Gurnee Village Hall was overflowing with people attending Monday’s Village Board meeting who were primarily there for to either show their support or opposition to a proposed fixed-site homeless shelter.
The shelter, which would be operated by PADS Lake County, would be located at 3740 Grand Ave.
Dozens spoke out during the meeting’s public comment period on both sides of the issue. The building now houses the FairBridge Inn, a motel that’s currently utilized, in part, by PADS. The organization has been using the motel, among others in Lake County, to house some of its clients since 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began.
Previously, clients would be housed in a series of rotating shelters at local churches.
The proposed site would only be available for adults, and would be able to house a maximum of 90 clients in 10 units. Each room would house two to three residents, with access to a private bathroom.
Gurnee’s Planning and Zoning Board voted 4-1 against the proposed shelter at its July 24 meeting, which lasted nearly six hours.
“If you came to the Planning and Zoning Board meeting, it ended at 1:26 in the morning,” Mayor Tom Hood said during Monday’s meeting, encouraging the long line of attendees to keep their comments to a maximum of three minutes.
Hood added that when the Village Board does vote on the issue, it will take four affirmative votes to approve the proposal. There are two items the board will vote on, one which would amend the zoning code to include an emergency shelter as an allowable special use, and whether to grant PADS Lake County a special-use permit.
The mayor said he will recuse himself from voting on both proposals.
“This is a unique situation,” Hood said. “There’s some voting issues that have to be taken into consideration.”
If approved, the facility would become the second fixed-site shelter in Lake County. A fixed-site shelter, which could house up to 64 families, was approved in Waukegan in July.
On July 9, the Lake County Board approved the pass-through of $2 million from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity to Waukegan, as well as $2 million for Gurnee to help fund PADS shelters in the two cities.
Carissa Casbon, a County Board Member for District 7, which includes portions of Gurnee and Waukegan, voted to approve the funding.
“I hear with empathy the voices of those who are against the project,” she said. “I understand their concerns. But after all of this work and research, I can confidently say that this shelter will improve the neighborhood.”
Some residents of the neighborhood said that they were concerned about a lack of communication between PADS Lake County and the residents of the proposed Gurnee site.
“I didn’t get one knock on the door saying, ‘Hey, this is what we’re going to do. This is what we’re planning,’” Gurnee resident Elizabeth Rivas said. “We had to find out through other people that this was happening, and that’s not including the community that’s going to be affected by this.”
Other opponents to the proposed site said that they were in support of having such a facility, but that the FairBridge Inn is not the right location, and they would rather see businesses or other efforts to revitalize the neighborhood.
Kiearrah Lawrence, a PADS Lake County board member, spoke at the meeting and addressed neighbors’ concerns about how they want the neighborhood to be revitalized.
“The east side of Grand Avenue has been neglected, but the alternative to this fixed-site shelter is to do nothing,” Lawrence said. “In order to revitalize the building as it currently exists today, where people are afraid to allow their kids to walk to school, to walk to the store, is that someone has to buy it, or there has to be another property for sale. Neither of those two circumstances exist.”
The board plans to take a final vote on the proposed shelter at its Aug. 19 meeting.
