Mayor: Carpentersville is business friendly

Carpentersville officials have taken several steps to welcome businesses that have mentioned moving to the village. As such, actions the village board took last week will allow pawn shops and make it easier for banquet halls to set up shop.

The village previously banned pawn shops and saw them as a nuisance, as criminals sometimes pawn stolen property for cash.

Two months ago, a pawnshop expressed interest in moving in but couldn’t because of the existing prohibition. The village board lifted the ban last Tuesday and established a $250 business licensing fee. The money would cover police time spent looking for stolen items and the extra police paperwork a pawnshop would generate.

“Our community development department has been systematically going through all our ordinances and looking for ones that are either out of date and have caused problems in the past,” Village President Ed Ritter said. “If an ordinance is blocking people from starting businesses, then it’s time to change the ordinance.”

Carpentersville did something similar last year, when a tattoo parlor wanted to open shop. But while the village changed the law to allow the parlor, it did not end up coming.

Pawn shops can be seen as a low-end business, but TV has helped turn that notion around, Ritter said, pointing to shows that depict them as community assets for lost treasures.

When it came to banquet halls, officials changed setback requirements to allow them to come in as well.

Banquet halls previously needed a 500-foot setback between them and property zoned for houses homes.

But very few properties in town measure up to that requirement, so last week the village reduced that to 100 feet. A banquet hall that approached the village several years ago tried to draw up plans under the old requirements but ultimately couldn’t make it work. “They had to do some odd arranging of everything, so it made it difficult to get all the parking in that we wanted them to have,” Ritter said.

In 2012, the village projected it would get $5.9 million in sales tax, but in reality, it only received $4.9 million. The projection for 2013 is $5.8 million.