Don't Annex, Especially In Panic!

The farmland in Northern Illinois is some of the finest farmland in the world. We must not put our farmland at an even greater risk for development than if we had simply left it alone. That is what we may very well be doing with the recent glut of incorporation and blanket annexation proposals here in western Kane County.

Back in the early 1990's, the Village of Elburn decided it would be nice to annex a Hughes Creek golf course into our community. However, in order to accomplish that goal, it was necessary to annex an additional 650 acres of farmland that made the course contiguous to the boundaries of then existing Elburn. Elburn zoned those 650 acres for agricultural special use, thinking naively that the land would be farmed or leased for farming for many years.

Almost immediately, a land speculator pounced on that property, quite sure that it was now ripe for development. When the village resisted the developer's too dense preliminary plans, a lawsuit was filed asking the judge to issue court ordered R-1 zoning on the property. After all, the property was formally annexed into Elburn. The town must have meant to develop it, right?

The Village of Elburn spent thousands of dollars defending itself in court against the developer's lawsuit. In fact, if the plaintiffs had prevailed in court, they could have built their subdivision on the property, and Elburn's pre-existing Subdivision Control Ordinance would have been the only document legally available to control that process. There would have been no capital improvement impact fees, no transportation impact fees, and no waste water capacity impact fees collected on the property whatsoever. None! Nada! Nyet!

Subsequently, a "White Knight" developer stepped forward and offered to pay impact fees on the property if the Village of Elburn was willing to annex an "additional" 250 acres to make this subdivision slightly larger. In exchange for enlarging the project, this developer graciously agreed to pay the associated impact fees on the entire subdivision, including the property previously annexed just to get down to the golf course.

That second annexation negotiation with a different developer helped settle the lawsuit, and has resulted in over $10 million of capital improvement impact fees being shared with several taxing bodies that all serve the Elburn community.

One relatively simple 650-acre annexation agreement generated over $10 million of taxpayer impact benefit. In case you haven't guessed it yet, this is the story of our Blackberry Creek subdivision here in Elburn.

So, when someone tells me they intend to annex 4 square miles, 12 square miles, or even an outrageous 36 square miles, much of which is primarily farmland, as a taxpayer affected by these initiatives, it frankly scares me to death.

They say those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. Sure as night follows day, I believe that there will be two main consequences from these proposed massive annexations, if they are eventually approved by their voters.

First, the affected communities stand to lose a sizable fortune in impact fees, as well as significant amounts of development leverage that they will willingly and prematurely throw away. And second, the affected communities will spend another sizable fortune in court defending themselves from developer lawsuits demanding to proceed with their projects via court ordered zoning.

As my good friend Steve Gliddon likes to say, Elburn has "been there, done that, and we got the t-shirt!"

The Village of Elburn has learned a lot about growth and development in the last 124 years. I wonder sometimes if anybody is listening and learning along with us? Does anybody get it? It doesn't seem like it lately.