Oak Brook Bath And Tennis

Hello, I'm Village President Larry Herman and I'd There's been an enormous amount of misinformation floating around and this presentation is intended to clear up the confusion. So in this first part, I'll walk through the history of the Bath and Tennis Club and the dilemma we now face with our cr In part two, I'll talk about Sheikchef's proposal and why it'so good for the sports corps and the village. This photo is from when the club first opened in 1969. While much has changed, the original pools and diving boards that you see here still exist today. It's just that they're not in good shape. The original clubhouse building you see in the background burned down in 1973 and was rebuilt in 1975. But that clubhouse has been used for banquets from the day it opened. Over time, many different operators ran it for the village. In recent years, the village was operating the facility with its own staff, booking weddings and other events until we licensed the operation to Sheikchef in February of 2024 following an open bid process. And you can actually see on the screen here the front cover of the wedding guide that the village produced and used to market the weddings before we entered into the arrangement with Sheikchef. Well following that 1975 rebuild of the clubhouse, the village built at least four more additions over the years that doubled the size of the clubhouse. But unfortunately, the haphazard manner in which they were designed and built has compounded maintenance problems and costs. You can see from the color coding of the shading that the original 1975 footprint is shaded in dark gray and the subsequent additions are each shaded in different colors according to the years in which they were completed. That teal colored borderline around it is the dimensions of the new proposed clubhouse building that Sheikchef will use in part. Since I first ran for village trustee in 2021, I've highlighted that the village has lost millions of dollars operating the Bath and Tennis Club over the decades despite a village law that has been on the books for many years requiring that the sports club be financially self-sufficient. So I've been working since then along with our village board and staff to save the sports core and Bath and Tennis Club and finally make it financially self-sufficient so that the village never has to again prop it up with subsidies or even sales of sports core land as had been done in the past. And because of the hard work we've done over the last few years to make the Bath and Tennis Club experience exciting again, pool membership is added all time high and we are finally generating an operating profit there. But while we have successfully turned operating losses into operating profits, we still have to deal with a 55-year-old facility that needs to be rebuilt but for which we just don't have the money. As I said earlier before Sheikchef came on board, the village had been running the clubhouse wedding business itself but had a loss of about $200,000 a year. And the outside caterer that the village used to supply food for events there, they weren't even paying local Oprah sales taxes or any of the expenses of the building. It really was a bad deal for the village and it was a great deal for that caterer. But the clubhouse as I said is now over 50 years old and needs millions of dollars of major repairs. We're spending about $100,000 a year just fixing unexpected problems And while that clubhouse is 50 years old and in need of reconstruction, the pools and tennis courts are even older. At some point probably in the not too distant future they will need to be replaced at a cost that could be as high as $10 million for which not a dime has been saved and for which the newly created annual operating profits, nice as they are, will never be enough to cover that kind of expense. So light of this dire financial situation at the Bath & Tennis Club, the village went out to our voters in 2022 with a referend The voters resoundingly said no so we've been working hard since then to honor their mandate by finding a viable alternative. So following that referend Sheikchef was selected from among three bidders as the best option. They since turned our $200,000 annual loss into a $200,000 annual profit to the sports corps but we still have an aging facility in need of millions of dollars of reconstruction for which we don't have the money nor for which the current operation will ever provide the required funding. And that predicament is why the Sheikchef proposal to rebuild the clubhouse at their expense is so promising for the village. So please watch part two of this presentation to understand the truth about that proposal.