The next year holds all of Buffalo Grove’s annual worries: Will the Buffalo Creek go on a rampage and flood people’s basements this summer? Will Bob Rohrman finish filling that empty space on Dundee Road?
And, can traffic on Lake Cook Road get any worse?
Road projects
As far as what can be predicted, the expansion of Lake Cook Road should be a big headache, and thus a big story. Cook County plans to widen the 53,000-cars-per-day, 100-crashes-a-year thoroughfare from two lanes to three from the choke point at Hastings Lane back to Raupp Boulevard. Delays, detours and other types or merriment are sure to ensue.
Cook County currently has the project budgeted for around $50 million. The work has already prompted the relocation of Buffalo Grove Days, from the Village Hall campus to Mike Rylko Park.
Another road story that is certain to be major in 2016 might have consequences that reach much further than Lake Cook Road.
The Illinois Tollway will spend the next year studying the environmental impacts of extending Illinois Route 53 into Lake County.
The project will cost between $2.3 billion and $2.6 billion —and that figure is in the Tollway’s assumption of what dollars will be worth in the year 2020.
Many of this area’s officials have said that the completion of Route 53, which would carry it from it current end at Lake Cook Road up to a refurbished Illinois Route 120 in Grayslake, is closer to gaining federal funding than any of its past iterations.
Dozens, sometimes hundreds, of opponents filled meeting rooms from Libertyville to Downers Grove in 2015, urging tollway and Lake County authorities to expand east-west roads to Interstate 94 instead.
The road’s current layout takes the road through a pair of marshes, in Long Grove and Hawthorn Woods. A study of how those wetlands might react to a long strip of impervious surface will surely be one of the largest topics in the year to come.
Crossing guard problems
In January, Community Consolidated Elementary District 21 will open its schools for the spring semester, and its three Buffalo Grove buildings will no longer have morning and afternoon crossing guards for walking students.
The loss of supervision is the result of a squabble between the School Board and Village Hall, which have parted ways after failing to find a way to keep paying for crossing guards in front of Tarkington, Longfellow and Kilmer. For decades, Buffalo Grove paid for crossing guards to monitor foot traffic in front of all the elementaries within village limits, a service that included three districts. In 2013, though, a budget-slashing Village Hall started sending bills to those districts for half of the patrol’s cost.
Districts 96 and 102 found the money, but District 21 — which is saving to rebuild its reserve fund — has refused, noting that it never agreed to this arrangement.
Talks that started in the summer broke down in the fall, and the three schools will open next year with more bus services, but no crossing guards. The two sides, as well as the families who pay taxes to both, hope that nothing bad happens to any of the students —which would make this a forgotten issue by the end of 2016.
Long Grove’s future
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The hamlet of Long Grove could become the home of big news in the realm of business, public works or public transportation next year. Among the many issues that have beset the leaders there:
* The state has declared the covered bridge that carries Robert Parker Coffin Road over the Buffalo Creek in the downtown area obsolete. None of its recent studies have declared the old span — most records place its age at around 80, a few date it back a century — to be in dangerous disrepair, but the Village Board spent much of 2015 considering how to ensure their drivers’ safety in the future. In 2016, the trustees may have to choose between tearing it down and erecting a new, two-lane bridge with mostly federal money, or repairing what currently exists with their own cash, leaving it at one lane.
* New businesses popped to life in the vacancies of downtown in both 2014 and 2015, but officials from Village President Angie Underwood to Long Grove Business and Community Partners executive director Sharon Fine said in 2015 that much progress remains. The LGBCP wants to dot the 2016 calendar with new, smaller festivals to fill in the gaps between the three major attractions, and the trustees are likely to spent plenty of time discussing the possibility of bringing a municipal water system — and the price tag for digging it — downtown.
* With Underwood casting a tie-breaking vote, the board extended video gambling in its taverns into February. With the same trustees expected to remain in position until the 2017 election, video gambling is likely to become a controversial, but permanent fixture of the village in a vote at one of their first meetings of the new year.
Changes at schools
Stevenson High School students should have something to cheer about this fall: their classes will start half an hour later.
Jumping aboard a trend that is spreading around the nation, SHS voted in 2015 to move its regular start times back from 8:05 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. School will also begin earlier in August, and the 2016-17 year will end in May as well. The hope, officials said, is to catch teens at their brains’ optimal times, helping them to absorb more information.
Lincolnshire-Prairie View Elementary District 103, Aptakisic-Tripp Elementary District 102 and Township High School District 214 have all looked into the possibility as well.
And remember: the biggest story of 2016 will probably be something no one saw coming. When asked what he foresaw in the next year, Buffalo Grove Lincolnshire Chamber of Commerce executive director Roger Sosa toyed with another protest-inducing, front-page dominating idea.
“I think the idea of a downtown Buffalo Grove isn’t totally dead,” he wrote in a Dec. 15 email, “but will need to be re-thought to include more stakeholders.”
Twitter: @RonnieAtPioneer