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SMILING IN SILENT CONTEMPT

There is no road in and out of the Lake Geneva Stone Ridge Development, located upon the highest northern hill of the city.  The road was part of the deal that Brian Pollard was given in order to be allowed to develop the hill.  Down at the bottom of that hill, alongside the road that does enter and depart from the development, that road owned and serviced by the Town of Geneva, there’s a big sign, readable for all people passing along on the busy road (where Interchange North and Williams Street blend running but not naming rights).  That sign indicates that people are still being encouraged to either buy existing Stone Ridge homes or build on still empty, for sale, lots.

Why has it been legal at all for homes to be built on city land that is not contiguously owned?  That happened and that is still happening.  When the Town of Geneva put in its awful, ugly, and damaging speed bumps last year, there was little that the residents up in the development or the City of Lake Geneva could do about it, except beg.  Meanwhile, the developer that promised to extend Stone Ridge Road, up near the eastern top of the hill, faded away.  Pollard sold out to another local developer named Shodeen.

There’s no road and there’s no pursuit of the rotten behavior Mr. Pollard and company exhibited then and continues to exhibit now.  Mr. Pollard retreated to Sym-phony Bay, that delightfully poor-taste collection of tiny, stacked, and stuffed homes being jammed onto the property he owns on Edwards Boulevard.  That mess of development has all sorts of its own problems, but what about Stone Ridge?  Why are homes still being allowed to be purchased up there and more built?  It’s not like the city doesn’t know.

There is current interest, consideration, and meetings being held about putting in a traffic signal where Center Street (the only road running down from Stone Ridge) and the Interchange North cross one another.  There has been no discussion about charging either Mr. Pollard or Shodeen for any bit of that now necessary (most probably) traffic control device.  Is the city really going to slap a ridiculous patch onto a problem that was endemically created and only can foundationally be fixed?  How much is a traffic signal complex, with emergency devices and automatic features?  About $500,000, with pedestrian, adaptive and automatic features, not to mention police and fire controls.  Then, there’s the distance problem, with respect to the traffic signal that controls the E. Sheridan Road cut-off and the Williams/Interchange North.

A traffic control light set up at Center Street would put the new intersection control devices less than 600 feet from the signals just a bit further to the northeast.  There’s an inherent safety danger to putting signals so close to one another, as it becomes very easy to get confused about when and where to stop.  In many places in Illinois, where planners have put intersections and control devices so close together, they’ve gone and added radar and cameras to catch people running one signal or the other.  They didn’t add the cameras for safety.  They did it because so many people, in confusion, run one light or the other, and the tickets the cameras allow for have become a great source of additional revenue.  Would red light ticket cameras become the rage in Lake Geneva?  The public gets force-fed these ‘Siamese’ lights and then gets nicked for violations.  Meanwhile, the developers continue to pay nothing. Is there any wonder why these developers are sitting back and smiling in quiet contempt?

Pollard Drive.  The road to nowhere, or maybe Hell…