Acting mayor named in Oakwood Hills amid resignations over power plant
Trustee Paul Smith has taken the helm as acting village president in Oakwood Hills, a tiny suburb rocked by controversy over a proposed power plant.
“Please be patient with us during this transitional time, we will keep the residents up to date as best as we can,” Smith wrote on the village's website.
The move comes after the resignations late Wednesday of Village President Melanie Funk, Village Attorney John Cowlin and Trustee Beth Gorr.
The almost all-residential town in McHenry County has been torn apart by plans for a 430-megawatt natural gas-fired power plant.
Village hall was closed for nearly a month after police said village leaders feared for their safety.
In her resignation letter, Funk wrote she and the village board have done nothing wrong or illegal.
“After giving almost 20 years of voluntary service to this village and serving as your village president, I no longer feel that I can continue to take the abuse that I have been subject to over these last few months,” Funk wrote. “I am truly saddened that all the hard work that myself and the board has done has been shadowed by a proposed power plant that we did not seek out, but came knocking on our door.”
Funk defended the village board's decision to sign a “hosting agreement” with the developer even before the power plant proposal came before the zoning board as a way of controlling what happens with the project. She also denied accusations that the board had secret meetings with the developer or that she had sent police officers to remove signs protesting the power plant from residents' yards.
Funk wrote the last few months have taken a toll on her health and family.
“After much thought, prayer and speaking with my family, I have concluded that continuing with the village is no longer worth the time and abuse,” she wrote.
Gorr cited similar reasons for resigning.
“I no longer feel that the village is a positive environment for anything I might be able to contribute,” she wrote. “Recent events have taken a definite toll on my work, my health and my family life.”
Smith said Thursday his first order of business is to find new legal counsel.
The resignations came after a meeting Wednesday organized by a group opposed to the proposed plant. Roughly 300 residents, a few county officials and state lawmakers packed the Prairie Grove Elementary School gymnasium in Crystal Lake to air their concerns.
State Rep. David McSweeney of Barrington Hills and state Sen. Dan Duffy of Lake Barrington, who attended the meeting, have spoken out against the proposed plant and have asked the Illinois Attorney General to investigate Oakwood Hills leaders.
The proposed $500 million Oakwood Hills Energy Center is a joint development venture between Northland Power, a Canadian company, and Enventure Partners. The plant would provide a cheaper, cleaner way of producing energy than coal and nuclear plants, and would supply electricity to 160,000 households, according to the developer.
The facility is targeted for roughly 13 acres behind village hall, 3020 North Park Drive, near a ComEd substation and high-tension power lines — less than a half-mile from Prairie Grove Elementary School and residential areas.
“The reality is this is not a good site,” said Robert Abboud, former Barrington Hills village president whose environmental engineering consulting firm, RGA Labs, was hired by the opposition group to analyze the proposed plant's impact. “It's particularly not a good site because of its location so close to schools and residential areas and because of groundwater issues. There's 13 impact categories that we've identified and they involve groundwater, noise, the lighting and visual impacts, the road construction impact, and there is a zoning impact.”
Abboud said often when zoning is changed to accommodate such facilities it has a rippling effect.
“You create this cascade of downward moving zoning that ultimately moves to either heavy industrial or very high-density residential, and usually low quality,” he said. “That tends to degrade the property values of the surrounding area. The impacts will reach out to a six-mile radius from the plant. That involves Cary, Crystal Lake, McHenry and Wauconda.”
Abboud said the plant would release 750,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions yearly.
“If you took 150,000 vehicles and drove them 11,000 miles each, that is the equivalent emissions that you would have on the site,” he said.
He added, the plant would use 1.5 million gallons of water daily for cooling that will not being replenished.
“That's pretty debilitating to the aquifer,” Abboud said. “This is not a sustainable process.”
A spokesman for the power plant project could not be immediately reached.
The zoning board hearing on the project had been continued to Oct. 9 at the Holiday Inn, 800 S. Route 31, Crystal Lake.