McHenry County Blog

With the Chicago Sun-Times asking,

"How much will you pay?"

for an Olympic Stadium, imagine my surprise at discovering a minor league baseball stadium planned for McHenry County College's future.

Now I know such a facility would make CABA, the sponsor of the world series of teen baseball, ecstatic, but I haven’t heard of any stadium that has paid its own way.

Maybe one is out there. I await input from someone who knows where it is.

Maybe a minor league baseball team is an “amenity” that ever suburban county in the Chicago metropolitan county “must” have.

In Kane County, it’s financed by a countywide tax district—the Forest Preserve District.

McHenry County has a similar counthywide tax district called the McHenry County Conservation District.

But, it’s unfortunately not into active recreation played on baseball or softball or football or soccer fields.

The McHenry County Conservation District specializes is passive recreational activities that do not disturb the environment. (It has a referendum on the ballot April 17th in the support of which you should soon start to see expensive campaign literature in your mailboxes promoting its passage.)

Although it sounds like McHenry County College is supported by all McHenry County taxpayers, it is not.

Algonquin and Lake in the Hills residents in Carpentersville’s District 300 are in the Elgin Community College District.

They are the biggest example of taxpayers who would presumably benefit from a county baseball stadium, but will have to pay nothing but the ticket price of admission to support it.

Maybe MCC taxpayers would be given a discount or non-MCC residents pay a premium.

I admit to not being a reader of the Northwest Herald’s sports pages. Maybe there’s been a big article about this possibility there.

But I keep coming back to how MCC taxpayers would be required to subsidize some minor league baseball team’s owner’s plaything.

Think we’ll be able to vote on that in a referendum?

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On top is the front page of the Saturday Chicago Sun-Times. Although the subheadline suggests that only Chicago residents will pay for the proposed Olympic Stadium, who knows what Govenor Rod Blagojevich will do should he pass the biggest tax hike in Illinois history. Here's what the governor told the Friday Sun-Times when asked whether the state would be willing to help underwrite a Chicago Olympics:

"Yes, absolutely. We'd be interested in that," he said. But the governor stopped short of saying the financially strapped state would become one of the parties to Daley's guarantee.

Next is an image showing the proposed minor league baseball stadium. Below you can see where it is proposed to be placed on the property. Both images can be enlarged by clicking on them.

Labels: Baseball Stadium, McHenry County College, Minor League Baseball