Board still testing the waters for Glennshire fix

Residents eager to eyeball a Hawthorn Woods plan for solving the Glennshire water conundrum will have to wait a bit longer, village officials said at a special meeting Tuesday night.

"At some point I'm hopeful that we're going to be able to talk about that," Mayor Keith Hunt said of a plan for the village to buy bulk water from private provider Aqua Illinois and resell it to Glennshire residents.

Hunt said the board is fine-tuning the formal proposal and will send a letter to residents today or Thursday detailing it. The village also will hold a meeting with Glennshire residents this Saturday in village hall, 2 Lagoon Drive, at 9 a.m.

"We need to get that finalized before I go spouting off about that a whole lot further," he said.

More than 200 Hawthorn Woods residents learned last year they would have to pay millions to replace the Glennshire water system because of an Illinois Environmental Protection Agency order. Lake County, which bought the 20 wells in the 1970s, said the purchase agreement required the homeowners pay to replace the aging system.

In a survey earlier this year, residents overwhelmingly chose to replace Glennshire wells with another county-owned water system, for which the county agreed to kick in $1 million out of up to $7 million in estimated costs.

But recently, concerns surfaced with the county's proposed water storage site, which would lie in a residential neighborhood. Soon after, the village of Hawthorn Woods volunteered to get into the water business, saying it would buy water wholesale from Aqua and resell it to residents. County officials and homeowners have been awaiting details of the plan. There is a late November deadline with the Illinois Attorney General's Office to pick a replacement water system.

Christopher Donovan, president of Citizens For Equitable Water Solutions -- a Glennshire residents' group formed to address the water issue -- said the group is waiting to see the proposal before it will make any recommendations or comment.

"I would say we need to get the proposal and we can kind of go from there," he said. "It's hard to say what's appealing or not."