*Much of the content for this article was taken from an interview on Fred Kroner’s podcast, I’m Game.
There’s always a moment when you can feel the change in the weather sweep over the prairie in East Central Illinois. The skies get a little grayer. The morning is a little crisper. The leaves on the trees dance a little more and the squirrels bounce along the ground.
Everyone knows there is a change in store.
It’s a scene that Champaign County Forest Preserve’s Executive Director Mary Ellen Wuellner has experienced as the organization gears up for fall and winter programming. But this year, as Wuellner hands the reigns of the organization over to Lorrie Pearson upon retirement, she hopes to spend a few moments just enjoying the fruits of her labor.
Wuellner joined the Forest Preserve staff 15 years ago when she left a position focused on grant writing with the City of Champaign to greet people at the Museum of the Grand Prairie.
“Part of the role as that person at the museum is to run the gift store as well,” Wuellner said. “I was really pretty bad at that. You know, retail has never been my cup of tea.”
But Wuellner and Museum Director Cheryl Kennedy knew the assignment was only temporary.
Wuellner moved quickly into a full-time grant writing position with the Forest Preserve within the year. While Wuellner had a political science degree, she was not educated in the environmental or social history work that CCFPD does on a day-to-day basis.
She relied on fellow staff to fill in the gaps in order to get grants.
“It made it very easy for me to find the people that I needed to find who knew that subject matter well enough for me to write those grants,” she said. “That experience as a grant writer here allowed me to work with everybody across the district. I worked with the Natural Resources staff. I worked with the Museum and Education staff. I worked with the Operation staff.”
That knowledge of how the entire organization came in handy when Wuellner moved into the position of Executive Director four years ago.
“It certainly wasn’t planned the way that things worked out for me, but I don’t think I could have planned it as well as it actually happened,” she said.
Founded in 1935, the Champaign County Forest Preserve owns and operates 4,028 acres of prairies, forests, savannas, and wetlands, including seven public parks and two educational facilities. Wuellner was tasked with overseeing the staff, while also making sure the Board of Commissioners had the best possible information to make good decisions about the public land.
Alongside finding ways to draw visitors to the grounds, Wuellner was also intricately involved in extending the Kickapoo Rail Trail through Champaign County, getting Dark Sky designation for Middlefork River Preserve, and adopting 100 acres of land north of Mahomet, now known as Heron View.
Perhaps most notably, though, under Wuellner’s leadership, the CCFPD was able to get a referendum passed by Champaign County voters as the 2020 pandemic raged on.
“Our facilities here, many of them are 40 to 60 years old, and just like a house, things start kind of falling apart and everything seems to start falling apart all at the same time,” Wuellner said. “So we’ve got a lot of infrastructure: we’ve got dams and buildings and other facilities that are in need of restoration or repair. Our existing revenue did not allow us to handle all of those repairs that were coming all at the same time.”
The tax increase, which still keeps CCFPD at the bottom of the share of the tax rate, will not only allow the Forest Preserve to manage those assets but will also allow for future development of already popular attractions.
Wuellner, who will continue to sit on the Friends of the Forest Preserve Board, said that she is excited to still have a hand in finishing off the Kickapoo Rail Trail in Champaign County, restoring Willow Pond at Middlefork, and expanding camping facilities there, too.
Pearson, who recently served as development services director in Urbana, will join the CCFPD team on Sept. 27.
Wuellner said that she’s not quite ready to jump into anything new at this point in time. As the leaves change and fall to the ground, walking the 50 miles of trails throughout the Forest Preserve will take on a new meaning as she won’t have to look for things to be improved upon when the weekend ends.
“I love to do outside work, like the garden, ride my bicycle, hike and be out in nature, so I plan to do a lot more of that,” she said.
