An Illinois FIRST grant has allowed most of the cost of installing water mains in the Crestbrook subdivision to be removed from homeowners’ property tax bills, village trustees said.
They voted recently to abate this year’s bond payments for the special service area, which they created last year to collect the homeowners’ 30 percent share of the project’s cost. The village applied 30 percent of the $250,000 grant to the residents’ bill, bringing the total down to $129,850, which is being split among the 50 properties in the subdivision according to their equalized assessed valuation.
“This cost is an average of $2,597 per property,” Village President John Geils said.
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“That’s half what it would cost the residents if the village had paid the total cost of the public improvement and the residents had just paid to connect their properties to the system.”
Although some Crestbrook homeowners have welcomed the project because their private wells were failing and they wanted Lake Michigan water, others objected to being forced to pay after the village had installed sewers in lower-income neighborhoods at no cost to homeowners.
An attempt last June to block the project through a back-door referendum failed when opponents didn’t get valid signatures from 51 percent of homeowners and registered voters in the subdivision.