The Park Ridge City Council reversed course on paying for new city gateway signs, choosing Monday night to approve spending over $200,000 for new signs after two weeks ago voting against it.
It’s considered a rare move, but the council voted to approve the new signage at a cost of $215,600.
The same council had recently rejected that same measure, calling the project too costly.
At the City Council meeting Monday, the city attorney said it’s rare for things to pop back on the agenda for reconsideration. No one would confirm to Pioneer Press who pushed for the reappearance.
Mayor Marty Maloney said Alderperson Joseph Steinfels, who previously voted against paying that much for the sign installation, had pushed for the issue to come back before the council.
But Steinfels said he made no such request.
Last year, the council agreed to pay $40,000 to design welcome signs to replace six posted at various entry points into the city. The current welcome signs are wooden, painted and show signs of weathering. They’re about 20 years old and, Mayor Marty Maloney pointed out, celebrate civic groups that do not exist anymore.
The cost to install was $215,600.
The overall replacement move wasn’t well beloved, and some members of the public complained the process didn’t include community input. After the designs were unveiled in December, some complained they looked bland and had nothing to do with Park Ridge.
At the Sept. 2 City Council Committee of the Whole meeting, the whole project got scrapped.
Steinfels said at that time the sign project was a waste of money and not a priority for the city. The mayor had argued the old signs are rotted and about to fall over, and need to be replaced.
But, what had been a 3-4 vote against spending the money to replace signs at entries to the city, turned to a 4-3 green light vote. Steinfels switched from no to yes.
Now the city will get new signs made of stone to replace the old wooden ones. The new signs will be electric and illuminated at night.
“I’m pushing this, flipping it,” Steinfels said during the meeting. “This topic remains not a priority for me. I think there are myriad issues where we should focus our efforts and our staff time.”
He said he visited the old signs and found that they were indeed about to fall over.
“I went out and touched each of the existing signs … and they are literally rotting and falling over,” Steinfels said. “That’s not an exaggeration from staff.”
Still, he said, it’s a low-priority issue.
More Top Picks Best Built In Refrigerators For Luxury Kitchens
“It’s not something that makes the residents’ lives better,” Steinfels said. “It’s aesthetics. I’d use the analogy of wrapping paper.”
He said he voted to make the purchase so the city could move on from the issue, and he would rather not revisit it again.
But one critic, Joan Sandrik, still opposed spending the money. A longtime opponent of the designs, Sandrik said she doubted anyone in town even notices the old signs, and spending nearly a quarter of a million dollars to fix a problem nobody notices is a waste.
“I would bet 17 cents, which I happen to have in my pockets, that the majority of the citizens in town have no clue what a gateway sign is,” she told the City Council. “They probably think it’s a little green sign that says ‘Park Ridge’ with the population under it.”
She suggested scrapping the designs – which she doesn’t like – for something designed by local high school students would be more reflective of the community.
“I don’t have a problem with gateway signs,” she said. “I really don’t. But the design is horrible. They’re little tombstones.”
Jesse Wright is a freelancer.