Carol Stream, company continue lease talks on landscape waste facility
More than two years after signing a lease with the village, a company that has yet to start construction on a drop-off facility for landscape waste in Carol Stream took the blame Monday for project delays.
Organic Soils has asked trustees for more time to break ground on the facility on village-owned land off Kuhn Road and to begin paying the village $1,500 a month in rent, among other fees.
Robert McNees, an attorney for Organic Soils, told the board Monday the project can't proceed until the company secures a wetlands permit from the Army Corps of Engineers. Organic Soils applied for the permit in late July, and McNees said the review by the federal agency could take six to nine months.
McNees apologized on behalf of his client, saying Organic Soils "dropped the ball on overseeing this project and getting the wetlands permit in a timely fashion."
"The (village) staff did point out right up front that there may be a wetlands problem here, 'you should look at it,'" McNees said. "Well, the looking at it consisted of looking at maps that were not current, that did not show a wetlands, and that was a mistake."
Trustees told Carol Stream's attorney Monday to continue renegotiating key deadlines in the lease. Several board members say the company should start paying rent in the immediate future, but still expressed support for the facility near the water reclamation center.
"We're just leaving this land in limbo for far too long," Trustee Rick Gieser said.
In August 2014, the village board approved a special-use permit that originally called for construction to start within 18 months. As that deadline approached, the village wrote a letter to Organic Soils in January asking about the status of the project and cautioned that the board could move to terminate the permit.
Organic Soils requested more time, and the board agreed to move the deadline to July 31. The company that month asked the village board for a second deadline extension to begin construction.
In a letter to the company in late July, the village proposed collecting rent payments Aug. 1. A counteroffer by Organic Soils earlier this month sought to start the payments in February 2017, but the company expressed a willingness Monday to move up that date.
Village Manager Joe Breinig said officials would try to find a "middle ground" in talks with Organic Soils and hammer out "specific performance standards" in changes to the original lease.
Under plans approved by the board in 2014, both independent contractors and waste haulers serving Carol Stream and its neighbors would unload landscape materials at the site.
Then trailers would pick up the landscape waste and drive to a composting facility in Bristol.
"I'm willing to be flexible on these dates, and if we can come up with a happy medium somewhere, I think it's definitely worth giving a guy that knows they messed up," Trustee Greg Schwarze said. "They admitted they messed up, and I think that it's a good project. I think we all feel like it's a good project."