Discussion postponed on Town Centre plan

About three dozen St. Charles residents showed up at a plan commission meeting Tuesday to question the developer of the proposed St. Charles Towne Centre about its effect on their neighborhood.

But they didn't get to ask about one of the hottest topics - traffic on Prairie Street.

Shodeen Inc. has proposed building a mix of stores, offices, restaurants, condominiums and apartments on the site of the former St. Charles Mall, between Prairie and Route 38, a little east of Randall Road. The mall closed in 1995 and was torn down in 2002.

Since its last meeting on the subject, the city hired a traffic consultant to study the proposal. That work is still going on, and the traffic experts weren't at the meeting Tuesday, so the commission postponed traffic talk until Feb. 17.

The hearing will reconvene at 7 p.m. at the Pottawatomie Community Center, 8 North Ave.

That's where it met Tuesday. The hearing was forced to end at 8:45, because the park district building closes at 9 p.m. The commission normally meets in the city council chamber at city hall, but the council was using the room, and will again Feb. 17.

Neighbors warned that they'll want a lot of time to talk about traffic.

They had quite a bit to say about the development's impact on schools, sales tax revenue and the height of some of the buildings, as well as whether the residential portion will really be mostly condominiums. They fear apartments will have tenants who, without a financial stake in the property, may behave less than ideally.

"You'll never really know, to be honest," said resident Jason Warden, asking the ratio of condos to apartments. He drew applause when he criticized the maintenance of an apartment complex just to the north of this project, owned by Shodeen.

Mayoral candidate Jotham Stein peppered David Patzelt, the developer's representative, with questions about whether Shodeen would pay to enlarge nearby schools, if children who move in to the development cause overcrowding.

Patzelt said the developer and the St. Charles school district disagree about whether to use the city's land-cash formula as it is to figure out what to pay to the school district, or pay only on actual students generated. The formula suggests 100 students would come from it; Patzelt said it expects no more than 25, based on numbers from similar developments nationwide.

Talk: Traffic experts expected at next meeting