Article in Saturdays's Daily Herald

Rt. 120 bypass will be built, mayor assures

By Jason King
Daily Herald Staff Writer
Posted Saturday, November 05, 2005

Two central Lake County mayors hope to capitalize on an emerging consensus to improve Route 120.

Round Lake Mayor Bill Gentes and Grayslake Mayor Tim Perry are leading an effort to create a corridor planning council for the road. They say it would do much of the groundwork for the desired improvements.

“The first phase of a road program is called the ‘phase one engineering.’ It maps out the corridor, gets the logistics out of the way. It’s a big picture look, if you will,” Gentes said. “That’s what we want to accomplish.”

In September, during a transportation summit staged by the Lake County Partners, work on the Route 120 bypass emerged as the main desired regional road improvement.

Perry said there’s a good reason for that.

“Grayslake and Round Lake are the most directly impacted. But it’s not just those residents getting bogged down in traffic, it’s the entire county,” he said. “It impacts every business in central Lake County, as well as the rest of the county.”

Gentes said the planning council ideally would consist of leaders from 11 communities along Route 120 and the proposed bypass, along with the five county board members whose districts include the road.

The bypass would be a four-lane divided highway running about 7.5 miles between Wilson and Almond roads south of Route 120. Cost estimates range up to $500 million.

Gentes said each municipality would pony up $5,000 to get the effort rolling and be expected to make its professional staff available for the project.

Most of the municipalities contacted have indicated they’d join the council, Gentes said.

“If we come up with every community on the corridor, every county board member and we’re all saying ‘yes’ and present it to our legislators and banged the public relations drum, it would be very difficult for the state to not put that very high on the priority list,” he said.

Perry said the need for improving Route 120 is too important for decision-makers to ignore.

“Transportation is the No. 1 impediment to the expansion of the local economy and our nonresidential tax base,” he said. “If business users identify that they can’t move goods, services, employees or customers through the area, they could make the decision to hopscotch over Lake County.”

Gentes said he expects the council to begin its work in January, with an eye toward presenting its information to the Illinois Department of Transportation and local legislators next fall.

“I think all of us speaking together in one voice will cause Lake County to get our fair share (of transportation funding),” he said. “The Route 120 bypass will be built.”