News on Virgil Development

Chicago Tribune
August 1, 2006

1,000 acres in Kane saved for open space

Forest district buys Virgil Township tract     

By William Presecky
Tribune staff reporter

The Kane County Forest Preserve District has closed on the largest land deal in its 81-year history--1,117 acres in Virgil Township--bringing down the curtain on just over a year of intense open-space buying.

The district spent $31,212,000 on Friday in the landmark purchase from seven property owners in the western Kane County township, exhausting proceeds from a $75 million bond sale Kane voters overwhelmingly authorized in April 2005, according to finance director Bob Quinlan.

The first forest preserve purchases with the bond money were made in July 2005.

"We're excited about this one," said Forest Preserve Commission President John Hoscheit.

Hoscheit said it has been a vision of forest preserve officials to acquire a 1,000-acre tract in the western townships of Kane County since 1999.

"We never could get a thousand acres together," said Hoscheit. Given the large number of property owners involved in the Virgil deal, its culmination was not assured, he said.

"Any one of those could have had the domino effect of it not happening," said Hoscheit.

The transaction last week also was the first major open-space purchase by the district in largely rural Virgil Township.

Every one of the 16 townships in Kane now includes forest preserve land.

Much of the agricultural land that was acquired to create the new Virgil Forest Preserve, the second largest in the district, had been targeted for a residential development.

"This benefits, obviously, not only Virgil Township, but this is going to be a recreational area and natural area for the entire county," said Jan Strasma, a spokesman for Preserve Virgil, a citizens group that opposed any massive expansion of the village.

"The original impetus for [the purchase] came from Preserve Virgil ... so obviously we're delighted," Strasma said.

Much of the land purchased was part of what had been proposed as a 1,200-acre Founders Creek development, he said. "Virtually everything north of Highway 64 that had been planned for Founders Creek was purchased by the Forest Preserve District," Strasma said.

The new preserve is centered on Lee and Sauber Roads, in and around the north side of Virgil.

Strasma had high praise for the landowners who had been part of the proposed development "for recognizing that this land is worth preserving."

"This is country to us," said Virgil Village Board member Patricia Probst.

"There are other parts [of Virgil Township] that are going to be developed that weren't in the forest preserve purchase but instead of being 2,000 homes, we're going to have green space or whatever the forest preserve decides," she said.