As he cast a trained eye on the dense green foliage at the Deer Grove Forest Preserve, Ben Cox didn’t like what he saw: buckthorn, honeysuckle, multiflora rose.
None is indigenous to Illinois, but the plants have thrived in the prairie soil, and over the decades in the woods just off a trail in north suburban Palatine the invaders have choked out native grasses, flowers and other plants — creating a “green desert.”
“You look at it, and you say, ‘It’s green, it’s healthy,’ but it’s not,” said Cox, the head of Friends of the Forest Preserves, a watchdog group that has been a vocal critic of the district in recent years.
The other side of the path, he said, offers a vision of what the district could become, three years after scores of paid contractors and volunteers cleared away the tangled undergrowth. Oak trees and shagbark hickory soar over tall prairie grasses that are dotted with sprays of native flowers — an open space that seamlessly gives way to a wetland alive with bees, dragonflies and birds.
As the Forest Preserve District of Cook County celebrates the century mark of the law that paved the way for its creation, officials and local conservationists are trying to reclaim the land from alien plants that have flourished amid years of financial and environmental mismanagement.
Even some of the district’s harshest critics are encouraged by progress at the district, the first of its kind in the nation.
Environmental groups that once issued scathing reports on mismanagement of the county’s 106-plus square miles of land say the district is moving away from the bureaucratic ambivalence of the past as it tackles aggressive plants that have spread through tens of thousands of acres of woodlands and prairies.
More than two-thirds of the more than 68,000 acres the district has assembled over the last 100 years are overrun with non-native flora, said longtime conservation activist Stephen Packard, who led one of the first efforts to beat back invasive intruders in 1977.
“I have great optimism,” said Packard, who notes that the district has restored only a few thousand acres over the past 30 years. “There is no reason we couldn’t have 30,000 acres” — an area roughly 10 times the size of Oak Park — “restored in the next 20 years.”
After much debate, a bill was signed in June 1913 that authorized forming the forest preserve district, which held its first meeting two years later.
The taxpayer-funded agency was charged with acquiring and preserving natural areas threatened by a fast-expanding Chicago and its suburbs.
Starting with a 500-acre plot in Palatine now known as the Deer Grove Forest Preserve and acquired in June 1916, the district owns about 10 percent of the total area of Cook County. Its annual budget is $189 million, and the district employs about 600 people.
According to dozens of news reports over the years, the district was long regarded as a place where patronage workers were sent to get lost in the woods. At other times the preserves were more notable for piles of fetid trash overflowing from garbage bins than for their ability to connect residents with plants and animals.
Moreover, critical management — such as brush removal and controlled burns — was put off for years because of political concerns. For example, in 1996, restoration opponents persuaded then-County Board President John Stroger to impose a moratorium on such projects in the entire district.
The moratorium was slowly lifted, but conservationists complained that while it was in place, invasive plants quickly reclaimed areas that had been painstakingly cleared.
The district has been slow, critics say, to react with a comprehensive plan to combat the invaders. The district will release a plan for all 68,000 acres this fall, said Arnold Randall, the district’s general superintendent, who was appointed in 2010.
Randall acknowledges the restoration work is a massive undertaking but said a comprehensive road map will make it easier to tap outside money from other agencies and donors.
“I don’t know why it didn’t happen decades ago, but if you look at the restoration activities, that was a grass-roots movement that started in the ’70s and ’80s,” he said. “And there were still people, into the ’90s, that were really opposed to what (the district) was doing.”
Observers say the district’s turnaround began after a financial crisis in the early 2000s when it was $16 million in debt. Staff was cut in half, and budgets were slashed or frozen. The agency slowly began to refocus on its core mission of preserving native habitat.
“I think that clearly the finances are in better shape, and we have a more efficient workforce,” said Cook County Commissioner Larry Suffredin, D-Evanston, a frequent critic of waste and incompetence at the district.
Indeed, the credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s boosted the district’s score last year from AA- to AA, citing management improvements and staffing cuts that date back to the 2003 reorganization. And in February, the district was released from a monitoring program required as an anti-patronage safeguard under the federal Shakman decrees.
Suffredin and others admit much remains to be done after years of neglect and mismanagement gave unwanted plants a head start.