Garage sale to help neighborhood stay dry

People have garage sales to raise money for many causes - the Muscular Dystrophy Association, church building funds, marching band trips.

Novak Park subdivision residents hope theirs will help them keep their homes dry.

The subdivision, east of Route 31 and north of Fox River Bluff Forest Preserve, is having a sale Saturday and Sunday to help pay its part of the bill to fix roads and stormwater drainage.

Kane County and St. Charles Township have agreed to repave roads and install storm sewers. The sewers will replace failed drain tiles and help ensure floodwaters flow to the Fox River, instead of flooding yards, homes and septic fields.

The total cost is budgeted at $180,000, and work is due to start this fall.

The Novak Park homeowners' association took out a five-year loan for its share, $30,000, and is billing residents to repay it.

Geoff Marko, the association's president, said he hopes the garage sale and other fundraisers will help defray that expense.

The neighborhood is well-hidden, with once-private narrow, one-way roads, generally sloping east to the Fox River. Boats and personal watercraft are parked at some homes. The association runs a riverside park.

The unincorporated subdivision started in the 1940s. "People did a lot of homegrown hydrological engineering themselves," Marko said, explaining owners sometimes filled in ditches and ravines so they could have more land to build on, or dug drainage ditches themselves.

"It's gotten to the point where the old clay tiles and certain systems don't work," he said.

But "there's a big disparity of haves and have-nots" in the subdivision, Marko said; some of the older, smaller homes are valued at less than $200,000, but the big new homes run as high as $440,000, township assessment records show.

"We decided as a community to work together for the good of the whole," Marko said.

The garage sale is from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday. Recreational vehicles, personal watercraft and trailers are among the items to be sold.