McHenry County Blog

Blogger ArchPundit led me to this June 14th story. He found it at Muckraker.com.

The highest Illinois infrastructure goal of United States House Speaker Dennis Hastert is the so-called Prairie Parkway. Local opponents call it the Sprawlway.

It is hotly contested by those in its path, which runs from I-80 to the Northwest Tollway. (Opps, I didn't read the map correctly. It would run only as far north as I-88.)

Now writer Bill Allison on a web site called the Sunlight Foundation has found land transactions listed in Hastert’s financial disclosure form.

Besides the fact that the land sales are near the proposed 4-lane highway is the fact that they were owned by a land trust, which Hastert does not name in his disclosure form. 138 acres near Plano were sold to the Robert Arthur Land Company. Readers of McHenry County Blog have heard the purchaser’s name before when the Hampshire landowner gave $5,000 to the District 300 tax hike committee.

The trust is called Little Rock Trust #225. Dallas Ingemunson is one of the trusts trustees, writer Bill Allison says. Ingemunson is virtually a charter member of what Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass has called the “bi-partisan combine.” Inguermundson helped engineer Hastert’s original nomination for state representative when State Rep. Bill Kempiners was appointed Public Health Director by Governor James R. Thompson.

Illinois has a long, rich and sordid history of land trusts. Until the 1970’s, those who held beneficiary interests in land trusts did not even have to reveal them when a sale as made to a public body. Ironically, Kempiners sponsored the legislation to pry open this part of the lid on the secret land trusts.

I’ve been told that Otto Kerner’s wife owned the southeast corner of the intersection of Barrington Road and the Northwest Tollway. It wasn’t because she was Otto Kerner’s wife though. It traced back to her father, who was Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak.

Think of how far ahead of the construction of the tollway that was.

Crystal Lake McHenry County Board member Lyn Orphal trumpeted expanding the Sprawlway up into western McHenry County in one of her answers to the Northwest Herald's questionnaire four years ago.

Since the route, which I believe was to loop all the way around to Richmond, was no where near here southeastern McHenry County district, I wondered at the time why she even brought it up.