Mark Kolasa, a teaching assistant for a restoration ecology class, uses his binoculars during a tour through Deer Grove East Forest Preserve in Palatine on Sept. 23, 2025, as part of a celebration of the completion of the habitat restoration project. The restoration project, funded by the O’Hare Modernization Mitigation Account, restored acres of native habitat and wetlands at this site. | Eileen T. Meslar/Chicago Tribune
By A.D. Quig | Chicago Tribune
Cook County Forest Preserves has used a $40 million yearly windfall from voters to buy up and conserve more land, pay for maintenance and add programming while bolstering its pension funds, the district reported Tuesday.
Voters overwhelmingly gave the preserves the OK to raise property taxes by 0.025% in a 2022 referendum. While at the time it cost the average homeowner about $20 a year, it was a “watershed moment” for the district, according to a new progress report on the district’s spending since then.
Because the new money was commingled with other preserve funds, it’s not possible to trace the improvements dollar for dollar, but the report puts some hard numbers on the “impressive and undeniable” benefits.
Among them: $11 million spent on ecological restoration projects, buying $4 million in new “greener” vehicles and equipment, and spending $2.4 million to expand the district’s “Conservation Corps.”
Revenues have grown only modestly after the referendum infusion. President Toni Preckwinkle is expected to roll out the 2027 budget for the preserves to the forest preserve board — which is the same as the County Board — on Oct. 7.
“The leap in capacity from increasing the budget in 2023 by nearly a third, and continuing that investment, has paid dividends for us all,” Preckwinkle said in a release.
District General Superintendent Adam Bianchi, hired in July 2025, inherited the district’s goals to ecologically restore 30,000 acres and expand the preserves from 70,000 to 90,000 acres by 2039. In the first three years after the referendum, the district added an “unprecedented” nearly 3,000 acres to its restoration work, Bianchi said at the district’s monthly board meeting Tuesday. Between 2023 and 2025, the district added 558 acres overall.
The district also spent $4 million to improve 64 miles of trails, $2.5 million to repair 43 picnic sites and $1.2 million to fix up more than a dozen bathroom buildings across the county. It planted 815 trees at preserves picnic groves, golf courses and campgrounds and created an accessible canoe and kayak launch at Beaubien Woods.
Report continues here.
