Those who attended Buffalo Grove Days last month may remember standing at the intersection of Lake Cook Road and Raupp Boulevard, waiting to cross from the food tents back to the carnival rides.
But under a new plan, that may be the last time visitors will have to wait in line to go from one side of Buffalo Grove’s summer festival to the other. Organizers say they are picking up the whole circus and moving it to a new location next year.
The Village Hall-funded Labor Day weekend gathering is moving to Mike Rylko Community Park for 2016, in an effort to prevent accidents and avoid traffic snarls while Lake Cook Road is under heavy construction.
Paulette Greenberg, who co-chairs the organizing committee with J.V. Springman, said her group will spend the next 11 months going through every detail they can think of, trying to predict what will go wrong before it does.
“It is overwhelming,” Greenberg said. “We’re making lists of everything that we can think of that we do now that we have to do over there. It’s like a giant puzzle, trying to figure out how to fit everything together.”
But the puzzle board will have more space next year: Greenberg said Rylko is larger than the Verna Clayton Village Campus. She cautioned attendees to not hope for a larger main stage or beer tent next year, but there should be more room for milling about.
“The grassy area alone will be two and a half times the grassy area of the St. Mary field,” Greenberg said, referring to the space that St. Mary Church has long allowed Buffalo Grove Days to use.
“It’s been on the books for years, there’s just never been a reason to make the change,” she said. “Then it became a reality that we had to do something.”
That “reality” is coming from the Cook County Department of Transportation and Highways, which next year plans to spend more than $50 million on an upheaval of Lake Cook Road from Hastings Lane to Raupp Boulevard. Crews will widen that section from two lanes both ways to three, a project that is scheduled to take until 2018.
Thus, Greenberg said Rylko will be the Buffalo Grove Days site for several years to come. The triangular park, built between Illinois Route 83, Deerfield Parkway and Buffalo Grove Road, should contain the entire event, she said —no longer will it be bisected by a road that moves 53,000 cars per day and averages more than 100 crashes annually, according to Cook County transportation records.
Village Hall and Cook County have discussed the Lake Cook Road project for years, but Greenberg said its potential impact on Buffalo Grove Days became much more clear during the 2014 festival, when a driver ran a red light at Lake Cook and Raupp and hit with a volunteer driving a golf cart through the intersection.
“Fifty police witnesses were standing right there — they got him,” Greenberg recalled. “But we can’t risk that again.”
Good weather brought more than 40,000 total visitors to the 2015 edition, she said, and resulted in zero injuries. But the combination of ongoing construction, compacted traffic and another huge crowd is a risk Greenberg said village authorities were no longer willing to face.
“It’s way too dangerous,” she said.
One major Buffalo Grove Days feature will see little change, though: the parade will still travel down the residential streets of Bernard Drive and Raupp Boulevard before ending at Emmerich Park, which Greenberg said should now be empty of activities and instead full of participants’ cars. Besides the interest in maintaining that tradition, Greenberg said moving the parade to Route 83 was impossible — the state would not give village police permission to close it.
Moving the five-day show is adding a massive amount of work to a committee that has been operating almost free of mishaps for a decade, Greenberg said. But she expected the payoff to be worth the labor.
“We don’t have to worry about people having to cross busy streets,” she said.
Village manager Dane Bragg and parks department executive director Ryan Risinger have not yet settled on an intergovernmental agreement, officials say, and the scope of usage fees and compensation are undetermined.
Twitter @RonnieAtPioneer
