Hazel Crest OKs golf course annexation
Opponents decry move as harmful to area communities
The Hazel Crest Village Board voted Tuesday to annex the Calumet Country Club, a move opponents said could end up being destructive to the community and surrounding suburbs.
Proposals for the 130-acre property, northwest of Dixie Highway and 175th Street in unincorporated Cook County, include warehouses and a factory to build manufactured homes components, as well as an indoor water park, hotel, retail space and restaurant.
Hazel Crest residents along with residents of nearby communities said it could create more truck traffic, worsen pollution and lower property values.
Gloria Bashir, a Hazel Crest resident, said board members are “complicit with the destruction of this community.”
“You will be held accountable for what you are doing,” Bashir said.
Charlene Dixon, who lives in East Hazel Crest directly east of the golf course, said “this is a death knell for the Southland,” and said redevelopment will be “destructive for the future of all our communities.”
Hazel Crest Mayor Vernard Alsberry Jr. said he believed the annexation will be a positive for the village.
“We are going to expand our community and we are going to grow our community,” he said.
He said the village will, through public meetings, get input from residents about the best use of the land.
“We’re going to take it to our community” for their input, Alsberry said to jeers and derisive comments from the audience. “That was our plan all along.”
Previously, the Hazel Crest Board approved hiring a consultant to study creating a tax increment financing
district that would cover the golf course property and offer benefits to development.
Founded in 1901 and annexed to Homewood in 1980, the golf course was most recently proposed as a site for up to 800,000 square feet of warehouse space by property owner Walt Brown Jr.
His company, Arizona-based Diversified Partners, paid $3.3 million in the fall of 2020 for the golf course property.
Homewood officials rejected the plan before voting in April 2021 to allow the country club to disconnect from the village.
Those in the audience Tuesday complained they
were not given an opportunity to speak before the vote, with public comment allowed toward the end of the meeting, after the board unanimously approved the annexation.
“Let us speak,” several people chanted, with some being escorted by police out of the meeting room, including Liz Varmecky, founder of South Suburbs for Greenspace, a group organized in opposition to development plans when the golf course was in Homewood.
“This is an open meeting, this is a public meeting,” she told board members before she was physically removed by three officers, including police Chief Mitchell Davis.
Later allowed to return during the public comment session, Varmecky asked board members to reconsider, noting the legacy they might leave should they move ahead with allowing the redevelopment.
“This is the biggest vote you’ve taken and it was a huge mistake,” she said.
Cindy Tolliver, a Hazel
Crest resident, said any development that includes warehouses is not what residents want.
“Consider reversing the decision you just made and allow residents a chance to voice their opinions,” she said.
Homewood officials had, before allowing the golf course to disconnect from the village, soundly rejected redevelopment plans put forward by Brown. Homewood Mayor Rich Hofeld asked Hazel Crest officials to not support the current proposal.
In a letter Tuesday to Alsberry, Hofeld said the proposal rejected by his village “would have destroyed not only the greenspace that the site affords but it would also create too large a volume of truck traffic,” affecting Hazel Crest as well as Homewood and East Hazel Crest.
Acknowledging the redevelopment plans have been tweaked, he said in the correspondence that “it is still not a good development.”
Hazel Crest had previously approved hiring a consultant, Plainfield-based Teska Associates Inc., to study whether the country club could be designated as a tax increment financing district. With a TIF, certain costs borne by the developer could be recouped through property tax revenue.
Teska said it could take four to six months to evaluate and create a TIF district.
Principals of Catalyst Consulting have identified the firm as the “majority developer” of the golf course property, although it doesn’t own the site and has thrown in potential uses including a grocery store, hotel, indoor sports center with basketball courts and a community center.
Catalyst gave $5,000 to Alsberry’s mayoral campaign committee May 12, followed by another $5,000 recorded June 3, according to a financial disclosure report filed by the mayor’s committee with the state board of elections.
Alsberry has denied any pay-to-play politics involved in Hazel Crest’s consideration of annexation or development plans.
Property tax records show a bit more than $350,000 in property taxes owed on the property were paid Jan. 11, according to the Cook County treasurer’s office.
They were paid by W & E Ventures, of Scottsdale, Arizona, and Illinois Secretary of State records show W & E’s manager is Walt Brown Jr., founder and chief executive of Diversified Partners.