The case of the missing steel

Macomb likes its new restaurants. A couple years ago, the city got its first-ever Arby's and -- according to (possibly apocryphal) lore -- set a record for greatest opening-day sales for an Arby's in North America. You don't mess with Macomb when it comes to curly fries.

So locals had a lot of similar enthusiasm when, earlier this year, Buffalo Wild Wings announced that it would build a new restaurant in the highly coveted land right in front of Wal-Mart. Construction crews showed up and began prepping the foundation. And then things just . . . stopped. For the past month or so, the site has looked like this:


The Macomb rumor mill went into overdrive, with some locals speculating that the Macomb City Council had denied the restaurant a liquor license. (Wal-Mart sued the city a few years ago when its liquor request was shot down.) But as Nathan Woodside of the Macomb Eagle reported on October 15, liquor wasn't the problem:

Kim Pierce, Macomb Area Economic Development Corporation executive director, said construction has stopped because a batch of steel needed to be back-ordered before excavation could continue.

"When I talked to them a couple weeks ago, they thought the steel was just a couple weeks away, so that basically brings up to right now," Pierce said. "Hopefully that will get delivered in over the weekend and they can start next week."

No word yet on the missing steel. The restaurant was originally scheduled to open sometime in November, but Pierce is quoted later in the article as saying that date has been pushed back until the end of the year. A hungry Macomb stands ready.

Websites about road projects

A couple weeks ago, the governor's office launched a new website to track the expansion/improvement of U.S. Route 67, which cuts through west-central Illinois, linking the Quad Cities to St. Louis.

http://www.dot.state.il.us/us67/index.html

One thing I learned is that the project will involve building a new four-lane bridge over the Illinois River at Beardstown; I'd figured that construction crews would expand the current bridge or simply whittle down traffic to two lanes for that section.

Anyway, the site gives a decent overview but is a little short on maps. Far more detailed ones can be found on the website for Illinois 336 -- the proposed four-lane linking Macomb to Peoria.

http://www.peoriatomacomb.com

A little recognition for our office

I'm not very interested in self-promotion just for its own sake. There's way too much of that in real estate already, and I think most consumers are sick of it, too. The "look at me, please!" thing gets pretty old.

So I thought quite a bit about whether to post a link to this story -- about an award our office recently won for 2006 sales. Among all of the 89 RE/MAX offices in the St. Louis Region, an area encompassing Missouri and the southern half of Illinois, our office averaged the highest number of transactions per agent: 51. (We also won the award in 2005, when we averaged 55 transactions per agent.)

While an award in itself is a nice thing to have, I think the real point of this one is that it demonstrates just how much we've been helping our clients. I look at it this way: In any industry, the busy people are the ones considered to be knowledgeable and hardworking. If your car breaks down and you need to hire a mechanic, for example, you can guess that the person who's doing it full time probably has the necessary training and has fixed the same problem dozens of times for other people.

My automotive expertise may be lacking (though I did once, as a grad assistant, have a professor give me the assignment of refilling her car's windshield wiper fluid, for which I earned high marks), but I'm happy to be part of a team that knows a lot about real estate. And at a current average of 44 transactions per agent for 2007 sales, we're keeping pretty busy this year, too.

Zoning requests that prevailed

One topic I haven't addressed much on here thus far (other than in a general overview I wrote last spring) is zoning in Macomb. That's not because I consider it irrelevant -- quite the opposite, actually -- but because there's so much occurring with it, often in apparently contradictory fashion, that keeping pace with the newest chapters of the story isn't easy. I could probably make zoning my sole topic of this site and still not prevent things from slipping through the gaps.

Last week, Macomb governing bodies made two somewhat surprising zoning decisions. I call them surprising because both involved changing (or at least bending) the zoning rules concerning multi-family housing -- and in Macomb, that almost never happens.

The first decision occurred last Monday, October 1, when the Macomb City Council agreed to change the zoning from single to multi-family for a piece of land at the corner of North Randolph Street and Hickory Grove Road. The owner of the land, the Macomb Country Club, requested the change in order to build two duplexes that would sit on the edge of the club's golf course.

The country club's request was granted by city aldermen, passing 8-1. The lone voice of dissent was from Alderman Ken Zahnle, who was quoted in a story by the Macomb Journal: "This is spot zoning, pure and simple."

Even if you disagree with Zahnle, it's easy to to understand his point. As this Macomb zoning map shows, there isn't any multi-family housing anywhere near this land; the closest multi-family units are some duplexes located on the east end of the country club, on Bayberry Lane.

The other zoning decision occurred two days later, when the Macomb Zoning Board of Appeals agreed to allow Scott Wisslead to construct twin duplexes on his property at 533 N. Randolph. From the Journal:

Developer Scott Wisslead sought a front yard setback variance of ten feet. The city code requires a setback of 25 feet, and Wisslead asked to be allowed to set it at 15 feet.

Community Development Coordinator Ed Basch said the fact that 533 is a corner lot gave Wisslead, in effect, two front yards. "For a duplex, this would be essentially an unbuildable lot if you required him to have two front entrances," he told the board.

Neighbor Cheryl Douglas, at 529 North Randolph, objected to the duplex design featuring second floor living quarters and garages on the first level. "It's going to look like a parking garage," she said. "This is a historic neighborhood. Four of these homes are in the David Badger architectural sketchbook."

Board chair Kevin Wiehardt expressed concern about a need for landscaping on the property. Board member A.J. Bourn moved to table any action until more detailed architectural drawings could be provided.

"This motion is indicative of the aesthetic concerns we all share about this design," said board member Sally Egler.

"The ranch home design provides the most useable living space," Wisslead responded.

But City Attorney Liz Wilhelm told the zoning board that action could not be postponed due to aesthetic considerations alone. Bourn then withdrew his motion, and board member Ron Runser moved to approve the variance.

The board cast a unanimous vote of approval. Basch assured board members that his office had successfully worked with Wisslead before on landscaping issues and that should not be of further concern.

(Runser, incidentally, is a new member of the zoning board. As a citizen, he appeared before the board a year or two ago on behalf of his employer, Schuyler State Bank, which requested permission to turn on an electronic sign located in front of the bank's new building on East Jackson Street. That request was granted, but only after a lot of back and forth between the bank and the zoning board.)

The zoning fights aren't over. Coming up soon is a request to build doctors' offices in a corn field along East Grant Street. The homeowners in that neighborhood have already spoken out against the project.

More on the water violation story

Not long after I posted a link to a Macomb Journal story about water-quality violations at a Macomb mobile home park, I spotted a similar write-up in the Peoria Journal Star.

What struck me was the final paragraph in the Journal Star version:

A water line was run from Macomb to Colchester in 2005 and runs right in front of the mobile home park. But city officials said Thursday that Dresler chose not to tap into the line.

Also, the Journal Star version correctly spells the property owner's last name as "Dresler" (one s), rather than "Dressler."

State sues owner of local mobile home park

Earlier this week, the Macomb Journal reported that Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has filed a lawsuit against Stanley Dressler, owner of a mobile home park located just west of Macomb. The lawsuit alleges that Dressler violated state regulations concerning water provided at his property, Country Aire Estates Mobile Home Park.

From the Journal article:

Water is supplied to Country Aire Estates residents from two drilled rock wells with depths of 320 and 323 feet, supplying an average of 6,580 gallons of water per day to 125 consumers through 51 service connections.

The seven counts detail a laundry list of items the state alleges the park's owner has violated in providing a public water supply: coliform sampling, lead and copper sampling, nitrate sampling, disinfectant sampling, reporting, failure to provide continuous chlorination and equipment installation.

The suit, filed by Madigan's office at the request of the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, seeks correction of the items that allegedly have been violated, as well as maximum fines for each violation, which run up to $50,000 for each violation and up to $10,000 for each day the violation has occurred.

"It's a pretty straight-forward set of violations," Scott Mulford, a spokesman for Madigan's office said Wednesday. "Some people there may not be aware of the problems."

The first count in the suit deals with coliform sampling and indicates the IEPA discovered in 2005 that the park exceeded the maximum contaminant level for coliform bacteria and failed to submit sample results. The IEPA then conducted an engineering inspection on June 27, 2006, and observed that the park's chlorination pump was not operating properly and that records weren't maintained. The suit also indicates the system lacked shutoff valves and adequate flushing hydrants and that the owner failed to routinely collect required samples from the wells, treatment plant and distribution system.

In the lead and copper sampling complaint, the state claims Dressler failed to submit results, which is similar to the complaints about nitrate and disinfectant sampling at the park.

The suit's allegations on reporting claim the state reviewed records on July 22, 2005, and discovered Dressler failed to issue public notices and public notice certification forms for a styrene, ethylbenzene and xylene violation and failed to issue a public notice for a violation for maximum contaminant level of coliform. The suit also alleges Dressler failed to submit monthly operating reports from October 2003 to March 2007, with the exception of August through October 2006.

Dressler, of Hinsdale, said Wednesday that he had not seen the suit.

"I know nothing about that," he said. "I thought I was in compliance with everything."

So far the only online reference I've seen to all this is on the Journal website. No word yet if any other news outlets have picked up on the story.

New source for rental info

As of this week, there's a new source to help in the search for Macomb rentals: rentmacomb.com. The site only launched yesterday but already has quite a few properties posted.

Rentmacomb.com offers a way for visitors to browse available rentals according to price, number of bedrooms, or name of the landlord. Each listing includes a small Google map, showing exactly where the rental property is located in town.

What impresses me about the site (aside from its Google-esque clean and minimalistic interface) is its thoroughness, even this early on in its existence. (Today I counted over 60 properties on the site, easily twice the number you'll find in a local newspaper's classified ads on an average day.) The site's owners, Jacob and Marcia Thurman, invite all Macomb landlords to list their rental properties for free, either by (1) creating a user account and performing the data entry themselves or (2) filling out a form with the necessary information and snail-mailing it back to the Thurmans. Landlords have nothing to lose, so they participate, and that only helps the database grow more complete. (Because even a "free" endeavor like this has to make some revenue, the Thurmans run ads on the right side of each page on the site.)

In a letter to landlords this summer -- asking for their participation in the project -- the Thurmans explained that they were motivated to create rentmacomb.com after spending several months stuck on their own frustrating rental search. "We did eventually find a house that we like," they wrote, "but we also found that despite the very high number of rental properties in Macomb, information about what is available is hard to come by.

"In short, finding a place to rent in Macomb is a lot more difficult than it needs to be."

Earlier this spring, I wrote about the rentals list our RE/MAX office keeps on file -- an informal list of every currently available rental we know about. That list has never been all-inclusive, and I'm always looking for ways to make it better. As soon as I saw rentmacomb.com go live yesterday, I typed it in bold and added it to the top of our list. Maybe our office will have some luck steering landlords and tenants the Thurmans' way.