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Trem # BA.
MINUTES
PUBLIC AFFAIRS COMMITTEE
Monday, March 22, 2021 7:00 P.M.
Call to Order, Roll Call, and Establishment of a Quorum.
Chairman Chassee called the meeting to order at 7:00pm. Roll Call found Alderman
Brown, Hallett, Swiatek and Short.
Alderman Birch Ferguson and Jakabcsin were not present.
Approval of Minutes.
A. Public Affairs Committee Minutes of March 22, 2021. Alderman Brown
made a motion, seconded by Alderman Swiatek to approve the minutes of the
Public Affairs Committee meeting. Voting Aye: Chairman Chassee, Alderman
Brown, Hallett, Swiatek and Short. Voting Nay: 0. Motion carried.
Public Participation / Presentations.
A. SAF-T Act — Interim Chief Shackelford gave a brief presentation on the
Illinois Bill known as the SAFE-T Act (Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity
— Today) Act, which passed in February 2021.
Items for Consent.
A, Resolution No. 21-R-0028 ~ RedSpeed Illinois and City of West Chicago
Agreement - Alderman Swiatek made a motion, seconded by Alderman Hallett to
direct this item to City Council for approval. Voting Aye: Chairman Chassee,
Alderman Brown, Hallett, Swiatek and Short. Voting Nay: 0. Motion carried.
Items for Discussion.
Unfinished Business.
New Business.
Reports from Staff.

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9, Adjournment. Alderman Swiatek made a motion to adjourn, seconded by
Alderman Short. The motion was approved by voice vote, and the meeting adjourned
at approximately 7:37pm.
Respectfully submitted,
Yahaira Bautiste
Administrative Assistant to Chief of Police
West Chicago Police Department

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Ttem # 4.A.
Phalen Consulting Report to City of West Chicago on COVID-19 Pandemic Pivot of the West
Chicago City Museum
As reflected in the attached FY2020 report for the West Chicago City Museum, although the
City Museum was forced to close our building in March of 2020 due to State of Illinois COVID-19
restriction for museums, City Museum staff were hard at work staying connected to the public,
working on backlog collection projects, and expanding the accessibility of our collections,
educational resources, and research materials. Despite a slight decrease from hours per week in
2019, during 2020 a part-time staff of five staff members, including myself, worked on average
51 hours a week. Staff pay totaled $58,100, a total of 66% of the budget with the remaining
budget going to programs and collections. My position of Director/Curator averaged 25 hours a
week and $33,000 of the total $58,100. Staff rotated on-site workdays to ensure social
distancing and communicated through zoom meetings, regular all staff email updates and
project management systems.
When in-person events were placed on hold, City Museum made a pivot to increase our online
presence with more detailed social media posts. These in-depth posts highlighted stories of
West Chicagoans and events from the community’s long and rich history. These posts have
helped us grow our social media followers, but more importantly, grow our engagement and
reach, a key component of the Phalen Consulting Agreement with the City for operating the
City Museum. Engagement ranged from general thanks for pushing out the entertaining and
educational information, as well as more specific stories of learning new aspects of family
history from our posts. The increased social media also made our large research and permanent
collection more visible, leading to new research requests for information about house histories,
family histories and local interest questions. The City and City Museum have the agreed upon
goal of ensuring the museum’s resources are accessible and utilized by the public in this
manner; creating these types of engagements also provides ways for the general public to feel
included and part of West Chicago history in meaningful ways that help sustain our community
as a desired hometown.
The City Museum also moved events, like our non-fiction book club, First Fridays, Town Hall
Shares and our popular Tales Tombstone Tell, to Zoom, with some programs being recorded for
on-demand viewing later at the convenience of watchers. Hosting online programs has allowed
the City Museum to grow our audience substantially, as those who do not live near West
Chicago, or those who have busy schedules, were now able to view the material live or on-
demand. This aspect of sharing programming virtually will stay with us after the pandemic due
to the success. Former residents, non-local train enthusiasts and seniors were able to access
the free programming and have expressed their gratitude for such fulfilling content being
available. Hosting our popular cemetery walk, Tales Tombstones Tell, virtually allowed seniors,
unable to walk the dark cemetery at night, and families with small kids, to view the program
from the comfort of their home and see more primary sources, which were incorporated into
the video. As with other programs, this program will continue to have a virtual component to

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ensure those audiences are still served and grow the reach of our programmatic calendar, a key
metric in growth of museum outreach.
Although a lot of our programming had to move online, we did launch a new in-person program
“Strolls Through History” walking tour. These small group tours focused on specific aspects of
history, including stories from the cemeteries, local railroad history, downtown buildings, and
historic homes, and allowed small groups of masked and socially distanced individuals to get an
intimate history lesson on the streets of West Chicago. Providing a safe in-person experience
also filled a need for those community members who wanted something beyond digital
engagement. This was especially for families with children, eager to get out of the house and
explore. Families from West Chicago and surrounding areas, especially those with train
enthusiastic children, were able to book semi-private tours and enjoy our local history in safe
ways. Portions of these tours, with expanded visuals, can also be seen in our Mobile Walking
Tour and through HistoryPin, both free, on-demand resources that allows anyone connected to
the internet to explore historic West Chicago photographs positioned on modern-day Google
street-view maps. These virtual tour programs were also used by teachers who were limited to
online tours and virtual museum visits.
City Museum staff also redesigned education programs that were normally done in the
classrooms with students to become virtual programs. These new digital programs aided
teachers remote learning lessons or were part of virtual field trips with City Museum staff being
virtually present for questions and discussions. Outreach was done with District 33 and District
25 schools that the City Museum works closely with in educational needs and development.
Teachers could request programs on specific topics or utilize our catalog of digital history kits
that live on our website. Growing partnerships with West Chicago schools, has been a target
goal of the City Museum for the past eight years, and although growth has occurred in the past,
the need of teachers to gain resources during the pandemic allowed the City Museum to step in
with educational supplements and accelerate partnerships. Our resources were also shared in
DuPage Homeschooling networks and used by families looking to supplement e-learning.
To replace our monthly in-person children’s programs, the City Museum launched History at
Home craft kit bags. These started as events where families could stop by the City Museum to
pick up activity bags. Once we heard feedback from families who lacked transportation or time
to stop by the City Museum, we revamped the program to include the opportunity for families
to request activity bags be delivered to doorsteps, increasing accessibility for all. These History
at Home bags have been very popular and include history-based crafts and activities. Deliveries
of kits were most popular during Thanksgiving and Winter Break when over 160 bags, each
containing eight activities, were delivered to homes throughout the community, an additional
90 bags have been handed out in 2021. The City Museum received numerous emails and
messages of thanks and wonderful pictures of children completing their projects. This program
is continuing monthly with options for pickup and delivery, as the City Museum found requests
from families with limited means benefited from deliveries that were made to apartments and

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houses throughout the entire city. Due to our physical closure, we were able to divert our
budget for exhibits, which always includes extensive children’s activities, to children’s
education programming, which maked up almost 9% of our total budget, or $7,700. The money
put into our educational programming this year helped families to have additional options at a
time when many were facing difficult times and allowed them to feel more connected to the
larger community.
The past year was extremely hard on the public, but for a museum with many collection
projects that often fall to the bottom of our to-do list, the closure of the actual building gave us
time to address the backlog in our collection processing. Processing of the collection backlog
has also been an agreed upon goal for operation of the City Museum for the past eight years,
and staff has worked hard to create new processes to ensure timely processing of new artifact
donations. While addressing our backlog, we also continued the digitization project that was
started in 2015 and now includes almost 18,000 items in our large collection fully digitized.
During the summer of 2020 City Museum staff began migrating our current database system to
a new system, CataloglT, that allows for a public facing platform. This new platform is more
robust than our previous database and after many months of hard work on inputting and
organizing the system, it will go live to the public this summer and be a searchable resource for
researchers and the public. Although it will launch with only a portion of our collection
accessible, the number of items in the public database will grow over time and further expand
our accessibly. Since May of 2020, staff has spent an average of 25 hours a week on collection
work to ensure our rich local history collection is as widely accessible as possible.
Working more extensively in the digital realm and as a society also allowed for new
technological ways to advance our work. After much research and reworking our processes, we
have setup a mini recording studio in the City Museum which allows us to do remote video oral
histories and recordings that augment our existing oral history collection. This project also
allows us to grow our digital collection to fuel future digital programs. Gaining these digital
resources helps us build materials so as we go forward with the reopening of the City Museum
building, we will still have digital programming to push out to our newly expanded audience
once staff is refocused on in-person community programming again.
Over the past year the entire museum field has learned a lot about engagement through
technological advancements and continuing to find ways to be accessible despite physical in-
person limitations. The City Museum was able to learn in remote conference about new tools
and open-source platforms to expand our own work and better serve West Chicago residents
and those who visit our community. The work we did on collection projects married with this
new knowledge base will help us remain relevant and increase our presence. We look forward
to coming out of this pandemic a stronger institution.
Personally, as someone who cares deeply about this community and greatly missed seeing
smiling faces come into the museum, being able to still connect with residents, whether on
zoom, through social media, or by dropping history at their doorsteps, allowed the work of the

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museum to continue and grow. Local history has the special ability to connect people
throughout time and help ground residents to the place they live. Through my work at the City
Museum, and in my role at my other part-time job at the Warrenville Museum, which is open to
the public less than half the amount of time our City Museum is open, it is a joy to bring the
stories of our area’s history to life, to connect families to their ancestors, and to help children
imagine their place in our community's story.

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Phalen Consulting, Inc.,
FY2020 Report for the Management and Operation of the West Chicago City Museum
Staff Time: 2,663.5 (average of 51.2 hours a week; FY19 average of 61.4 a week)
Main Projects:
Staffing Museum open hours
Collections: processing temporary receipts, accessioning artifacts, database entry, digitization of
collection, inventory of collection, research files, newspaper collection, online digitization plan,
special collection processing, Historical Preservation Commission files, artifact storage, new
online collection platform accessible to the public-Cataloglt, backlog processing
Communications: email, mail, reports, social media, website updates
o *During COVID-19 closure extensive social media and online presence boosted to better
reach the community during physical closure
Community outreach projects: Burlington Route Historical Society collaboration, Fire Department
book, record sharing with Methodist Church, DuPage Foundation-Arts DuPage, WeGO Together
for Kids, Healthy West Chicago, Spanish, Cultural Arts Commission-Public Art, new community
care cards campaign, Friends of the Museum holiday ornament.
Conferences/Professional Development: Kane DuPage Regional Museum Association COVID-19
area check in, DEAI meetings, planning meetings, teen programming; Illinois Association of
Museums COVID-19 & DEAI meetings, MASS Action-museum accountability, Tulsa Indigenous
Day, Field Museum land acknowledgement zoom, Chicago Museum Exhibitors Group meetings,
Art Equity trainings, Muze-X museums moving forward sessions, CUSEUM programs, Art of
Gathering, Arts Administrators of Color Conference, Museum Computer Network Conference,
TXHC zooms, Sites of Conscious rethinking Migration Exhibits, AAMG Kress webinars,
American Alliance of Museums conference.
Educational: Digital mini-kits; online resources on wegohistory.com; Library reading program
collaboratives for adults and kids
o During COVID-19 closure new virtual programs and educational highlights and spotlights
on social media and History at Home Craft Kits
Events: walking tours, Tales Tombstones Tell
Exhibits: CB&Q interior exhibit; outdoor interpretive signage for the CB&Q Depot, High Lake
and Sesqui Park displays; HOME exhibit May 2019-April 2021; Women of West Chicago exhibit
May 2021- April 2022; virtual online mini exhibits
Grants: National Council for the Arts grant work; Illinois Humanities COVID resiliency grant
Operations: bookkeeping, staffing, planning
Programs: History Pin, Mobile Walking Tour, Historiography reading history book groups, Voices
of DuPage, Town Hall Shares; Artist in Residency Chris Lucero Calaveras of West Chicago, Rail
Trail, KDRMA Passport to Adventure/GeoCatching; Tales Tombstones Tell; Strolls Through
History-Social Distance Friendly walking tours
Research: organizing research files, working with researchers and processing research requests
Volunteer management
Phalen Consulting FY2020, Summary Report 1

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Collection:
Accession Total:
e Collection total: 34,221 objects
e Collection processed into PastPerfect database: 15,691
e New donations YTD: Railroad materials, local church materials, local business items, COVID
related materials
e **New Catalogit online database: 386 artifacts entered
Research Inquiries: 118 (average 9.8 a month) (house history, local business history, family
history, cemetery history, local school history, local historic buildings)
Visitation:
e Overview
Metric L 2020 [ 2019 2018 |
Open hours | 126* 752 743
Museum Guests i 213* 3,306 3,127
| External Program Attendance | 352* read Gude Sh ec Ee O03 es) as]
Virtual Program Attendance | 552 [ _
Website Unique Visits 2,404 | 2,859 2,257
L Facebook Followers | 935 665 552
Twitter Followers _ 44] 433 408
Instagram Followers | 356 186 186
*Museum closed March 14-July 5; open by appointment only July 5-November 18 due to COVID
pandemic
o Breakout
Walk-in Museum visitors Jan-March 13, 2020 26
during regular open hours (Th
10am-6pm; Fri & Sat 10am-
2pm)
Museum specific visitors Jan-March 13, 2020 128
(researcher, museum related
question)
Museum visitors By July 5-Dec 31, 2020 59
appointment
Program Historiography Non- Third Thursday of 59
Fiction Book Club each month
Program Timeless Tales Jan-March 2020 34
Youth-once a month
Program Afterschool History Jan-Feb 2020 90
Art Program
Program Late Night at the Feb 28, 2020 5
City Museum/Drawing on
History Final Friday
Presentation West Chicago = March 5, 2020 40
Local History for We Go
| Together for Kids
Phalen Consulting FY2020, Summary Report 2

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Collaborative
Education: Ebook April-Dec 2020 118 users
curriculum
Education: Digital Local April-Dec 2020 65 classrooms used
History Lessons
Program: Community May-June 2020 34
Cares Card Drive &
Disbursement to Shut-ins
Program: Late Night May 21, 2020 6
with the City
Museum/WeGo Virtual
Trivia Night
Tour: Stroll Through June 16, 2020 8
History: Small walking
tour of Oakwood
Cemetery
Tour: Stroll Through June 30, 2020 6
History: small walking
tour on Railroad History
Program: Late Night July 31, 2020 8
with the City
Museum/WeGo Virtual
Trivia Night
Event Art Supply August 1, 2020 375 kits
giveaway with Cantigny
Event CB&Q Depot September 2, 2020 130 kits
Train Craft Kits
Giveaway
Program: Tales October 4, 2020 384
Tombstones Tell
Education: History at November 21, 2020 48
Home Craft Kits
Education: History at December 20, 2020 34
Home Craft Kits
*museum was open by appointment only during the COVID-19 outbreak
Volunteer hours: 194 (FY2019: 450) (docent hours, Voices of DuPage, file organizing, event
staffing, newspaper collection, genealogy, research requests, model building and repair, virtual
programs)
Phalen Consulting FY2020, Summary Report 3

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Goal Achievement per statements made in Attachment B
e Education: Annual Goal of 6 total programs during school year including 4 in museum
group tours; unmet as of December 31, 2020; YTD 2 program in school; 0* in museum; 65
virtual classroom programs.
e¢ Summer Passport Program goal of attracting 75 additional visitors through program, the
majority of which from out of town; unmet as of December 31, 2020; (YTD 0* passport
visitors)
e Exhibits/Displays: Annual Goal of at least one new large exhibit unmet as of December 31,
2020*
e Outreach Exhibits: Expand current Depot Days open public hours from four Saturdays a
year to twelve Saturdays a year: unmet as of December 31, 2020*
e Exhibits/Displays: Accessibility goal of maintaining at least 12 hours a week during winter
months and 16 hours a week during spring/summer/fall months unmet as of December 31,
2020*
e Volunteers: monthly goal of utilizing volunteers for 30 hours a month met as of December
31, 2020
e Collection: annual goal of accessioning 50% of the backlog of artifacts met as of
December 31, 2020
e Collection: annual goal of accessioning 75% of 2020 donations met as of December 31,
2020
e Collection: digitizing 10% of the collection during inventory process met as of December
31, 2020
e Research library: monthly goal of serving 10 researchers a month met as of December 31,
2020
¢ Programs: annual goal of 8 programs open to the public met as of December 31, 2020
*museum was open by appointment only during the COVID- 19 outbreak
Financial Overview
For the fiscal year of 2020 under the seventh year of the executed contract with the City of West Chicago
for management of the City Museum, Phalen Consulting, Inc. had total cash inflows of
$88,485.21 and total cash outflows of $88,485.21. Per the February 4, 2019 Agreement between the City of
West Chicago and Phalen Consulting for the Operation of the West Chicago City Museum, City Resolution
No. 19-R-0008 $88,200 of cash inflows came from the City.
Funds were taken from the Museum’s Trust Fund, administered by the Friends of the West Chicago City
Museum, to cover additional costs in the 2020 calendar/fiscal year, not covered by other inflows, totaling
$285.21.
Category Amount budgeted YTD (Dec. 31, 2020)
Staff $60,000 $58,086.63
Training and Tuition $1,000 $1,359.87
Membership dues/subscription $1,500 $1,945.96 |
Phalen Consulting FY2020, Summary Report 4

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Printing and binding $1,100 $100.00
Advertising and promotions $800 $2,913.15
Other contractual services $2,000 $3,400.00
Computer/office supplies $1,000 $6,585.89
| Tools & equipment $800 $2,193.38
Educational exhibitions $11,600 $1,968.16
Educational programming $4,200 $7,625.30
Miscellaneous $1,000 $0.00
Collection maintenance $2,000 $615.38
‘Additional arts programming $1,000 $1,500.00
Other $200 $191.49
$88,200 $88,485.21
For the fiscal year of 2020 the West Chicago City Museum’s Trust Fund had total cash inflows of $224.95
and total cash outflows of $285.21, for a net deficit of $60.26.
e Inflows
© $221.00 donations made by museum visitors
o $3.95 from interest revenue on account
e Outflows
© $285.21 to cover Phalen Consulting FY2020 deficit
FY2021 Preview
e Expand digital offerings and integrate into in-person events once safe
e Events and museum programs that partner with other community entities to help rebuild a
sense of community negatively impacted during COVID
e Expanded small outdoor events (walking tours, cemetery tours, educational programs)
e Continue to strengthen relationships with schools and increase community collaborations
e Continue to address collections backlog and storage issues
e Plan for digital asset maintenance
e Launch online collections database
Phalen Consulting FY2020, Summary Report 5