Bartonville Mayor Leon Ricca is glad to be back on the job after surviving a major health scare earlier this spring.
It's been a little more than two weeks since Ricca returned to his mayoral duties, and he says he's feeling great now. But that wasn't the case a few months ago when he had to be rushed to OSF Saint Francis Medical Center.
“I had triple bypass surgery, and they've done some other stuff while they were in there – an ablation for a-fib (atrial fibrillation),” Ricca said. “But right now, doing great. I'm in cardiac rehab at The Riverplex three days a week. So right now, everything's great.”
Ricca says doctors never termed the incident as a heart attack, but they did need to clear a major blockage. He recalls going into village hall for work one day and realizing something was very wrong.
“I had severe pain in my chest. I made it into the office here, long enough to sit into one of these chairs and call 911,” Ricca said. “I told them I knew that it was a lot more severe than the a-fib attack I had had a year ago.”
The 70-year-old Ricca credits the rapid response from paramedics and other first responders, and the doctors who quickly got to work at saving his life.
“(They) tried to put stents in on Thursday morning – this happened on Wednesday night – they tried to put stents in on Thursday morning (but) they couldn't; it was too plugged,” Ricca said. “So they put a heart pump on and a balloon up to my heart and an external pump.
“They had to wait for the blood thinner that I had been on to get out of my system before they could do the open heart surgery. So I waited two days, and Saturday morning they did the open heart surgery and everything went great.”
Ricca says he stayed in the hospital for a full week, with family close by. When he returned home, Ricca says he was instructed to take things easy, with physical activity mostly limited to small amounts of walking to keep up his strength.
He also had to step away from the mayor’s office for eight weeks as he recovered from the surgery. Ricca says he never felt the urge to check on how things were going, because he had complete confidence in village clerk Michelle Carr-Bruce and the board of trustees to keep everything running smoothly in his absence.
“My clerk sent me an email the day before the surgery and said, ‘you know, we got this. Turn your phone off, turn your email off, turn your text off,’ and they just took over,” Ricca said. “My clerk and several of the board members, they took over and it was very seamless. There were people in town that didn't even know I was gone or in the hospital, so they did a great job.”
Ricca says he visits The Riverplex on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings to work on the treadmill as part of his recovery. As far as on the job goes, he says he knows he can't overexert himself but he also doesn't feel any need to limit his pace.
“The office type work is fine. I'm not – you know, there's no stress there, really, to speak of. I mean, there's stress as part of getting the job (done), but there's no physical stress,” Ricca said.
Now that he's returned to work, Ricca doesn't anticipate having any difficulty handling his responsibility to the village.
“Not really any challenges, other than what we were dealing with before – and that's just some of the projects that we have going. So you just kind of move forward with them,” he said.
One project in particular stands at the top of Ricca’s list of priorities for Bartonville.
“We're in the middle of approving our comprehensive plan. We've approved it pretty much at the committee, with some small changes,” he said. “That will come back to the board at one of the next – I don't think it'll be the next meeting, but the meeting after – to approve the full comprehensive plan that we haven't had since 2006; (that) was the last one we had.”
Ricca said the village's comprehensive plan will look ahead for the next two decades.
“They call it a 20-year plan, but you update it every five years or so, and you can update it continuously,” he said, adding that the project is driven by one main objective with several focus areas. “Just improving the image of the Bartonville area, and connectivity of trails between schools, libraries and parks.”
Ricca said the village has worked with a consulting firm on developing ways to spark more economic development in Bartonville. He points to one specific area in particular as a major need for the village.
“I think medium-density housing is probably one of the biggest things, and maybe senior housing; we'd love to have that,” Ricca said. “That's just tough because there's always state grants in that, and to get the state tax credits, they're judged on a lot of different parameters. Sometimes you get them, sometimes you don't. It just depends on how good a job the developer does in putting the plan forward.”
The mayor also said he thinks the village should explore opportunities to grow in size over the next few years.
“We would like to annex more property, and that's kind of a tough thing (with) the way we're kind of boxed in,” he said. “But we're working on things like that, just to increase the tax base, and hopefully lower taxes for the rest of the residents if we can increase the tax base.”
Ricca added he believes Bartonville is in very strong shape from a financial standpoint.
“The only debt we have is one fire truck, and we've got the money set aside to pay for that,” he said. “Right now, our pension funds are at 95-plus % funded, which most cities cannot say. I mean, most of them are at 40-50%; we're at 95-98% funded in both the IMRF (Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund) and the police pension fund.”
