Oak Park Utility Companies and County Departments Need to be Responsive to our Residents

By "Tony" Fote

Quality Utility services are not enough for Oak Park. The MAC should interface with all service agencies and County Departments regularly to assure innovative ideas to improve these services in the future are explored and implemented.

Usually residents will just throw up their hands and feel like there is nothing they can do to alleviate the problem. I feel that with better communication between the MAC and local utility providers, our neighbors might be surprized by some of the simple measures they could take to make a big improvement in how utilities are able to serve us.

Currently serving on the MAC is a 37 year resident of Oak Park who also serves on the Board of the water provider who supplies Oak Park water service. We have an automatic inside information provider who regularly gives information at meetings on how much we are charged and what measures are being taken to insure good service. But most residents who might not be able to make the meetings would never know these things...and this information MUST be communicated.

When we recently experienced rolling blackouts we were told that a transformer blew in Moorpark. Why were there not adequate backup systems in place to keep power outages from occurring? The MAC should try to look into encouraging home owners and rental property owners as well as the School District and Parks and Recreation Departments to look into installing solar cells in order to generate power that could be put into the grid and stored to help ease any power shortages. This is just one example of a number of measures the MAC could take to try to help utilities improve their services.

Coordination between the Parks and Recreation Department and the Oak Park Water Service, along with a public awareness campaign to help homeowners be aware of their water use and drainage situations might go far in helping those in charge of our water supply do a better job. These people need to know that even if the "ugly" water poses no health hazard, the people of Oak Park deserve better...indeed they deserve the best.

We have water purification experts living right in Oak Park who could be consulted on this matter and who the MAC might want to talk to regarding this chronic problem. With water mains breaking a few times in the past couple of years and our area now built out, a good examination of the infrastructure's life cycle and how it relates to the level of our water services needs to be done and acted upon as soon as possible.

Be it the new water tank being built, replacements of lateral drainage for affected homeowners and businesses, the high cost of water for users in Oak Park...there is no arguing that water IS an issue here, and there are many different ideas on creative reclamation practices and usage procedures that might improve the performance of our water service. Again, the MAC has an inside line of communication here that MUST be exploited.

On a related issue, recently the Student Representative to the MAC brought up the fact that the new Oak Park Community Center could be a venue for teen dances and fundraising events for teens in the area. There is no reason that we can not provide a DJ and drinks to have a profitable and ongoing regulated activity for the teens who may want to have a good "clean" time. Parks and Rec. Department as well as local merchants would love to appeal to our areas younger residents, whom I feel are some of our most important assets. All this would take is some community outreach by the MAC to some of our local residents.

I would advocate an ad hoc task force of concerned citizens reporting back to the MAC to interface with all utilities, County Departments and other related agencies throughout the year on various issues that need immediate and ongoing attention. This would assure that problems are not passed over from one meeting to the next, month to month and so on.

Generally speaking, all utilities and County Departments should interface with our School District as well as all other Departments that provide our area services and bill our people. The MAC can be the center for communication between these agencies and a clearing house of ideas and information to make life better through constantly trying to increase the quality of all of these services.

(to be continued)