The Wilmette Park District may not have a say in the Keefe family trust easement issue after all.
Joseph Keefe says his family needs an easement over Metropolitan Water Reclamation District-owned land because it’s the only way to access the east Wilmette property it owns and wants to sell.
Until recently, everyone with an interest in the issue – Keefe, the MWRD, the Park District, which rents the acreage from the MWRD, and the Canal Shores Golf Club, which then sub-leases it from the Park District – thought the Park District needed to approve the easement.
But on April 4, Park District real estate committee members said their board shouldn’t do that because it would mean eliminating publicly-owned recreational land to benefit a private landowner.
The committee recommendation was up for a vote on April 11. At that meeting, Parks Executive Director Steve Wilson said the MWRD had requested a 30-day delay to research claims by Keefe attorney Jeffrey Greenspan that the easement doesn’t actually cross land rented by the Park District.
If that’s the case, the MWRD won’t need the Park District’s blessing to grant the easement request, Wilson said.
More Top Picks Optoma Lv130
“I think everyone’s been operating under the idea that (MWRD land) from Isabella north to Sheridan Road is leased to the Park District,” Wilson said after the meeting. “When you get past that assumption and look at the legal descriptions of the property, lot by lot, it does open up the possibility where the land on which the easement was to be laid wasn’t in fact leased by us, but was still owned by the MWRD.”
Commissioners approved the delay.
“We are a good tenant of the MWRD, so if it asks us to wait 30 days, I see no problem with that whatsoever,” said John Olvany, the park board’s president and head of the real estate committee.
Keefe said April 12 that Greenspan’s research shows land to the south of his property actually lies in Evanston. He said the family is seeking clarification from Evanston, the Park District and the MWRD “so we can consider all of our options.”
Park District staff and the district’s attorney compared descriptions in the district’s MWRD lease with survey descriptions of the land, but couldn’t decide if the land is leased to the district, Wilson told park board members.
The MWRD 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, MWRD spokeswoman Allison Fore said. The Park District in turn subleases that land to the Evanston Wilmette Golf Association, which manages Canal Shores.
Keefe, a Glencoe resident, told the park board last July that 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 family plans to remove eight to 10 swamp white oaks to create easement access, which golf association officials oppose because they fear it will increase flooding on their greens and damage a potential wetland.
Twitter: @pioneer_kathy