After a year of drama ensued following the swearing in of three new commissioners, the Crystal Lake Park District board may be heading in a different direction after voting to change the board’s leadership.
Over the past year, many changes have been made by the park board and met with significant public backlash, including dismantling of the district’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policy, replacing a lake advisory group with a lakefront property owners’ association and attempting to terminate a lake agreement with the city and village of Lakewood.
The changes were made under board President Frederick Tiesenga, who has decades-long family ties to conflicts with the park district as lakefront property owners but had not served in an elected position on the board until he took office last year.
His family was involved in lawsuits with the park district over lake ownership, known as the “lake wars.” In 1988, new buoys and a park district patrol boat were vandalized. Tiesenga, 24 at the time, pleaded guilty to a citation of defacement for covering some of the buoys with plastic bags, according to the published reports.
Every May, the park board can nominate and elect replacements for board positions like president, vice president, secretary and treasurer. During Monday’s meeting, the board unanimously agreed on almost all nominations, except for legal counsel.
Tiesenga may have realized a change was coming as he was the first to nominate board Vice President Keith Nisenson for the presidency. The motion passed unanimously without discussion.
The board’s legal counsel will continue to be former board president Eric Anderson for at least three months while an annual evaluation is conducted. Anderson took over as the district’s new attorney the same day his seat expired.
As pointed out by Commissioner Cathy Cagle last month, an annual evaluation is required by the board’s general policy.
Tiesenga attempted to reappoint Anderson as park district attorney for the full year, but the motion failed in a 3-4 vote, with Commissioners Cagle, Michael Jacobson, Karen Johnson and Richard Hickey voting against it.
Over the past year, Hickey has generally sided with the other three commissioners, Tiesenga, Nisenson and Jason Heisler, resulting in many of the board’s acts passing by a 4-3 vote.
Tiesenga, Nisenson and Hickey were all elected last year in an uncontested race, after Anderson and other former incumbents chose not to seek reelection.
Other positions filled Monday include Jacobson appointed as vice president, Tiesenga as treasurer and interim Executive Director Kurt Reckamp as secretary, Freedom of Information Act officer and Open Meetings Act officer.
Jacobson said: “I would like to make a recognition of gratitude for all of the members of our community [who] have been showing up in this past year. I feel like an energized sense of pride for this city that I’ve grown up in and have lived in since 1965, and I’m just so proud to call this place my home.”