Its Alive! The 120 Corridor Planning Council is Live!

The organizing meeting for the 120 Corridor Planning Council was tonight. I hosted it at the new Police and Public Works facility. It was very well attended, with the Mayors of Grayslake, Round Lake, Round Lake Park, Hainesville, Gurnee, Waucounda and Mundelein all attending or having representatives there. In addition County Board Chair Suzi Schmidt and the other 4 board members were there as well. The communities of Park City, Volo and Waukegan were unable to have there mayors attend. There were about 30 people in the audience.

The meeting was mostly all organizational with the adoption of bylaws and election of officers. I was elected Chairman, with County Board Member Diana O'Kelly as Vice Chair (she is the Chair of the county boards transportation committee and is an excellent fit), and Mayor Tim Perry of Grayslake was elected Treasurer.

I am very excited about the whole process and over time and it will take time, we are going build this needed transportation improvement. Of course I made some remarks which I will post below, with some edits for clarity.

I want to thank everyone on the council for there confidence in me. When I was thinking about what to say, there were three phrases that jumped out at me

• The first was "“Consensus" --—10 Municipalities and a substantial part of the county board leadership are here today and back the eventual construction of this needed traffic improvement. This is truly impressive and shows the importance we attach to transportation improvements.
• Second is the "East-West Transportation Solution"”-- this project is about exactly that, East-West, not North-South and specifically not 53.
• Third is "Optimism" the Route 120 bypass will get built, I doubt all of us would be sitting here, and staring ahead at a project of this magnitude and timeline if it were not because we are optimistic about the inevitability of this project taking place.
  
• There are many different ideas on how the road should end up. All of these ideas will and should be evaluated by our committee structure and the best solution will emerge. I think we can all promise that they will be heard and evaluated.

Obviously there will be much more happening in the future and of course you will be hearing quite a bit about it when those things happen!