Geneva may add parcel to Prairie Green Preserve
Geneva may add a little bit more to the Prairie Green Preserve.
The city council will vote Monday on buying a 6.3-acre parcel at 1N384 Peck Road. The property contains a house and a barn, and was once part of the Fisher family farm.
The Fishers sold land east of Peck, from Keslinger to Bricher roads, for what would become the Fisher Farms subdivision in the 1990s.
The city would pay $475,000 for it using money in the Prairie Green Capital Project Fund.
The city bought land for the 580-acre Prairie Green Preserve from 1998 to 2003 to preserve open space. (The Kane County Forest Preserve District owns 40 of the acres).
It also has a wetland bank for water drainage management on part of the site. The Geneva Park District has community garden plots on the northern edge and the city rents 280 acres of it to a farmer.
The city sells wetland credits to developers of properties elsewhere in the Mill Creek Watershed. It took more than a decade to get the first half of the wetland bank established and approved by the Army Corps of Engineers, and then it had trouble selling the credits, particularly during the recession.
In 2010, the council decided against purchasing another piece of land for the preserve, saying it could not afford it.
But last year, it sold about $1 million worth of wetland credits. The fund was expected to have a balance of at least $1.5 million as of April 30, but the city planned to use $1 million of that to pay back money it had borrowed for the preserve.