County 2030 Plan Final Stretch

I try to be an optimist, but sometimes it's really hard to keep my spirits up...

Take the McHenry County 2030 Land Use Plan as an example. The County Board held a series of Public Open House meetings last month that were very well attended. They received over 300 comments in some written form - emails, letters, notes about the maps, even handwritten comments.

But then the Planning & Development Committee - with scant discussion of the comments - voted to send the plan to the full County Board for a vote at its April 20th meeting. They made some changes to the map to reduce the amount of residential sprawl shown (although they decided to maintain the plan for residential development on top of two of the largest remaining oak woodlands in the county, despite TLC's request to amend that portion of the map). However, they kept all of the thousands of acres of commercial/office/industrial land around Marengo, despite three important facts:

1. the areas planned for this type of use are some of the most sensitive groundwater recharge areas in the entire county -- and everyone in the county is dependent upon groundwater for their daily water use (even elected officials).

2. many of the areas so planned are prime agricultural lands - some of the best farmland in the US, and even the world.

3. the agricultural industry is the second largest economic force in McHenry County. And consider that for every person who works on a farm, there are something like 20 people who have jobs because of those farms. Yep, think of the people who clean and process the seed, who manufacture and sell farm chemicals, who manufacture and sell farm equipment, who process the end products from the crops raised on the farms, etc, etc.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I for one like the idea of my food being raised in the USA, rather than imported from former South American grasslands or the Ukraine (two other prime agricultural regions based on climate & soils). And it kind of honks me off when our elected officials create a farmland preservation commission on the one hand, and then push a policy document aimed at further damaging an already threatened local industry.

That's two handful's of rich, black, humus-y soil in the picture on the left. And that is the reason for this area being such a primo spot for growing crops of all sort. The soil combined with a favorable climate where it rains regularly during the growing season. There may come a day on this planet when wars will be waged over resources like this.

Oh wait, that is already happening in Africa... But it would never come to that here, would it???