Schaumburg may stop requiring permits for garage sales

There's one particular item you may no longer be able to find at any garage sale in Schaumburg — a permit.

Village officials are considering doing away with the requirement on the basis that issuing and enforcing permits are more trouble than they're worth.

The Planning, Building and Development Committee voted to recommend such action Thursday, and the full village board is expected to make a final decision Tuesday, Feb. 25.

The coordinated Timbercrest-Woods garage sale that's been held across the two adjacent subdivisions on the first weekend of June for the past 50 years will still need some village services, Schaumburg Community Development Director Julie Fitzgerald said.

But the approximately 100 participants there as well as the nearly 1,000 other garage sales that take place across the village each year won't require permits if trustees approve the change later this month.

From 2013 to 2018, the village issued 6,464 garage sale permits. While many were applied for online, about 20% required the direct assistance of village staff members.

Roughly 107 hours of staff time were believed to be occupied by that task over those six years, officials said.

Furthermore, garage sales in the village have typically generated only about one neighbor complaint per year, they said.

In surveying the 42 members of the Northwest Municipal Conference in the region, Schaumburg officials found that only 16 of those local governments required permits for garage sales while the other 26 did not.

One downside of eliminating the permits that garage sale organizers and patrons may see is the village could no longer host a monthly garage sale map on its website, based on the permits it's issued. Over the past three years, the map has received more than 10,000 unique visitors.

Officials said they would plan to recommend apps like VarageSale and Nextdoor to residents looking to promote or find garage sales if the village's own map goes away.