Schaumburg trustees balk at apartment plan
Schaumburg may have to wait a bit longer for its first new apartment complex of the 21st century.
To avoid a tie vote Tuesday night, village trustees deferred discussion of a controversial, 180-unit proposal at 680 E. Algonquin Road to their next committee-of-the-whole meeting, tentatively scheduled for next Tuesday, March 17.
Mayor Al Larson was in Washington on Tuesday night and is expected to be in Springfield on March 17. To be able to count on his tiebreaking vote - whichever way it falls - trustees suggested the possibility of moving the meeting to a date he will be available.
Concerns that the amount of parking for the apartment complex might be inadequate was the chief reason trustees Tom Dailly, George Dunham and Jack Sullivan said they planned to vote against it.
But Dailly said he had further concerns about rezoning the property from office use to residential, as well as granting variances from the zoning code for the 6.5-acre site that's still undeveloped open space.
The village previously changed its land-use plans for the site when it prepared for a new tax-increment finance district in the area - in which property taxes going to local governments would be frozen for several years while taxes received above that would go toward redevelopment - but Dailly said that decision was made before he was reappointed to the village board in 2013.
"I disagreed then, I disagree now," Dailly said.
Because of his three concerns, his stance against the project is unlikely to change, he said.
Parking also was a concern of the village's zoning board of appeals over three meetings held on the proposal, until developer UrbanStreet Group LLC met a demand to provide 1.5 parking spaces per unit on the property, by dropping 12 of its originally planned 192 units.
Another controversial aspect of the project is the 74 parking spaces it plans to share with a neighboring office building. Zoning board members were unsure such an agreement could be counted on in the long term and preferred to leave those 74 spaces out of their calculation of available parking.
But while UrbanStreet representatives complied with the zoning board's request, they also argued that the deed guaranteeing the 74 shared spaces was legally binding in perpetuity and would bring the apartment complex's total parking to nearly two spaces per unit.
The apartment complex is believed to be the first one proposed in Schaumburg in approximately 30 years and would cater to a more affluent category of renters. Monthly rents are expected to start at about $1,000, with some larger units going for about $3,000.