The action comes less than a month after Village Council approved the annexation of Mid-Iron Golf Club and Gleneagles Country Club from unincorporated Lemont Township. The property owner wanted to move quickly with the process in hopes of avoiding involvement in an ongoing legal dispute between Palos Park and Lemont.
Officials in Palos Park, Ill., approved annexations of the Cog Hill Golf & Country Club and the Ludwig Farm property, on February 8, the Chicago Tribune reported.
The action by the Village Council came less than a month after the it approved annexing the Mid-Iron Golf Club and Gleneagles Country Club, both previously in unincorporated Lemont Township.
“This is a community worth being a part of,” William Hennessy, an attorney representing the owners of Cog Hill and the Ludwig family, told Palos Park commissioners after they approved the annexation ordinances.
Instead of negotiating pre-annexation agreements with Palos Park, the property owners wanted to move quickly with the annexation process in hopes of avoiding becoming snared in an ongoing legal dispute between Palos Park and Lemont, the Tribune reported.
In December, a petition was filed on behalf of some residents of the Sun Hill subdivision, seeking to bring them into Lemont. That petition also seeks the forced annexation of about half of the Gleneagles property. If that annexation petition were to be improved, it would upend Palos Park’s efforts to bring Cog Hill and other properties into that suburb, the Tribune reported.
Palos Park, as well as the owners of Gleneagles, Cog Hill and Mid-Iron, have filed objections to the Lemont petition, and a hearing is scheduled for next month in Cook County Circuit Court, the Tribune reported.
The Cog Hill property consists of 1,036 acres and the Ludwig Farm property is made up of 111 acres. Last month, the Village Council approved annexing the 232-acre Gleneagles property and the 46-acre Mid-Iron range, just northeast of the Ludwig Farm, the Tribune reported.
It’s anticipated that at some point, residential and commercial development could occur on some of the properties being annexed, which would be made more attractive for development with access to Lake Michigan water and sanitary sewer service. The McNulty family, which owns Gleneagles, has indicated that it would be several years before development would occur on that golf course; and the Jemsek family, owners of Cog Hill, has indicated it wants development that would enhance its golf course and make it more attractive to major golf tournaments, the Tribune reported.
Hennessy said Monday that any development at Cog Hill could take 35 to 40 years to complete. Any development proposals at Cog Hill or the other annexed properties would go through an extensive public review process, Palos Park Mayor John Mahoney said.
Lemont officials have argued that the properties Palos Park has annexed are within Lemont’s long-range planning area, but owners of the properties had resisted efforts by Lemont to annex their land, the Tribune reported.
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