Careful What You Ask For
Unaware of the vote, about 30 people showed up for the meeting that had been scheduled for April 5. “When we arrived where the meeting was scheduled to take place, we found an empty room,” says Chris Dunn, a resident at the Catholic Worker, 4652 N. Kenmore. “The chairs were all folded. We set them up and waited. Four TSNA members appeared and told us the group had ended, then held a brief question-and-answer session and left. We were pretty stunned.”
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Paulus had once been a TSNA board member. “Until they voted me out,” he says. “My dad became very ill with cancer last July, and I stopped going to their meetings. When I showed up for the January meeting they told me I was no longer a board member. They didn’t tell me they were voting me out, and they knew what was going on with my family. [TSNA president] Jay Schwetz told me he had my dad’s name in his church’s prayer list.”
Paulus–who’s also affiliated with the Christian Community Development Association, a national organization that encourages people to help build the communities they live in–says he’d begun to feel estranged from the group after he voted for Helen Shiller in last year’s aldermanic election. Other Uptown block clubs have had openly adversarial relationships with the 46th Ward alderman: Buena Park Neighbors, for example, actively campaigned to unseat her last year. TSNA had never squabbled publicly with Shiller, but its members weren’t enamored of her. “I think TSNA was comprised of residents who had a sincere desire to improve the neighborhood,” says Paulus, “but they became bogged down and became almost obsessed with Helen Shiller. Whenever her name came up they would denigrate it, make jokes about it. . . . I didn’t campaign for her or put her shirt on or anything, but when I said I was planning on voting for her they were not pleased.”
Instead the board members voted to dissolve the organization. “Some of their members complained about not being included in the vote,” says Tom Walsh, chairman of ONE’s land use and housing committee. “They said it didn’t matter, because according to their bylaws, if you were a dues-paying member but not a board member your vote didn’t count. How’s that for democracy?”
Reed insists that TSNA was inclusive. “I was elected president, and the secretary was a resident at Habitat for Humanity. We had people from all economic backgrounds involved.”
Labiak says he hasn’t determined the prices of the Kenmore condos, though he’s aiming for the upper-bracket buyer. “One lady told me there’s a city program under which I can have lower-priced units and make as much as I would from high-end units. I told her I have never heard of such a thing, and even if it’s true the paperwork for it is probably so horrendous that I’m not sure I would go through with it.”
