Sugar Grove not immune to economic downturn
Sugar Grove was supposed to be a bigger by now, or so thought planners at the time the Solheim Cup was announced in 2004.
The police force was supposed to be operating out of brand-new $40 million station. The village's attention was to turn next to building a new village hall, and a new public works building, to handle the potentially hundreds of workers it would hire as the village mushroomed to a population of 62,742 by 2030.
Instead, Sugar Grove has cut staff, frozen salaries, and put plans for those buildings on hold, the victim of the free fall in the housing market this year, last year and the year before that.
Ah, another chapter in the history of a farm town-turned-suburb.
Beginnings
Six guys looking to move west meet in a camp at Black Swamp, Ohio, in 1834. Forming a fast friendship, they decide to stick together and go to Illinois. They settle down in a former Indian sugaring camp in what is now Bliss Woods Forest Preserve. A small farming community is born.
And agricultural it stays for the next century. As of 1957, the year it incorporated, Sugar Grove had just 125 residents.
But suburban growth showed up in the 1960s - first east of Route 47, then west. By 1990, 2,005 people lived here.
But the biggest spurt came this century, when the town more than doubled in size, adding nearly 1,000 a people a year for four years, as Chicago's suburban line stretched farther.
Regional planners estimated that by 2015, 33,000 people would be in Sugar Grove; by 2030, more than 62,000.
City officials hired experts to figure out what kind of space they would need to operate a larger town, borrowing several million dollars and planning to charge impact fees of up to $5,000 per house to help pay for those costs. They hired consultants to suggest how to develop a "Town Center" of commercial, residential and other uses on 243 acres bounded by Routes 47 and 56 and Galena Boulevard. There was talk it could include, among other things, an indoor water park and hotels. Village officials also designated land for a potential Metra station, hoping to bring passenger rail service back to the town, even though Metra hadn't indicated any interest in extending service beyond Aurora.
Then the downturn hit.
Full halt ahead
A town that once issued 377 building permits a year as recently as 2005 expects to issue only five this fiscal year. (And a quarter of the way through that year, has issued none.)
The developer of the 200-acre Prairie Glen subdivision is asking the village board to cut its permit and impact fees in half, for at least 18 months, to stimulate home sales. The developer of the Meadowridge Villas townhouse subdivision has defaulted on its required infrastructure, prompting the board this month to draw on the developer's letter of credit to pay for finishing the work.
A new library has opened, but time to visit it has been reduced, as voters have refused nine times to increase taxes to operate it.
On the up side, a Jewel-Osco did open, Waubonsee Community College expanded, and children will attend a brand-new middle school on Harter Road this fall.
But even that middle school news has a dark side. It was supposed to be the Kaneland school district's second middle school. But the slowdown in home building led the school board earlier this year to decide to go at least another year with just one middle school - the new one. The older Kaneland Middle School, next to Kaneland High School in Maple Park, will be used instead for some overflow programs from the high school.