The Equestrian Commission will meet for the first time in over a year tonight at 7:00 PM at Village Hall. A copy of their agenda can be viewed here.
The last time the Equestrian Commission met was on Friday, August 1, 2014 in special session. The purpose of that meeting was to review and comment on two of four commercial horse boarding text amendment proposals to modify our Village code.
The primary focus of that evening was the proposal submitted by the owner of Oakwood Farms, LLC, Barry LeCompte, and another submitted by the Riding Club of Barrington Hills.
The ePacket agenda for tonight’s meeting includes minutes for approval from that August 2014 meeting. These minutes reveal a number of text change and deletion recommendations from the original proposed ordinance for the Zoning Board of Appeals to consider, and, in fact, stated, “To clarify, the redline version below is what we recommend the Village adopt.”
The most important deletion recommended to the Oakwood proposal was striking the effective retroactivity of the proposed code to June 26, 2006, which coincided with the Village Board at that time putting all horse boarding operations, regardless of scale, under the Home Occupation Ordinance.
We find no record of the Equestrian Commission’s recommendation to the Zoning Board (or to the Board of Trustees) in any meeting agendas or packets. Nor is there any mention of them in published audio recordings, so we must ask what happened to this commission’s considered and unanimously approved change recommendations? Why have they not seen sunshine until now, over a year later?
Furthermore, why didn’t certain members of the Equestrian Commission at that time who were present during subsequent Zoning Board public meetings speak up when their recommendations to the ZBA were not recognized and considered? Some may consider this a rhetorical question, but it nonetheless needs to be answered.
The ePacket agenda for tonight’s commission meeting can be viewed and downloaded here.
I bet [former] ZBA member Kurt Anderson is very upset about this equestrian commission document not being furnished to him as a member of the ZBA. Imagine being Kurt up there on the record informing all of us that his Anderson II Horse Boarding Amendment (written by him alone in the dark of the night) took into consideration all opinions and recommendations of the Equestrian Commission. Thanks to this BHO blog, we now know the contrary is true.
As a member of the Illinois bar and knowing Kurt as I do, I expect he will speak to the public at this month’s meeting acknowledging (with this equestrian document in hand) that his Anderson II commercial boarding ordinance falls woefully short of Equestrian Commission expectations and recommendations.
I expect Kurt may even apologize and go so far as to lead the charge for Anderson II to be forever erased from our zoning code. Kurt, underneath it all is an honorable man who wants this law to be right.
One final note:
Why didn’t anyone from the Equestrian Commission stand up before the ZBA at any one of the ZBA public hearings on horseboarding informing the ZBA board, specifically mbr. Anderson that his proposed ordinance fell “woefully short” of Equestrian Commission opinions and recommendations?
Could it be each of their voices might have been horse those nights?