Daily Herald opinion: Untied but apparently unconcerned: Given new authority, Mundelein seems uninterested in settling development flap

On Friday, Gov. JB Pritzker signed legislation that was intended to enable Mundelein village leaders to impose impact fees on a development that could place heavy new demands on public stakeholders in the community. Unfortunately, as far as the village is concerned, it may have become a moot issue.

Earlier this month, Mundelein’s new village president wrote an open letter telling community interests, essentially, to just drop it.

The law arose last spring as then-Mundelein Village President Steve Lentz fretted that “our hands are tied” and the village didn’t have the legal authority to levy such fees on the developers of Ivanhoe Village, a $2 billion, 25-year residential and commercial project. On that premise, the village board voted in April to approve an agreement that includes payments that affected school districts consider “woefully short” of their needs — even though local lawmakers had stepped in with a bill intended to bolster the village’s options.

Robin Meier, who was elected in April to succeed Lentz, reportedly had promised to revisit the issue if the legislation passed. But her letter suggested otherwise.

This is no insignificant matter. The proposal for 773 acres owned by the Blackhawks-owning Wirtz family near Route 60 and Peterson Road will bring transformative change to the community, with the potential for significantly increased expenditures — read “property taxes” — for the schools and public amenities that will be needed to accommodate the increased population.

The plan approved by the village board allots $6.6 million to Fremont Elementary District 79; the district says it will need $90 million. The agreement authorizes $4.3 million for Mundelein High School District 120; school officials say they'll need $22 million.

Consider those gaps. The sides are nearly $84 million apart in District 79, nearly $18 million apart in District 120. Even if one side is lowballing and the other inflating expectations, discrepancies that size surely must be examined and evaluated.

Sadly, the one attempt at such a negotiation ended practically before it started, with the developer’s representatives grousing after a first and only meeting that the schools were showing “a complete failure to act in good faith.”

The impact-fees legislation — sponsored by Senators Adriane Johnson of Buffalo Grove and Mary Edly-Allen of Libertyville and Representatives Daniel Didech of Buffalo Grove and Laura Faver Dias of Grayslake, all Democrats — could offer an opportunity to start over, and head off a potentially devastating issue for future taxpayers.

Meier, however, seemed to foreclose any such possibility. “We have to stop focusing on the past and we cannot keep dividing our community with controversy,” she wrote in her public letter, curiously failing to recognize that the issue is about the future, not the past, and the controversy is not going to go away simply because village leaders decide not to do anything.

This is an unfortunate point to come to. Not because the school districts are right to seek more money to address their expected costs, but because an issue that deeply affects them has been arbitrated without their influence, and if their predictions are closer to correct than Wirtz's, the property taxpaying residents in districts 79 and 120 are the ones who will be saddled with the costs of making up the difference.

In a joint statement released on Friday, the lawmakers called on Meier to uphold what they said had been a previous willingness to engage “in good faith conversations with local stakeholders” if the governor signed the legislation.

Now, they wrote, “Mayor Meier has an opportunity to honor her commitment, re-engage with stakeholders, work collaboratively, and lead a process that unites the community.” They added that they had acted because village leaders said “additional state action was needed to allow the imposition of impact fees that would fairly compensate other local taxing bodies for the specific costs created by the Ivanhoe Village development.”

They got that action State government has given Mundelein the ability to do more, important homework. Instead, the village appears willing to wash its untied hands of the matter on little more than a promise that the impact costs can be reevaluated 10 years into the project. That approach may end the debate for now, but it's a slap in the face to the lawmakers who cleared the way for a more inclusive process, not to mention the affected school districts and their taxpayers, and seems highly unlikely to really end the controversy that Meier is apparently concerned about.