Residents Bombard Village Officials, Staff, Developer with Concerns over Triangle Redevelopment

The open house didn't go as planned.

“His dream is our nightmare,” Diane Kontos said Monday of Orland Park Mayor Dan McLaughlin. “I told him that to his face.”

For more than two hours at the the village mayor, trustees, staff and developer David Flaherty took questions and concerns, some polite and some heated—the sweat literally drenching one man’s back—in what developed into a loud free-for-all on the first phase of the Main Street Triangle redevelopment project, known now as .

“I think it’s going to be a difficult thing to fill,” said Bernard Murphy, no relation to the former trustee.

For many of the 200 registered attendants at the village's open house, Ninety 7 Fifty is a project they don’t like but cannot stop, even if it has yet to be approved. And they’ve felt misrepresented all along.

“They’re ruining the town. It’s destroyed. It used to have a home-town feeling,” Jim Nowakowski said.

He and his wife, Marion, said they've lived in Orland Park for 36 years. Despite the answers they got from the village, they worry that their home on Jefferson Avenue, which is located across from the proposed project, may be next.

“We’re just worried about eminent domain,” Marion Nowakowski said. “They did it to the (Orland Plaza) shopping mall. What’s stopping them from doing it to us on Jefferson?”

Alexander Kapocius sounded incredulous when he said, “Orland Park Crossing went into bankruptcy last October, and now they’re pushing this down our throats.”

Steve Benda said he came out with friends and neighbors as a “show of force,” adding, “I don’t know if something like this in our tough economy will fly.”

Cook County Commissioner Elizabeth Gorman, , left the event with a notebook in hand, content at least that village officials took the time to listen and “slow things down.” At the end of the night and give residents a formal public hearing to express themselves on Tuesday, Sept. 6.

The village board and staff were not without their supporters on Monday, notably Mary Clark, who spent most of the evening shadowing and defending the mayor as people bombarded him with questions.

“I think Orland Park has everything and now it’s going to have the best of everything,” she said.

She noted that all of her concerns for Ninety 7 Fifty, including funding, have been alleviated.

“I will support the mayor in anything he does,” she said.

Several fence-sitters were also found at the open house, many of whom expressing that the project has just as much a chance for success as it does for failure.

“I hope this is a positive thing for Orland (Park),” Rich Kelly, , said. “If it doesn’t work—all the tax burden is going to be on us again.”