Huntley village, school officials hold joint meeting

If the Huntley village board was still smarting from remarks school board member Larry Snow made last month, it didn't show Wednesday night.

The village board and the Huntley Unit District 158 school board met for the first time in two years Wednesday. Despite the recent clamor over an online posting by Snow that some saw as questioning the integrity of Huntley's elected officials, the meeting was mostly congenial.

In a meeting that lasted just over two hours -- short by District 158 standards, lengthy by Huntley's -- members of both boards praised each other, took aim at other towns and posed, at times, pointed questions to their counterparts.

Among the most direct of these was Snow's request that Huntley's transition fees reflect how much it actually costs the school district to educate each child.

Homebuilders pay transition fees to help cover the cost of educating children while school districts are still waiting to receive property tax revenue. Districts typically don't see property tax revenue until about a year after a family moves into a home.

Snow asked the village board to roughly double the transition fee for a four-bedroom home from the current $4,000 to $8,000, which Snow cited as the average cost to educate each student.

Huntley officials demurred, saying they did not want to tie transition fees to the per-student cost unless other towns in the district also did the same.

District officials thanked the village for controlling the pace of development and funneling millions of dollars in developer fees to the district in the past decade.

"You have been a leader in collecting transition and impact fees," District 158 board member Kim Skaja said. "You have been a leader in keeping growth at a pace we can handle."

Amid all of the board members and administrators at Wednesday night's meeting, one familiar face was missing. The meeting was the school board's first without Jim Carlin, who resigned last week after only six months on the board.