Buffalo Grove turns to residents to shape town's future
Buffalo Grove is looking to its residents to help shape a 2040 vision of the village.
Officials hosted an open house Wednesday at Aptakisic Junior High School to solicit input from residents as part of the process to create a new comprehensive plan that will guide development of the community over the next 20 years. It will be the first new comprehensive plan for Buffalo Grove since 2009, a document that officials say is now outdated.
Representatives from the village board, the park district and the planning and zoning commission joined residents for the public event.
Lesley Roth, associate principal and director of urban planning for village consultant RATIO Architects, said the process for the upcoming comprehensive plan "is an opportunity to set goals for how you would like to see the village change."
The document will incorporate existing plans for the area around the Prairie View Metra Station and the Lake-Cook Corridor, and pay particular attention to the Milwaukee Avenue and Dundee Road corridors.
Roth put an emphasis on the importance of public involvement in the process.
"This whole planning process is a colossal waste of everyone's time if it's not implemented," she said. "You have heard about plans that sit on a shelf. This is not one of those plans."
Visitors to the open house were ushered through four workstations that allowed them to give feedback and make suggestions.
The first focused on "visioning." Residents were invited to pick from cards containing images representing what they see as the future of Buffalo Grove, aiming for a vision of the village in the year 2040.
The second station, "mapping assets," offered maps of the village's residential, commercial, industrial and office areas, as well as its parks and open spaces. Visitors were asked to identify strengths, opportunities, weaknesses and threats in the village.
The third, "corridor and subarea planning," gave attendees the opportunity to examine the Milwaukee Avenue and Dundee Road corridors in greater detail.
The fourth station was the "Ideas Exchange," a digital platform enabling people to engage with the project website, www.engagebg.org, and submit a new idea or create a campaign.
Among the interested residents attending was a recent arrival, Anthony Lee, who moved to Buffalo Grove two years ago from Chicago with his family, which includes two small children.
"I guess I would like to get in on the ground floor and see what's going on," he said, adding that infrastructure improvement and business development is among his priorities.
Resident Peggy Cobrin mentioned the need for affordable housing.
"For people who want to stay in the community and want to downsize, there is no place to go.," she said. "As a realtor, I get told that all the time.
"I'm seeing the 30- to 40-year-old kids who graduated from Stevenson (High School) raise their family east of here, in Deerfield, Highland Park. They will find a smaller home. They can walk to Whole Foods. They can walk to Starbucks," Cobrin added.