After a two-hour-long meeting filled with public comment, the Gurnee Village Board voted against a proposed fixed-site PADS Lake County shelter in a split decision during its Aug. 19 meeting.
The ordinance needed to have four Village Board members vote for approval, but only received three votes from Trustees Greg Garner, Jeanne Balmes and Cheryl Ross. Gurnee Village Board members Quin O’Brien and Karen Thorstenson voted against the ordinance. Mayor Tom Hood and Trustee Kevin Woodside recused themselves from voting during the meeting. Woodside has been a PADS Lake County board member since 2019 and currently serves as the PADS Lake County Board’s president.
During the meeting, the board heard 15-minute presentations from PADS and Gurnee residents who opposed the fixed-site shelter.
If approved, PADS Lake County would have purchased the FairBridge Inn, a motel at 3740 Grand Avenue, that the organization partly utilizes now. The shelter would have housed up to 90 clients in 30 units for a maximum stay of 90 days. PADS Lake County 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.
On July 9, the Lake County Board approved the pass-through of $2 million from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO) to Waukegan, as well as $2 million for Gurnee, to help fund PADS shelters in the two cities.
As the ordinance approving the shelter was denied, Lake County Board Member Carissa Casbon said it was “likely” that all of the funding would be reallocated into the Waukegan shelter.
Gurnee’s Planning and Zoning Board voted against the proposed shelter in a 4-1 vote at its July 24 meeting, which lasted nearly six hours, and the Village Board heard public comment in a nearly four-hour long meeting on Aug. 5.
During the meeting, O’Brien said that the reason he voted against the shelter is because it’s “first and foremost, a zoning question.”
“Gurnee defines emergency shelter as temporary housing, not permanent or fixed,” O’Brien said. “This is not a discussion on the merits of PADS or their occupants, it’s a question of modifying the zoning ordinance for an entire district.”
Before the vote, Ross, who voted to approve the shelter, said that the fixed-site shelter would be an opportunity to improve the neighborhood while meeting attendees who opposed the shelter said that they would prefer businesses in the location instead.
“We can not make businesses come to Gurnee, or a particular area of Gurnee,” Ross said. “If this doesn’t pass, I hope that everyone will be patient because it will take a long time to get the improvements that you desire.”
As the first ordinance, which would have approved a zoning text amendment allowing emergency shelters to be added as a special use permit, was denied, there was no vote held on the second ordinance on the agenda. The second ordinance would have seen the board members vote on whether or not to grant a special use permit to PADS Lake County for an emergency shelter at the location.
“This is an important issue, but I don’t want it to end here tonight,” Hood said. “It’s sometimes easy to fight over one issue, and then have it go back to the way that it was. That just isn’t acceptable for us in the Village of Gurnee. We live in a great community, and this is one of the things that we need to improve upon. This is more about what happens next as opposed to what the decision is tonight. No matter what happens, we still have to deal with this.”
