Eve Lee was stunned when she first heard the news.
As the sales agent for Hunt Club Farms in northern Lake County, a 621-acre development of estates for the horsey set, she had been promoting the property as a haven for those who seek wide-open spaces.
Suddenly, what was to be possibly the largest factory outlet shopping mall in the world was being dropped on Hunt Club`s doorstep, posing a distinct threat to her sales pitch if to not the entire ritzy ambience of the development.
Angry owners of the $450,000-plus houses on the two- to eight-acre lots began hinting that she had known all long that they were being lured into discount mall heaven.
But, says Lee, she had not known. What made it all the worse was that at the time, in 1988, she was the chairman of the Lake County Regional Planning Commission, a position that might be thought to give her a certain insight into future development.
And in fact the county`s comprehensive plan showed the area northwest of the intersection of Interstate Highway 94 and Grand Avenue outside Gurnee as low-density residential or agricultural, with one- to five-acre lots and no sewer service.
But when it comes to development, Lake County government has surprisingly little say in what goes where within the county lines.
The key governmental power in determining the shape of growth in Lake County and the rest of the Chicago metropolitan area lies with the 266 municipalities, all off whom can make decisions affecting the entire county or region without considering that impact.
And when the growth involves the potential of millions of dollars in tax revenues, pre-existing county plans may count for very little. ”There`s no means for the county to implement its plans,” said Lee.
The Lake County comprehensive plan got bypassed in 1988 when Western Development Corp. of Washington, D.C., proposed its 325-acre, $200 million, 2 million-plus-square-foot Gurnee Mills mall.
With the promise of $20 million to $30 million in sales tax revenues for the state, plus $5 million for Gurnee, Western officials talked Gurnee into annexing the unincorporated land. Then they persuaded the Lake County board to allow extension of sewer service into the area.
Lee said she called a friend in then-Gov. James Thompson`s office in Springfield to see whether help could be enlisted from that quarter in stopping the project.
She recalls the answer: ”We can`t help you on this one. Big Jim won`t let $23 million go into Wisconsin.” The reference was evidently to the Factory Outlet Centre across the state line in Kenosha County.
At that point, Lee and Hunt Club Farms developer Gerald Fogelson decided to live with Gurnee Mills rather than fight it. ”We seriously considered opposing it, but then decided morally we couldn`t as developers and planners,” she said. Fogelson is co-developer of the mammoth Central Station mixed-use project planned for the Near South Side lakefront.
Lee said she and Fogelson became the ”conscience” of Gurnee Mills and were able to get Western Development to promise $4 million in road
improvements to be done at the discretion of the county transportation department, plus berms and landscaping to mitigate its effect on idyllic Hunt Club Farms, which is only a few hundred yards away.
”We decided to make it as compatible as it could be,” Lee said.
Lee left the planning commission in 1989 after serving on it for 18 years and has become president of the Lake County Board of Realtors. She now says the coming of Gurnee Mills, which is set to open Aug. 8, was perhaps for the best, given its placement on a major expressway interchange and across from Great America.
But her experiences have left her disillusioned with the way development gets planned and managed in the county. Growth management efforts ”have not been successful,” she said. ”We`ve really lost the ballgame.”
Lee, like many other critics of planning failures in the metropolitan area, blames the fact that land-use control resides in local communities. The communities not only have full planning and zoning authority within their borders but have somewhat more limited powers extending a mile and a half into unincorporated areas beyond their boundaries.
”There`s no restrictions on municipalities looking out for their own needs,” she said. ”There`s no understanding of regional planning.”
County or regional planners can collect data showing where growth might occur, develop elaborate plans for infrastructure that might handle it, create maps showing rural areas in green and high-density areas in purple, but when it comes to the real world, the individual cities and towns have the power.
”In Illinois the counties are much less powerful in relation to controlling local growth and development than municipalities,” said Robert Chave, Lake Country planning director and head of the state chapter of the American Planning Association.
”It`s nice to have different patterns of colors on a map,” he said,
”but if it doesn`t get implemented, it just sits there and no one does anything.”
This local control sometimes ends up in a scramble for tax revenues. When the stakes are as high as with Gurnee Mills, it`s easy to see how a little land-use tinkering opposed perhaps only by a bunch of polo players and fox hunters could be easily justified.
But critics say that such tinkering by the 51 municipalities in Lake County-or the 266 municipalities or 1,250 taxing bodies in the six-county area-adds up to a landscape carpeted by a chaotic sprawl in a manner that ignores the need for regional consideration of problems such as traffic, solid waste disposal, storm-water management, open-space preservation and affordable housing.
”Planning has become a mirage, it has truly become a collaboration with the inevitable,” charged Don Klein, director of the Barrington Area Council of Governments, in testimony late last year to the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission (NIPC).
Towns pursue taxable development instead of common sense, Klein said.
”All of it is chasing ratables. It`s fiscal zoning at its best,” he added more recently.
In Lake County particularly, the land-planning debate has tended to polarize into what are seen as rampant growth and no-growth (or elitist)
factions, though members of both sides deny the labels.
”Some communities want to preserve low density and a rural character and are concerned about quality-of-life factors,” said NIPC director Lawrence Christmas. ”Others are hungry for improved tax base and higher density development.”
Possibly one reason why the Lake County planning debate has degenerated into the growth/no-growth dichotomy is that the only countywide entity with any real power to affect growth decisions has been the Lake County Forest Preserve District. Once the district acquires a piece of property, it is no longer available for development.
During the late 1980s, the chairman of the forest preserve district`s land acquisition committee was F.T. ”Mike” Graham, at the time a county board member. Graham, who gave up his county board seat, is Lake County`s most widely known and controversial open-space proponent.
In 1989 and 1990, the district acquired more than 2,700 acres of land, 400 acres more than it had acquired over the previous nine years. Other sites were designated as forest preserve land, which effectively stops development even if the final purchase is never accomplished.
When last November`s election gave more growth-oriented politicans a majority on the Lake County Board, the forest preserve district, which is governed by the county board, de-designated some land the previous board had set aside.
The de-designated lands were either ”not environmentally significant, or the cost made them prohibitive,” said Andrea Moore, the current chairman of the district.
County Board Chairman Robert Depke, who won his county board seat with the help of contributions from home builders and Realtors, said the previous forest preserve group had improperly used the district as a tool for growth management.
”Everything those people did was to stop development,” he said.
Depke expresses the view that Lake County has long been fated to lose its rural character because of its location between Chicago and Milwaukee. ”Lake County will get built out,” he said. ”I don`t think there`s been a future for agricultural preservation in Lake County for the last 20 years.”
Lee said such changes in the makeup of the county board have been occurring over the past 25 years she has been a real estate broker or plan commission member in the county. The result has been a ”push-me, pull-me effect” on growth management, she added.
Considering that growth planning in Lake County has either been a free-for-all among municipalities with differing objectives or, in the case of the forest preserve distrct, a tug of war among opposing factions, hopes seem dim for a coordinated, rational, countywide approach to development.
The only potential for improvement, according to Lake County planner Chave, lies in what he sees as a growing willingness of municipalities to sit down with each other and county officials to talk over countywide problems.
He cited a committee with six county board representatives and six representatives from municipalities that is meeting regularly to discuss issues of common concern, such as a proposed countywide transportation impact fee similar to the one Du Page County has levied on new development to fund road projects.
Another county/municipal unit to address a problem of regional impact is the Lake County Stormwater Management Planning Committee, which is in the process of fashioning a tough ordinance establishing countywide minimum standards for storm-water, flood-plain and wetlands management.
And the county has a solid waste agency that has been joined by 34 of the 51 governmental units whose mission is to plan a countywide solution to the garbage disposal problem.
In addition, a group of Lake County towns has formed the Corridor Planning Council for Central Lake County to discuss issues surrounding the controversial proposed extension of Illinois Highway 53. The group even includes Long Grove, which has led the fight to stop the road.
The forest preserve district is also starting to take a cooperative approach to land preservation, seeking to work with landowners and developers to reach mutual agreements to preserve open space rather than moving in on property with the threat of condemnation, according to district chairman Moore.
That technique, she said, has already resulted in a plan for the 2,500-acre Oak Prairie Reserve north of Libertyville, which involves a
combination of purchases by the forest preserve district and the Liberty Township Open Space District, plus easements and convenants agreed to by landowners that allow some clustered development but leave much land for agriculture. These agreements have been drawn up by CorLands, the legal arm of the Chicago-based Open Space Project, said Moore.
Because property in Lake County has become so expensive, Moore said, the forest preserve district can`t afford to make straight purchases of all the land that should be sheltered from development.
”More than anything, we hear that citizens want us to preserve the rural character of the county,” she said. ”If we in government expect to try and achieve that, we have to be much more creative. When we work with landowners and allow some types of development, have other areas restricted voluntarily and purchase some along with that, everyone wins.”
Whether such voluntary cooperation among municipalities, the county and private individuals will endure or in fact lead to effective planning and coordination is, of course, open to question.
Lake County planner Chave argues that state law needs to be amended to give more force to both countywide and regional planning efforts.
But at present, voluntarism is the only option, because local communities, jealous of their powers, have always resisted any kind of compulsory state or regional planning mechanism.
”There ought to be greater recognition of regional planning values, and the state ought to get off its duff and create state enabling legislation to give regional planning more capability for planning to get out of the Dark Ages,” he said.
”We`re making progress without it, and I don`t think it`s going to happen politically,” said NIPC director Christmas. ”I don`t really know how effective (state land planning) has been and whether they`ve avoided the problems we have. Considering the circumstances we`re in, we`re not doing too badly, but we need more help.”
———-
NEXT SUNDAY: Should the state impose controls on the local development process?
