No new information —but a lot of old emotions — came out of Long Grove’s open-house meeting to discuss the possible extension of Illinois Route 53.
Lake County Board President Aaron Lawlor responded to criticism by saying he would not be treated like a “punching bag,” and Long Grove Village President Angie Underwood asked the crowd to stop berating him.
Underwood and two other members of the Long Grove Village Board spent about 90 minutes on Tuesday skewering aspects of the Illinois Tollway’s plan to extend Route 53 from its current terminus at Lake Cook Road up to Illinois Route 120 in Grayslake.
The project would build an entirely new, likely four-line highway near or through wetlands and neighborhoods. The 12 miles of new pavement, currently estimated to cost about $2.5 billion, would then join a renovated Route 120 in an attempt to ease traffic and spur economic development.
In a recently published public-opinion survey that Long Grove Village Hall funded, 53 percent of respondents opposed the project, while 47 percent favored it. On Aug. 17, Hawthorn Woods convened a Village Board meeting with hundreds of residents to discuss how it might be affected by the construction.
Underwood said she had been impressed by that session and wanted to hold her own.
Village officials billed this week’s meeting as an official Long Grove Village Board session, but no official meeting was ever called to order, and only three of the six board members present —Stan Borys, Michael Sarlitto and Underwood — stood before the audience or spoke. All three identified themselves as against the extension.
Underwood said she wanted to keep an open mind to its possibilities, but Sarlitto and Borys spoke frankly about the flaws they see.
“If there are any residents here who support this, I dare you to come up here and explain something positive about it,” Sarlitto told the audience of about 200.
No one in the standing-room-only audience answered that challenge. The Long Grove board had invited Lawlor, as well as County Board member Sid Mathias, Hawthorn Woods Mayor Joe Mancino and Lake County treasurer David Stolman to attend.
At several points, crowd members called for Lawlor to answer questions, which he stood up and responded. Lawlor challenged nearly everything Sarlitto and Borys put into their presentation— like how a first-of-its-kind tax financing district might affect Long Grove and the per-mile price of the project.
No new information on the project itself came from the gathering. Lawlor said Long Grove invited him on the promise that he would not be asked to make a presentation.
“I’m not going to be here, at a meeting that I was explicitly told I wouldn’t be speaking at, just to be a punching bag,” Lawlor told the crowd.
Underwood admonished the visitors —about 25 of whom stood along the walls or sat on the floor, because the gym had plenty of open space but too few seats —to respect Lake County’s top elected official.
“This is not a meeting for everyone to gang up on Aaron Lawlor,” she said.
But Sarlitto said some of Long Grove appears to be misinformed, saying that the 47 percent of survey respondents who want Route 53 needed to know what he knew.
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“If you had the facts that have been crammed up in this little noggin in the last month, it would be a hell of a lot higher,” Sarlitto said.
“Long Grove is Ground Zero for this project,” Sarlitto said. “It starts right here, in this gym.”
Twitter: @RonnieAtPioneer