Five towns turn to referendum for road repairs

While tax-hike referendums for municipal road improvements haven't been unheard of in the past, they'll be unusually prevalent on suburban ballots Tuesday.

Lake Zurich, Prospect Heights, Deer Park, Villa Park and Winfield are asking voters for extra help to take care of one of the most basic responsibilities of municipal government.

While leaders of each community have their own reasons for going to referendum, they also share theories about why paying for road repairs has become a more universal problem in 2010.

Among the new realities suburbs face are the effect rising oil prices have on repair costs and the additional cut of motor fuel taxes consumed by the growing cost of road salt, Winfield Village Manager Curt Barrett said.

“That has caused an increasing gap between what we need and what we have,” he added.

With the sluggish economy driving down labor costs and the ability to save 35 percent on interest through federal Build America Bonds, now is the time to act, Barrett said.

“If you let the road go too long, you can't just repave it,” he said. “You have to reconstruct it” at four times the cost.

Winfield and Prospect Heights are looking to property taxes to fund road repairs, while Villa Park, Deer Park and Lake Zurich are putting their hopes on proposed sales tax increases.

For Deer Park Village President Bob Kellermann, deciding between the two was not difficult. He believes a property tax would never pass in his village, which has never had one.

He sees the age of the roads in many parts of the suburbs and the effect the past two winters have had on their condition among the reasons so many communities are in the same boat this year.

The public's expectations of good service also have increased, he added.

“People demand more today than they did 10 or 12 years ago,” Kellermann said.

Like Deer Park, Prospect Heights is a non-home rule community without a property tax. Mayor Dolly Vole believes that's one of the reasons keeping up with the city's road maintenance demands has become so difficult.

Motor fuel taxes and all the other revenue sources the city has relied on have been going down in recent years, she said. But the planned tax increase will allow the city to create a comprehensive road maintenance program.

Though she believes the need for road repairs is a relatively easy thing to demonstrate to the public, she's still not entirely sure hers will pass given the highly taxed area of Cook County in which Prospect Heights lies.

While a similar referendum failed in Villa Park earlier this year, Interim Village Manager Eric Dubrowski believes that the summer's violent storms have since demonstrated the failings of the town's infrastructure.

The new referendum turns away from a proposed property tax increase to a higher sales tax, about 60 to 65 percent of which is expected to be borne by shoppers visiting from out of town, Dubrowski said.

Lake Zurich Village Administrator Bob Vitas said the lack of growth over the past several years and the increasing cost of public safety pensions also have made funding road repairs more difficult for cities and villages.

These and other factors have overwhelmed Lake Zurich's efforts to find savings by cutting out 18 percent of its operational costs, Vitas said.

Road maintenance both locally and nationally has been deferred about as long as it can be, he said. Vitas pointed to crumbling and collapsing bridges across the country as evidence.

“We're sending a statement to the residents that we have infrastructure problems,” Vitas said. “It's time that we did some nation-building. Some of the millions that we're sending overseas ought to be start being spent here at home.”