Don Klein looks at the center of a map of the Barrington area and sees comfortable mansions and winding roads amid a countryside reminiscent of a 19th Century English landscape.
But at the edges of the canvas, he sees that bucolic lifestyle fading under the approaching bright lights and heavy traffic of sprawling malls, movie theaters and townhouses.
Last week, South Barrington’s outgoing Village Board gave final approval to a 30-screen movie theater at Barrington Road and the Northwest Tollway.
And though plans for a $300 million megamall in North Barrington and a 600-acre housing development in South Barrington both have been rejected by those villages, the land targeted by these proposals remains a blank canvas waiting for a developer’s thick paintbrush.
The emerging portrait is not what Klein and the Barrington Area Council of Governments, which he directs, had in mind when they created their vision for the Barrington area nearly 30 years ago. At issue are not only the last of the large land tracts in the region, but the future of BACOG itself.
For the last year, the mayors of the seven towns in BACOG have been struggling to answer this question: If the communities can no longer sustain the BACOG vision of land use, should the vision change to help towns preserve what they can of the Barrington lifestyle?
The BACOG vision of bucolic tranquility emerged nearly three decades ago to draw together the villages in the 90-square-mile region encompassing Barrington, Barrington Hills, Deer Park, Lake Barrington, North Barrington, South Barrington and Tower Lakes.
According to BACOG’s comprehensive plan, all retail, corporate and commercial businesses were to be located in Barrington. The other communities were to maintain a rustic environment with large homes on even larger plots of land.
United, the towns have fended off common threats such as development and tollway expansion, preserving a pastoral lifestyle for their residents.
“This area is predicated on an open countryside feel,” Klein said. “You have mostly 5-acre lots, two-lane roads, intersections with no retail on them. Where else can you go to see that?”
But some members of the coalition may no longer be able to sustain the vision.
After three decades of allowing only houses to be built, some villages are facing a financial crunch, Klein said. Without stores to generate sales-tax revenue, the rising costs of operating a village have outpaced municipal incomes almost exclusively from real-estate taxes and building permits, he said.
For North Barrington and South Barrington especially, Klein said, competition from aggressive neighboring towns outside BACOG may force village boards to accept expansion as a way to protect their borders and control their way of life.
“Would South Barrington have looked at that 30-screen complex if (neighboring) Hoffman Estates wasn’t interested?” Klein said.
Last week, American Multi-Cinema Inc. broke ground on its 30-screen, 6,000-seat complex on about 70 acres of the Midlands property at Barrington Road and the Northwest Tollway.
The complex is just a half-mile south of a proposed 24-screen cinema that Hoffman Estates initially approved last December on 22 acres at Barrington Road and Lakewood Boulevard. That project, proposed by Cinemark U.S.A., is still awaiting final approval from the Hoffman Estates Village Board.
The cinemas aren’t the only expansion that South Barrington is considering. A new mayor and Village Board are set to consider what to do with 600 acres in the southwest corner of the village known as the Klehm property. A plan to build homes on lots of less than an acre apiece was rejected by the board.
In North Barrington, the triangle of 110 acres at U.S. Highway 12 and Old McHenry Road remains undeveloped after the Village Board rejected a plan by Michigan-based Taubman Inc. to build a megamall there.
“Most of the towns have survived by hanging onto tight budgets that come from residential (property taxes),” Klein said. “But when a developer gives you a mall on the edges of the village that will add $1 million or so to your budget, you start to think it will solve your problems.”
Not so, said Barrington Hills Mayor James Kempe, a stalwart defender of BACOG.
“Some of these communities are so eager for tax revenues that they forget the consequences and back themselves into a corner,” said Kempe. “But when you make concessions, the burdens go up.
“Rapid growth does not solve a community’s financial problems” because it brings the added costs of public works, more police and road maintenance, he said.
And any expansion in any part of the Barrington area ultimately will have an impact on the other towns, Klein said.
“This area has always hung together,” he said. “Once you fragment that, you weaken our ability to stand against that kind of development.”
