Closed Beaches: The Village Council Is “Big-Footing” the Park District — and the Residents They Both Serve

With Labor Day behind us, summer unofficially ends — and with it, beach season.

For Winnetka, it was another summer of closed signs. Elder Beach was closed to swimming more than one day in four for high bacteria. Village-owned Tower Road Pier, “temporarily” fenced since 2020, spent its seventh summer behind chain-link — this time all of it. And Centennial’s dog beach stayed on-leash, after every Park District plan to fence it the way Cook County requires was turned down by the Village Council and its lower boards.

Three closed signs, one pattern. The Park District, which runs all five of our beaches, keeps bringing plans. The Village Council, which owns Tower Road Pier and the storm sewer pipe at Elder Beach, keeps saying no.

Plain and simple, this is about cooperation between the Village Council and the Park District. Or in this case, lack thereof. Let’s take a deeper dive, shall we.

The Dog Beach Showdown

Starting with the simplest one, Cook County’s animal-control rules require an off-leash beach to be enclosed. The dog beach has run at Centennial for thirty years, and to be in compliance, the Park District designed a temporary fence solution in winter 2023 and took it through the Village’s permitting process.

• Plan Commission: no.
• Zoning Board: no.
• Design Review Board: no.
• Village Council: no, twice.

Eighteen months, four boards, not one vote in favor for a permit to provide a smart solution for off-leash dogs at Centennial.

Then, this summer, the Village Council drafted its own dog beach approach — a “temporary” one at Village-owned Tower Road — and solved the fence problem with one sentence:

Under Winnetka’s Home Rule, the ordinance declared, the county’s rules “will have no applicability within the Village.”

The rule that killed the Park District’s plan simply didn’t apply to the Village’s.

The Village Council unveiled that plan at a Special Council Meeting on June 30 (you can watch the YouTube here), to a chamber full of residents who had come to talk about it. Here are a few highlights:

• President Bob Dearborn opened by announcing that this was “not the time for public comment.”
• When Trustee Tina Dalman asked to hear from the people in the room, President Dearborn stated: “There’s no sense coming up…” and later, “we’re not together with the Park District on this right now.”
• The Council deferred the whole thing “to a date uncertain,” 4-1, Dalman dissenting.
• Two residents were finally allowed to speak — three minutes each and after the vote — while many waited patiently to voice their opinions.

Twenty-eight minutes, gavel-to-gavel. The next afternoon the Park District approved the Village’s own plan, 7-0. It has not come back to a Village Council agenda since.

Elder Lane Beach, an 80-Year-Old Pier, and Pipe Chaos

While the dog beach is an annoyance, Elder is a health problem. For years the Park District has told the Village that illegal cross-connections send raw sewage through the Elder storm sewer when it rains hard. Again, as a refresher, the Elder Pier is managed by the Park District; the pipe running under it is managed by the Village.

In May 2025 the Park District started daily testing to prove it. On July 11, 2025, the reading at Elder came back at 40,777 CFU of E. coli per 100 milliliters — 173 times the level that closes a beach. Faced with that number, the Village went looking and found a major illegal cross-connection. The problem did not go away. This summer Elder was closed approximately 25% of the time for bacteria the state’s log lists as of “unknown” origin.

Here is what makes that hard to accept. Since 2016, every plan the Park District has drawn for Elder does the same two things:

• Take down the 1946 pier, and
• In conjunction with the Village, relocate the storm-sewer pipe / outfall out from under it

The Village Engineer signed on to that approach in 2022. The Park District prepared a permit application in October 2023, but the Village refused to accept it, citing an “abeyance period.” When the abeyance period lapsed in April 2024, the Village said the Park District must wait for Strand Engineering to complete a study on the safety of Elder Pier. When Strand released its plan in September 2024, only then was the Elder permit processed — but hearings were never scheduled.

Then, in March 2025, the Park District showed the Village that the pipe inside the pier had disintegrated. The Village’s answer was not to hurry the District’s plan along. It was to declare an emergency and fix the pipe where it lay: a contract “not to exceed” $119,000 to replace sixty-five feet of pipe under the old pier. Sand, waves and rusted anchors turned $119,000 into $316,250 by October — and the dredging began before the permit did.

This summer the structural engineer’s report on the Elder pier finally surfaced. Its finding: the pier is structurally unsound. Eighty years old, fenced off, past its useful life — exactly what the Park District has said for a decade, and exactly why it offered to remove the pier and relocate the sewer at its own expense.

The Village spent $316,000 to put new pipe under a pier that shouldn’t be there, and the outfall still empties into the lake in the middle of a swimming beach.

Tower Road Pier — Closed Since 2020

The Village’s own pier tells the same story from the other side. The end of Tower Road Pier has been closed since 2020, when part of the deck collapsed. Every capital plan since has carried the line “repair storm-damaged pier,” with a deadline that slides a year each year.

In January the Village closed the entire pier — on a visual inspection, after six years of Jersey barriers. Only then came the consultant, the budget of up to a million dollars, and a timeline that now runs into 2027. Beyond that, the Council’s stated preference is to take the pier down after the water plant stops making steam in 2035.

Six years to look. Then a rush.

What OTW Urges

The Park District operates our five beaches. The Village owns pieces of the solution: the Tower Road Pier and the Elder Beach outfall pipe — both, as described above — are long past their useful lives. The Park District has spent years and hundreds of hours of public input on plans. The Village has spent the same years writing ordinances to control what happens over Park District jurisdiction.

OTW’s recommendation is straightforward:

The Village Council and the Park District sit down this fall — on a public agenda with every open lakefront and beach item in front of them — and put in writing who decides what, by when, at whose cost.

Before the 2027 season goes the way of the last several.

The beaches belong to all of us. Somebody has to act like it.

Published by Our Town Winnetka · Our Town. Our Future. Your Voice.

Update, September 17: the Park District presented a strategic plan to the Council committing to written intergovernmental coordination. No trustee asked about the dog beach, Tower Road Pier or Elder Lane. Read the September 17 recap.