The Wilmette Park District’s real estate committee on Monday unanimously rejected an easement request that would have allowed an east Wilmette property owner access to his otherwise-landlocked acreage.
Members said they didn’t want to endanger future recreational uses of land the Park District now leases to the Evanston-based Canal Shores Golf Course.
“I don’t feel comfortable granting an easement that’s going to benefit private use of public land,” said John Olvany, who chairs the committee.
The Park Board could act on that decision on April 11. The decision is technically a recommendation against giving the current landowner, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, consent to grant the easement to the Keefe family trust.
“From the feedback we’ve gotten, from the neighbors, and from the concerned citizens here in Wilmette, people seem to be in favor of keeping it as it is,” Park Board Commissioner Ryrie Pellaton, a member of the committee, said.
“To grant the easement, we would be starting the process by which a road could eventually be built. I don’t know how this would be built without taking down trees and changing the nature of this land,” fellow committee member Bryan Abbott said.
The decision pleased John Powers, president of the Evanston Wilmette Golf Association, which manages Canal Shores. Course officials object to granting the easement to the trust because they fear it could increase flooding on their greens and destroy possible wetland habitat.
“Our foremost concern is that we have a golfable course,” he told the committee.
Joe Keefe, the Glencoe resident whose family trust owns just over an acre of land purchased decades ago by his Wilmette father, said he was not disappointed, though the committee’s decision represents “a challenge” for his family.
“I think the real estate committee acted as it felt it had to,” Keefe said.
However, Jeffrey Greenspan, the attorney who represents the trust, said the decision disappointed him, and his clients would be looking at other options.
Committee members agreed the case was confusing because it involves multiple leases of land that lies both in Wilmette and in Evanston.
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The MWRD owns the land over which the easement would travel. It leases just under 32 acres east and west of the North Shore Channel, between Isabella Street and Sheridan Road, to the Wilmette Park District in an agreement that lasts until 2032, according to MWRD spokeswoman Allison Fore. The Park District in turn subleases that land to the Golf Association.
Confusing the status even more, some of the land the Park District leases to the Golf Association actually lies in Evanston. according to Greenspan.
What’s more, any development of the easement would have to be approved by Wilmette and Evanston, the municipalities across whose boundaries the easement lies, according to MWRD Executive Director David St. Pierre.
Because a private entity seeks the easement, the Park District must sign off on the easement, St. Pierre stated in a January letter to Steve Wilson, his Park District counterpart. He attended the committee meeting, and said the MWRD has no objection to granting the easement.
He also told Abbott, who questioned him on how the MWRD deals with flood control and wetland protection issues, that the easement holder would have to obey Cook County’s watershed ordinance, whose regulations protect local wetlands. That could be the Keefe trust, or whoever the trust sells its land to, he said.
If local wetland is affected by development, the easement holder would have to mitigate that by creating, or paying to create, wetland elsewhere in the county, St. Pierre said.
Last July, Keefe told the Park Board his family needs the easement to sell its four-lot property just north of the Wilmette-Evanston border, south of Wilmette’s Golf Terrace. Without it, he can’t build an access road to reach his property, making it hard to market, he said. There is no ingress from Golf Terrace to the north, he said.
The easement lies roughly 100 feet east of CTA train tracks, he said. The family has provided a plan to remove eight to 10 swamp white oaks to create easement access, Keefe said. It also intends to replace some of the trees, and would be wiling to make a contribution to the Park District for plantings elsewhere.
On March 22, Tom Tully, golf course superintendent, said the Association received an Illinois Department of Natural Resources grant to do an environmental study of the course, including the area adjacent to where the easement might come in. In February, Powers sent a statement to the Park Board saying the easement area contains wetland and pre-Columbian woodlands, and urging the board “to consider the ecological impact of any development that would remove old-growth forests and wetlands.”
Keefe said last week that an environmental study the trust had done states that the wetland isn’t natural. He also said the question of how to maintain land is of concern, but should properly go to whoever purchases the lots.
“We’d assume that any future development would go through necessary Plan Commission and Zoning Board review,” he said.
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