Crystal Lake has undergone many changes in the nine years since the city last adopted a comprehensive land-use plan.
The city’s third high school, Prairie Ridge, for instance, opened in the fall of 1997 and doesn’t even appear on the current land-use map.
Now the city’s Plan Commission has set its sights on devising a new plan and hopes to have a new map ready by summer.
The current plan was adopted in 1989, when Crystal Lake’s population was about 24,000. The population has increased by about 11,000 since then, creating a need for more housing, schools and infrastructure–and rendering the map incorrect in many areas.
“The map needs updating every 5 to 10 years in a community with rapid growth,” said city planner Michelle Rentzsch.
The Plan Commission will be spend one meeting a month from now until June discussing the land-use plan, which will lay out a scheme for the city’s future.
Crystal Lake’s neighbor to the northwest, Woodstock, revises its comprehensive plan every five years and is due for a revamping next year. But in recent weeks, Woodstock officials amended the plan to try to curtail rapid growth.
On the northeast side of town, for example, the city changed the designation of a 1,600-acre parcel to agricultural from residential.
That process included several time-consuming public hearings, but Woodstock Mayor Alan Cornue said the hearings were vital.
“You have to listen and take into account (public) concerns because the comprehensive plan presents the vision the city has of itself,” Cornue said.
Crystal Lake Mayor Robert Wagner, who believes communities should be clearly defined and separated by parks and green space, said he hopes his city’s commission will take that into account in its revision.
“I just hope they get out their green crayons and we have a plan that creates a nice buffer between the cities and villages and different property uses,” Wagner said.
The Crystal Lake Plan Commission also is looking at innovative uses of land for development.
Traditional planning isolates districts by use, Wagner said.
“The idea is that commercial should be in one district, industrial in another and residential in a third,” he said.
But city planners recently decided that a new designation might be appropriate for industrial parks. Commission Chairwoman Valerie Marek said the new designation would solve the problem of trying to determine which parcels should be designated industrial and which should be zoned business within a complex.
The new designation would give developers some leeway, she said, for compatible uses within a business park.
Enforcement of the comprehensive plan will be up to the community. But revisions to the map don’t automatically change the current zoning designations.
If a petitioner comes before the Zoning Board requesting a change from the comprehensive plan, the board still has the option of determining whether the petitioner’s request might be a better use for the parcel.
“The comprehensive plan,” Rentzsch said, “is just the community’s basic intention with respect to future development.”
