Board, residents need to be partners

Trustees of Lake Zurich: I know you have received many correspondences over the last week regarding the proposed development at Nestlerest. In order to be respectful of your time, I will try to avoid repeating many of those points. I do feel compelled though to summarize a few of my thoughts.

My wife and I, along with our neighbors, have invested millions of dollars in improving our neighborhood and homes. We had done so trusting that the rules (use, building, zoning, tree, etc. ordinances) would be consistently applied and enforced so that we could have confidence that the investment of our life savings could not be exploited for the benefit of a few. Single-family homeowners, by and large, are the largest base of tax revenue for the village and the cultural heart and soul of this community. The board's seemingly systemic disregard for our interests, scolding us for promoting our own self interests and positioning us as neophytes that are scared of inevitable "change," is insulting and totally inaccurate.

Second, let me respectfully repeat what others have said. That expectation that the developer hopes to achieve full occupancy with a very small minority of units facing the lake at a price of $250-$300 per square foot is totally unrealistic. Even with these inflated expectations the revenue the village may realize will be less that $175,000 and the soonest the village could expect to see this would be 2011. In the meantime the village will have invested many times this amount with infrastructure improvements that would be required to essentially double the size of the existing infrastructure. On a $25 million budget, this represents less than 7/10ths of 1 percent of that budget and even less of a percentage of the $27 to $30 million outstanding debt of the village. Clearly this desire by the board to move forward cannot be justified by the economics even under the most optimistic assumptions.

Lastly I need to make a heartfelt plea for better transparency and fair play in the affairs of our village. I will avoid making any specific accusations but for the mayor to acknowledge that discussions of this development have been occurring for a year (including developer-sponsored field trips), yet to have the first public acknowledgement of it less than a week before a hearing is totally unacceptable. I wish I could say that this was an isolated example but it isn't and the issue of transparency was one of the major reasons a majority of the citizens of Lake Zurich replaced all but one incumbent in the last election. We need to do better and we can if we all recommit ourselves to partnership, rather than partisanship, and start to rebuild the cooperative, civil and trusting relationships that are the foundation of the culture in our village.

John Thode

Lake Zurich