Last month’s Lake County Board vote to dissolve the Avon-Fremont Drainage District marked the ninth unit of local government to begin the dissolution or consolidation process since 2017, an effort that has been praised in a state infamous for its bureaucratic glut.
The Avon-Fremont Drainage District is one of four such remaining districts in Lake County. State code allows drainage districts to be dissolved if each municipality within its borders and the county agree to dissolution, as long as there are no outstanding debts and dissolution won’t stop any federal or state permits or grants.
Chicago-based research institute The Civic Federation, which advocates for the elimination of excess government bodies, has previously praised Lake County for its efforts. Still more could be on the chopping block, as county staff and leadership argue the merits of eliminating redundant taxing bodies.
Depending on who is doing the counting, Illinois has between about 7,000 and 9,000 units of government, based on numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau and The Civic Federation, respectively, with the discrepancy due to disagreements over the technical qualifications of a government body. Regardless, Illinois has many thousands more than any other state in the country.
“Illinois has the most units of local government across the United States by a long shot,” Lake County Deputy Administrator Matt Meyers said. “That’s a lot of overhead that should be looked at.”
County Board Chair Sandy Hart has been a vocal advocate for cutting smaller redundant units of government in the county, viewing it as a way to save residents money.
That means targeting sanitary, drainage and mosquito abatement districts — largely single-issue government bodies whose responsibilities, Hart argued, can be covered by the municipalities.
Lake County’s 2025 report included a rundown of those efforts since 2017, starting with the dissolution of the Round Lake Sanitary District. The next year, the Seavey Drainage District was dissolved, followed by the Beach Park Drainage District and Lake Bluff Mosquito Abatement District in 2021.
In 2023, the Lakes Region Sanitary District dissolved and the Skokie East and West Drainage Districts consolidated into the Skokie Consolidated Drainage District. The dissolution process for Slocum Lake and Avon-Fremont Drainage Districts kicked off in 2025.
What was not included in the list was the South Lake Mosquito Abatement District, the last of its kind in Lake County, which was merged with the neighboring North Shore Mosquito Abatement District in Cook County last year.
But dissolution requires buy-in from the municipalities, Hart said, and the county’s reach is limited to districts it has some degree of authority over — those that extend beyond the boundaries of a singular township. In these cases, the County Board appoints members to the districts’ boards.
It was “critical” to evaluate these units of government to make sure they were still needed, Hart said, which is particularly the case for drainage districts when the county has a “nationally recognized and awarded” Stormwater Management Commission.
Eliminating these taxing bodies means doing the work more efficiently and effectively while saving taxpayer dollars, Hart argued. Meyers laid out the fundamental redundancies.
“We have all these units of government that all need attorney support; they need consultant support; they need engineering support; they need financial support,” Meyers said. “They’re all hiring consultants or staff that are completing those tasks across every single one of these units of local government.”
In the Avon-Fremont Drainage District, residents were essentially “getting taxed twice,” Hart said, paying for both the drainage district and the county.
Critics of such government units, including Hart, have described them as hold-overs from bygone eras. Such districts may have served a role when the county was made up of farmland, but “times have changed,” and “the government needs to change,” she said.
“The county doesn’t get anything out of this,” Hart said. “It’s not like we get additional revenues. It’s all on behalf of the taxpayers.”
There could be more dissolutions and consolidations in the future. Hart said she can think of a handful of sanitary and drainage districts currently being evaluated.
“Maybe it does make sense to have just one group of people working on a drainage district, but I just struggle understanding how that makes sense when we have an agency that is literally called the Lake County Stormwater Management Commission,” Hart said.
According to Meyers, that includes the Del Mar Woods Sanitary District, created in the late 1970s by residents of the Del Mar Woods subdivision to maintain recently installed sanitary sewer pipes.
While it still technically exists, it has “performed few functions” in the last decade, the county said in an online report, with infrequent meetings and no assessed levy in “many years.” Meyers said the county has struggled to find willing appointees, and they will likely look to dissolve the district and find a government able to take over running the infrastructure.
However, dissolution isn’t always the best path forward, Meyers said. He pointed to the case of the East and West Skokie drainage districts, which run from as far north as Park City all the way down to the county border. It was ultimately decided that consolidation was the best course of action, given “the amount of work that they do, and how involved they are,” Meyers said.
“There’s other districts that we’ve taken a look at, and considered the type of work they’re doing and how much overhead they have, and it still makes sense for such districts to continue to function,” he said.
