Lake in the Hills village trustees postpone asking the McHenry County Board to consider consolidating sanitary district.
LAKE IN THE HILLS – A vote to pass a resolution encouraging the McHenry County Board to dissolve and consolidate the Lake in the Hills Sanitary District with the village was postponed by Lake in the Hills trustees.
Outgoing Lake in the Hills Village President Paul Mulcahy, who initiated looking into the consolidation, called the Lake in the Hills Village Board’s decision to table the resolution “completely and utterly irresponsible.” “All the questions that I’ve heard from this Board of Trustees cannot get answered until this ordinance is passed by the county,” Mulcahy said at Thursday’s Village Board meeting.
Under the new law, county boards must cite a legitimate reason that concludes that the body proposed for elimination provides either unnecessary or duplicative services.
The law allows the McHenry County Board to eliminate a handful of bodies, such as the Lake in the Hills Sanitary District, the Crystal Lake Rural Fire District and the Greenwood and Hebron drainage districts.
The Lake in the Hills Sanitary District is a separate government than the village of Lake in the Hills and levies a separate property tax.
The district provides wastewater collection and water pollution control for about 11,000 customers in Lake in the Hills, and parts of Crystal Lake and Huntley, according to village documents and sanitary district manager Rick Forner.
Mulcahy has said the consolidation of the sanitary district would be more efficient and reduce expenses, in part by eliminating the district’s property tax levy, which sits at about $600,000, according to a Lake in the Hills staff report presented to the board in February.
Reduced services?
Or reduced upkeep on a $43 million facility?” Trustees Bogdanowski, Harlfinger, Bob Huckins, David McPhee and incoming Village President Russ Ruzanski voted to postpone voting on the resolution.