The tiny community of Ringwood is today confronting the same problem many northwest suburbs faced nearly a century ago.
Ringwood is an unincorporated area in McHenry County and has no municipal structure. Residents, however, have a sense of identity they don’t want to surrender.
Yet as the county continues to grow, residents fear they will be claimed by a neighboring municipality unless they beat others to the punch and become their own city.
“We are a non-entity,” said Rick Mack, who grew up there and now heads Citizens for Ringwood. “We are trying to hold back the annexation fever.”
Ringwood’s plight illustrates what happens when established municipalities expand their borders and unincorporated land in a region gradually disappears.
As development has fanned outward from Chicago, the northwest area’s agricultural roots are being pulled up and a mix of commercial and residential building is settling in.
In northwest Cook County, pickings are slim when it comes to land unclaimed by any village, and in the future planners say all will probably be swallowed up.
The Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission predicts that by 2010, the unincorporated residential population will drop by roughly two-thirds, from 64,000 to 22,000, in the seven townships that make up most of northwest suburban Cook County.
Regional and village planners say it won’t take that long for unincorporated territory to dry up.
James Ford, assistant director of the planning commission, said that within the next 10 years the western end of Cook County will be as residentially and commercially developed as eastern Cook.
Ford speculated that when the land rush is finally over, only parcels that are extremely undesirable-such as high-crime and environmentally unsound areas-will not be spoken for. Indeed, the last prime pieces of real estate on Cook County’s west end are the subject of annexation talk.
They include the Klehm family nursery property, a 700-acre parcel off the Northwest Tollway between Hoffman Estates and Barrington. Another tract is south of the tollway and known as the Mullady land, 350 acres that Pasquinelli Partners Inc. plans to use for 540 homes.
Not surprisingly, towns on Cook County’s western edge are expected to post the biggest population gains over the next 16 years, while those closer to Chicago are not anticipating big increases.
Top population gains in northwest Cook County, according to the planning commission, are expected to be in Schaumburg, Hoffman Estates and Palatine. In Kane County, hamlets like East Dundee, West Dundee and Gilberts are expected to more than double their 1980 census counts by 2010. And Elgin, which has growing room to the west, is expected to reach 99,000 people by 2010, up from 63,000 in 1980.
In McHenry, the state’s fastest growing county, boomtowns such as Crystal Lake, Algonquin and the once-tiny Lake in the Hills are expected to double or even triple their numbers between 1980 and 2010.
Much of that growth will be spurred by annexation.
McHenry County planners created a long-range pattern for development and annexation that aims to preserve the county’s rural flavor by preserving open space. At the same time, the plan recognizes the inevitability of development, particularly near urban areas such as Algonquin, Woodstock and Crystal Lake.
Jim Hogue, principal planner for McHenry County, said the annexation trend of the last five years is tapering off, particularly in the county’s southeast quadrant, as towns realize they need to balance residential growth with some type of business base.
However, even with the county’s plan, Hogue said everything is not expected to fall neatly into place because towns can annex whatever land they want.
Towns that have already undergone rapid growth periods say they were spurred partly by their neighbors’ intentions and by the need to create a balanced residential and business base.
In Crystal Lake, manager Joseph Misurelli said, benefits in the form of impact fees paid the city would have been lost if Crystal Lake had not claimed new land in the 1970s, the city’s peak growth years.
The police department was providing assistance to some unincorporated properties but receiving no taxes in return. In addition, the city sensed similar annexation intentions from nearby towns and realized it needed to move quickly, Misurelli said.
To the east, Elk Grove Village wanted to expand its boundaries to build up its industrial park, which keeps residential property taxes down, according to Village Manager Gary Parrin.
An annexation plan was key for long-range planners to design the village’s network of roads, utilities and zoning districts, he said.
Algonquin may have broken new ground in McHenry County by becoming one of the first towns to address growth by forging boundary agreements with neighboring municipalities of Barrington Hills, Lake in the Hills, Huntley and Carpentersville.
Although Algonquin has not annexed all the land within its agreed boundaries, Village Administrator William Ganek said border pacts give the village a reference point for planning.
The southwest Lake County towns of North Barrington, Lake Barrington, Wauconda, Island Lake and Fox River Valley Gardens reached a similar agreement late last year spelling out each other’s turf should a property owner want to annex into a community.
The intent is to stop the border battles that sometimes erupt between towns as developers shop around for the best zoning deal.
Nowadays, suburban planners say they are not interested in quantity as much as quality-namely, annexing land that will produce communities with a healthy balance of residential and commercial uses.
Officials in the Elgin and Schaumburg area are among those who say that residential development routinely does not pay for itself; instead, such development puts more demands on village services than it generates in tax revenue.
A developer’s reason, “pure and simple,” to annex into a community is for sewer and water hookups, according to Ronald Sova, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Kimball-Hill Inc., a leading northwest suburban residential developer.
The costly alternative-constructing subdivisions with homes on septic systems-can also limit the number of homes that can be built on a site, Sova said.
From an environmental perspective, conservationists hope land annexation decisions will be made with an eye toward preservation of open space.
One solution to this problem has been for the Cook County Forest Preserve District to acquire large amounts of land. Of the district’s 67,000 acres, roughly a third lies within the county’s northwest segment, and the district is looking to buy more. One of the Forest Preserve District’s most recent acquisitions was the Younghusband Farm, 105 acres between Baker’s Lake and Dundee Road, ensuring that the land will remain a natural area.
Waid Vanderpoel of the Barrington-based Citizens for Conservation has spotted one distressing trend that’s helping inflate some village sizes. “There is a lot of ego in it, and many village officials love to see their villages grow,” he said.
Whatever the reason for other annexations, Ringwood residents hope they will not be annexed and lose their sense of community.
“We are afraid that the quaintness of the town won’t exist anymore,” Rick Mack said.
