There’s a reason I’m no fan of corporate America.
For one thing, I am one of many journalists across this nation now working for a hedge fund that puts profit above all else.
And don’t get me started on health care. For the past year countless residents have expressed grave concerns about how Advocate Health Care – formerly the beloved Dreyer Clinic – has taken doctors out of Ascension Mercy medical center, making patients in the Fox Valley use its Good Samaritan headquarters in Downers Grove.
Adding insult to injury, Mercy was one of nine Ascension hospitals recently purchased by the for-profit Prime Healthcare, which a couple years ago agreed to pay $65 million to settle Medicare overbilling allegations in 14 California hospitals, and just last week announced the closing of one of its newly-purchased Ascension hospitals in Chicago.
Money talks. And the Sisters of Mercy are no doubt turning over in their graves.
This column, however, does not focus on my career or my health care, as vitally important as both are to me. It’s my community now in the crosshairs.
As I’ve mentioned in past columns, I live in Blackberry Township, where residents had no say in who was elected to the Sugar Grove Village Board that is now pushing through a 760-acre mixed-use Crown Community Development that will no doubt include a whole lot of warehouses.
People like to say you can’t stop development, especially if it’s being driven by one of the wealthier companies in the country. There’s a frustrated but feisty group of people living in my neck of the woods, however, who have been working really hard to prove that adage wrong.
For those who need a summary: Crown tried to come into Sugar Grove five years ago but was met with heavy resistance from residents on both sides of the Interstate 88/Route 47 interchange. And so, its bigwigs retreated, a few heads rolled on the Village Board at the next election, and last year the developer came back touting a new and improved plan.
This “Crown Light” proposal includes residential, retail and a lovely town center – complete with paddleboats on ponds – that would be located a good four miles from the heart of Sugar Grove. All of which would go on the south side of the interchange where the village trustees live, including the current president who won her seat running a no-warehouses campaign.
The good news is there will indeed be no industrial … on the south side. If built, the warehouses would all go on Blackberry Township’s north side.
I’m not here to do a deep dive into the myriad – and obvious – reasons this plan continues to be met with so much resistance. But I do feel comfortable talking about the misconstrued idea that development equals progress, and what it means to a community that’s on the brink of major change.
For one thing, it means a heavy police presence, with metal detectors and body searches as residents walk into a church or a community college to take part in public hearings.
It also means accusations and name calling – at microphones or, far nastier, on social media – that pit officials against residents, residents against residents, neighbors against neighbors.
It means passions running so high that even those working on the same side of the issue can turn against each other.
There’s nothing sweet about what’s going on in Sugar Grove right now.
Earlier this month at a public hearing on rezoning in front of the village’s Plan Commission, hundreds of Sugar Grove and Blackberry Township residents turned out to give and hear emotional and scientific testimony about why this redevelopment plan would not only harm individual homeowners but an entire community.
And on Tuesday and Thursday, hundreds more went through those security measures again to attend the Village Board meeting.
Emotions are high because much is at stake. Unfortunately, this is not a unique story, as suburban development continues its march westward, with warehouses in particular mushrooming across communities that prided themselves on open space and rural landscapes.
But what is “rural” these days? What will it be 20 years from now? Fifty years from now? A hundred years from now?
Those who have been longtime readers of this column know how proud I am of my farming heritage. But even western Kansas is not immune to the agricultural changes in this nation. For one thing, fewer farms are staying in families. My own brother, who was left all the acreage pioneered by our great-grandfather so it would remain in the family, stopped tilling the land and now rents it to others.
He gave up farming, by the way, to own and operate a highly-profitable concrete business.
But at least that land is still producing crops. According to the 2022 agricultural census, for the first time since data was being collected, the total farmland acres in the U.S. has dropped to 880 million, the lowest since 1850.
The reasons are not complicated. Market volatility makes farming financially challenging. That means younger generations go into other professions because they don’t want to take on all those uncertainties. And who can blame them, if given the chance, for turning their land over to larger groups or sell to anxious – and patient – developers.
Twenty years ago Crown purchased this farmland that straddles the interstate and continued to grow crops on it with the intent to develop the property when the time was right. That time came when the eastbound portion of this I-88/Route 47 interchange was put in, partly funded by Sugar Grove.
So it comes as no surprise that those in support of the proposal proclaim the owners have the right to develop their property as they see fit, provided they go through “the process.” In this case that means annexation and zoning changes. And there’s also been a $109 million TIF thrown in, which can only work if those many acres of rich Illinois soil are declared officially blighted.
Here’s where things get sticky, and I respectfully suggest, open to interpretation.
There’s language in place that declares an owner’s right to control their property, but consideration must be given to the good of the community. It’s those last few words that have produced all the angst and controversy.
Those in favor of Crown rightly argue Sugar Grove desperately needs economic development. This plan, they say, is not only good for the community because it brings housing, jobs, goods and services, it’s necessary to rein in already-high property taxes.
To which opponents counter – bring on development. Just not warehouses and a gas station near existing neighborhoods that will add far more trucks on the already diesel-infused Route 47, creating serious health and safety nightmares that will impact residents for generations to come.
And don’t throw an always controversial TIF into the process, they add, by designating precious farmland as blighted because of dubious claims of flooding in the Blackberry Creek watershed.
It’s not hard to understand why so many residents on the north side of the interchange feel betrayed and cheated. But from what I saw after a show of hands requested by a speaker at Tuesday’s meeting, the vast majority in that large audience who were against Crown’s plans were from Sugar Grove.
There was, of course, far more of the village’s population who did not show up. Their reasons, I’m guessing, range from Crown support and/or indifference to no idea what’s going on that has many people so angry metal detectors are called for.
Or maybe they just wanted to watch the DNC party going on in downtown Chicago. To quote a well-known politician on the other side of this also-divisive 2024 election, “there are good people on both sides” of the local controversy.
There’s also a well-worn phrase about change being inevitable. Few know that more than those in the newspaper and health care professions. But it’s not always synonymous with growth – or progress.
Nor is development.
“I’m not against it,” said a retired Sugar Grove man who lives on the other side of the village and far from the interchange, yet stayed until the end of both Tuesday’s and Thursday’s five-hour meetings.
“I just don’t want to see the kind of development,” he added, “that will hurt so many people.”
dcrosby@tribpub.com
