Arlington Heights funeral home move gets preliminary OK

The Arlington Heights village board gave preliminary approval early Tuesday morning for the construction of a funeral home next to an existing cemetery.

The vote paves the way for Lauterberg & Oehler Funeral Home to move from their 51-year-old building off Northwest Highway and into a new facility.

Trustee John Scaletta was the only board member to vote against the proposal. The funeral home will be required to build a new fence and improve landscaping, at the urging of residents and other trustees.

"I don't think you have any choice but to put up a fence," Trustee Helen Jensen said.

The vote came shortly after midnight after more than 25 residents gave their feedback. Opinions were closely mixed with support and opposition for the project. Some residents are concerned about the presence of a new commercial entity in their residential community.

Jaye Finn, who has lived at his home near Lauterberg & Oehler for 16 years, called the staff from the funeral home, including general manager Jim Murray, "five star." "We need to be building instead of falling down in this recession," Finn said.

Representatives from the funeral home said they've altered their plans based on residents' feedback. That includes backing off future plans to build a crematory on the parcel at the corner of Euclid and Waterman streets.

That concession quelled some residents, but some felt that wouldn't stop the funeral home from adversely affecting their property values.

Some homeowners argued it was unfair to them because when they purchased their homes they couldn't predict a funeral home would be built nearby. While funeral home officials nixed plans for the crematorium, they kept the possibility of building an embalming facility in the future intact.

Service Corporation International is a nationwide company that owns the Memory Garden Cemetery plus five cemeteries and three funeral homes in the Northwest suburbs. SCI officials claim they're not getting the maximum use from their property.

They said during the last decade they've struggled with selling and developing the would-be funeral home land because of soil and drainage problems.

SCI officials convinced the village those struggles qualify as a hardship, which would makes them eligible for the necessary land-use variation they need to build the more than 12,000-square-foot funeral home. Some residents and trustees disagreed.

"That is the farthest reach I have heard for the definition of a hardship," Trustee Thomas Stengren said.

SCI officials also said they preferred to adhere to only one of two recommendations from the village. The first was to improve the proposed landscaping, and the second would be to build a fence that would better hide the funeral home from passers-by on Euclid.

SCI officials stressed their project would not alter the character of the existing community.