Randhurst Village owners again pitch plan to sell outlots to fund shopping center upgrades
Despite some skepticism on the panel, Mount Prospect's Economic Development Commission on Thursday unanimously recommended that the village board approve a plan to subdivide a portion of the Randhurst Village shopping center.
The property's owner, DLC Management Corp., wants to partition 15 outlots that ring the property and then sell the parcels to pay for improvements to the center's troubled core.
The signoff by the commission was just the first step on the proposal's comeback tour. DLC officials first proposed the subdivision in June, but withdrew their request amid criticism of the plan from village board members. Now the proposal seems headed back before the board, likely next month.
Mount Prospect Community Development Director Bill Cooney said one of the village board's concerns is "a bunch of rogue owners doing their own thing" with the outlots.
But, "the reality is that they can't" because DLC will maintain control through a master declaration and covenants over Randhurst, he said.
DLC Chief Operating Officer Christopher Ressa said the company's goal is to make Randhurst "the dynamic community hub that we all want it to be."
"For us to be able to keep up with the market, we need to find unique ways and different ways than we did in a previous life in order to reinvest and re-imagine into the property," Resa added.
But DLC faced some tough questioning from commission member David Roe, who asked what advantage it is to the village to allow a subdivision.
"I think everybody would agree here that as Randhurst goes, so goes the village," DLC attorney Andrew Scott said. "It's a big part of the village's identity, and I would suspect that it is, in terms of sales taxes, a big part of the budget or a contributor to the budget."
According to Cooney, about 75% of all sales taxes the village collects comes from the Rand Road corridor, which includes Randhurst Village.
"This is the biggest anchor in that corridor, and if this starts failing, then what we have seen over the last decade, the investment that we have seen in Rand Road, that might start declining and the whole corridor goes downhill," he added.