Draft Strategic Plan Statement
THE LAKE FOREST PRESERVATION FOUNDATION’S COMMENTS TO THE CITY OF LAKE FOREST’S DRAFT STRATEGIC PLAN 2025-2030
September 6, 2024
The Lake Forest Preservation Foundation (the “LFPF”) is a not-for-profit organization, having over 500 members and supporters, almost all of whom are residents of Lake Forest. For over four decades, the LFPF has been dedicated to the stewardship, safeguarding, and endurance of Lake Forest’s exceptional architectural and landscape legacy for succeeding generations, through public education, historic preservation and advocacy. Among its key beliefs is the preservation of the historic visual character of Lake Forest and thoughtful development that is sensitive to Lake Forest’s surroundings. The LFPF offers these comments on the City’s Draft Strategic Plan 2025-2030.
Given the LFPF’s mission to safeguard Lake Forest’s historic visual character, the focus of its comments is on the section of the Draft Strategic Plan entitled “VISUAL CHARACTER AND DEVELOPMENT”. The LFPF appreciates that the City has elevated Visual Character and Development to its own section, as opposed to being a subsection in prior strategic plans. The LFPF believes that such treatment is consistent with the importance the community attaches to Lake Forest’s historic and architectural character. The 2023 Community-Wide Survey, the starting point for this plan, confirmed that residents overwhelmingly agree that the visual character of Lake Forest is an important reason in choosing to live in Lake Forest and should be preserved.
The LFPF also agrees with many of the stated objectives and initiatives identified in the Draft Strategic Plan, including the following:
• Recognize, respect, and preserve significant buildings, landscapes, and distinct streetscapes carrying on the tradition of actively working to preserve the community’s unique character while at the same time, being open to development and redevelopment.
• Recognize and celebrate the historic and unique aspects of the community to raise awareness about and remind people of what makes the community special.
• Consider development and redevelopment plans in a careful and deliberate manner as has traditionally occurred in the community and avoid “trends of the day” without proper due diligence.
• Maintain the established development review processes and public input opportunities which have historically served the community well.
• Respect the decisions of the various Boards and Commissions, recognizing that each has a specific purview. 2
• Recognize that the review processes have served the City well for decades, trust that although messy at times, the process works.
This said, the City cannot overlook that the 2023 Community-Wide Survey also showed that the City received its lowest service satisfaction scores in “overall quality of new development” and “development process”. See Survey at 2. The related comments made clear that many believed that the City had not respected the decisions of the commissions and boards and did not consider recent development plans in the context of the community’s visual character over the long term. So, there is room for improvement.
To this end, the LFPF’s biggest concern with the Draft Strategic Plan is that it lacks specific steps or processes to achieve its objective to preserve the community’s unique character while at the same time, being open to development and redevelopment that complements or enhances that character. The reason for this concern is that entire neighborhoods and even portions of the Historic Business District currently are not protected by the Historic Preservation Ordinance or other ordinances or codes that would preserve their historic visual character. Such unprotected areas in the Historic Business District alone include (1) the portion of Bank Lane starting south of the bank buildings fronting Deerpath and ending at Illinois, (2) the entire area north of Westminster; (3) the south side of Deerpath west of the Old National Bank, and (4) some of the City’s parking lots.
While the City might reject developments that are not visually compatible with the character of the Historic Business District or other neighborhoods, the problem is that without legal protections in place, the City would be unable to defend itself effectively against lawsuits by developers who have little regard for such character. What law would the City stand behind? Indeed, developers have sued the City when it has such legal protections in place. Imagine the result when it has no such protections.
This problem could be addressed through several measures to protect historic and architecturally significant areas including by:
• expanding existing historic districts
• creating new historic districts • adopting appropriate form-based zoning codes
• revisiting and strengthening as appropriate the existing zoning and other standards
• developing binding design parameters
The LFPF appreciates that the Draft Strategic Plan includes an initiative to “[d]evelop guiding parameters for ‘opportunity areas’ that exist in the business districts to serve as a road map for developers who may have interest in Lake Forest and to set realistic expectations for all stakeholders.” But all the measures identified above should be considered and should not be limited to “opportunity areas” in the business districts. Rather, the City should consider such measures for all sensitive historic or architecturally significant areas.
In addition, any guiding parameters should start from the premise that any new development must be visually compatible with the historic buildings which surround it. The LFPF 3 has previously sent to the City, in connection with the Bank Lane Streetscape Enhancement Plan, a set of parameters that would be appropriate for the entire Historic Business District, which the LFPF incorporates by reference.
The point is that creating legal protections, in one form or another, for sensitive historic and architecturally significant areas is something that the City, as a strategic matter, should prioritize and, at a minimum, it should include a concrete process by which it will achieve this important objective in the Draft Strategic Plan.