.”