The Lyons Township High School District 204 school board will soon seek community input on a land sale that could bring the district millions of dollars.
At their regular Monday meeting, the LTHS board discussed at length first steps in selling the district’s undeveloped Willow Springs property, just west of that town at 79th Street and German Church Road. It’s not clear when the process will begin as the district needs to find a community engagement consultant, though the board seemed eager to get started.
Last week the school district got an offer of almost $20 million for the property from Pulte Homes, a home developer and, as the district looks for funding for an ambitious improvements plan, the income would be welcome.
However, a school district land sale is not an overnight process and the fate of this particular piece of property has, for years, been a topic of contentious debate between neighbors and district leadership.
First, by state law any school district has to accept public bids before it sells land — it cannot, in other words, simply accept an offer from an interested party without a bid process — and LTHS has toyed with selling this land for years, including to industrial developers, for far more money than $20 million, albeit without securing zoning changes or community support in Willow Springs.
The land is zoned for residential use with some light commercial, and even the residential zoning is limited according to lot size in an effort to limit density. The school district has no direct control over zoning and Willow Springs leadership has balked at the idea of allowing industrial use and it might again reject any bid to alter residential lot requirements, even though the plan put forward by Pulte Homes envisions a denser housing development than is currently allowed.
The board made no decisions Monday, but board members expressed an interest in seeking community interest and the support of Willow Springs.
One official from Willow Springs present at the meeting, Trustee Tom Arra, sat in on the meeting in the audience. He said the mayor had a prior engagement and he thanked the school board for its apparent willingness to work with the town. Two community members also addressed the board, one who said she favored the sale as presented and another who criticized the process to date, including the district’s attempt last year to sell the land to a manufacturing facility for $55 million.
“The land was never worth $55 million,” Mario Imbarrato told the board. Imbarrato was a critic last year of the sales talk — as were many residents — and he said the district would face an uphill battle convincing the school community to accept any lesser bid this year.
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“Now I think we have people across the district who think they lost $35 million that they never had,” he said.
But the board has not yet begun to make its case publicly, and that was the focus of Monday’s discussion. In the end, the board asked Superintendent Brian Waterman to put together a request for proposals from community engagement consultants that will eventually kick off a series of community meetings to gauge community interest in a sale.
Attorney James Levi, who is working on behalf of the district, suggested a community engagement process first — before even getting a property assessment — to make sure residents of Willow Springs and school parents even supported a sale before the district pressed forward on bids.
Levi pointed out that once the board votes to sell the land and seek bids, the district only has 60 days to sell the land by state law.
“You do have a limitation in time,” he said.
LTHS Board President Dawn Aubert pointed out the district doesn’t even know yet what the parcel is worth.
“That is a huge piece of information that we should have,” Aubert said.
Levi agreed, though he pointed out that getting land assessed doesn’t take much time and could be done later, and still prior to any decision to sell the property. He said the community engagement process would be more time consuming.
“Keeping it within the current zoning, you’d hire an appraiser and … an appraiser would go out and perform his due diligence to do that,” Levi said. He added that it’s likely any potential home developer would want the property to be rezoned to allow for denser development, so the district would want to at least consult with Willow Springs residents and officials about whether they would accept a zoning change, though in any case whoever got the bid would be on the hook for getting the zoning changed.
“Most developers want as much density as possible, and that’s usually the sticking point,” Levi said. In any case, he said the property assessment isn’t a guarantee anyway of what the district could get.
“They are valuable to provide you with some sort of insight. … it does help. It’s not the end all be all of the price you’re going to get. It probably won’t be. It could be lower, it could be higher,” he said.
Jesse Wright is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.