Practicalities Not Politics Behind
Recent Plat Act Revisions

By MARTIN BUEHLER, Lake County Superintendent of Highways

The permit applicant at the County Highway Department Office was obviously agitated. "What do you mean I shouldn't be allowed an access permit for my new subdivision road where it is?" he screamed. "My plat has been approved by the Village and I'm starting construction next week!" he added. "I didn't know until yesterday that I needed a county permit to work on a county highway."

"Do you know," the person on the other side of the counter said, "that your road will come out below a hillcrest where motorists using it will have trouble seeing high speed traffic; it would have been better to put it on the top of the hill."

"Great!" was the disgusted reply. "Don't you and the Village ever talk to each other?"

Agencies Involved
This short story points to the need for early coordination between the agency that approves land development and the agency that has jurisdiction of the highway the development is taking access from. In Illinois, municipalities are empowered to make land development decisions within their borders. In Lake County, as in all counties, there are two separate non-municipal agencies that have jurisdiction of a majority of the major highways and these agencies are responsible for the safe access to those highways. These agencies are the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) and the county highway departments. In Lake County, the County has jurisdiction of over 267 miles of major highways running through 45 of the County's 49 municipalities while the Department of Transportation has another 370 miles of roads in 47 municipalities.

Access Permits and Problems
Both the county highway departments and the Department of Transportation regulate access to their respective highways by means of issuing an access permit. This balances the property owner's right to have access to a public highway with the government's duty to protect the traffic carrying capacity of the public highway and the safety of the motoring public.

In reviewing a request for an access permit the highway authority is primarily concerned with the location of the access and the improvements that need to be made to the highway to accommodate the increased traffic from the development. These are reviewed in a very detailed fashion by the highway department's professional staff of highway design engineers, highway planners and traffic engineers. The vast majority of municipalities in Illinois do not have professional staff that possess experience based upon daily work in these particular fields. Even in urbanized Lake County, which contains the eighth most populous city in all of Illinois, there are not any municipal traffic engineers. The typical professional staff of villages are very experienced in evaluating how the development as a whole fits into the community — the detailed land use issues. Municipal decision makers who lack staff experienced in detailed roadway access issues are thus often making decisions upon developments which, while they are made in good faith, are probably not the same decisions they would make if all the implications of the roadway access were known in advance to them. I have observed this to be the case through my experience as a member of a municipal plan commission. The classic example is the one illustrated in the opening of this article.

Other examples of uninformed roadway access decisions being made include: new streets that are offset in the wrong directions which causes left-turning vehicles to conflict with each other, inadequate spacing between streets that does not allow for left-turn lanes of adequate length, too many access points thereby reducing roadway capacity, access on a cut section where water will flow onto the highway and the lack of the preservation of adequate right-of-way for future highway improvements.

Surprising to some local officials, a recommendation from the panel "experts" from other states at both of the recent traffic congestion workshops held in DuPage and Lake Counties was to improve the regulation of access to help preserve the roadway's traffic carrying capacity.

Need for Early Coordination
If IDOT and the county highway departments must issue an access permit before construction can take place, then is not the safety of the public protected? The consensus is no, because the development review process has been improperly structured. Land developers talk to the municipality to have their development reviewed and then the developers independently, at some point, talk to the highway agency to get an

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access permit. Things work smoothly only if; (a) the requested highway access is satisfactory to the highway department, or (b) the highway agency and the municipality have a good working relationship. Without early coordination between the highway agency and the municipality the process as structured will have a high propensity for conflict. Using the earlier example, does the highway agency issue the access permit for the new road below the hill or not?

For all interests to be considered fairly, the communication link that is often missing between the municipality and the highway agency must be opened at an early stage in the development review process. At an early stage, concerns and problems regarding access to highways can be discussed and resolved before the developers have invested time and money into a final plan for their developments. A cardinal rule of planning is that land use planning and transportation are interrelated. Roadway access for new land development is a practical illustration of this; change the proposed land use configuration and the roadway access needs will change and vice versa. If land use and transportation issues are not reviewed in a coordinated fashion, an optimum consensus which has them in balance will probably not result.

A new piece of legislation that will become effective January 1,1988, formalizes the procedure to gain access to a county or State highway by making it an integral part of the municipal development review process.

Plat Act Revision
Public Act 85-0500 passed by the 85th General Assembly inserts the following wording into Chapter 109, Article 2 of the Plat Act:

"Neither the city council of the city, the board of trustees of the village or town or the officer designated by them, or the county board of the county shall approve such plat, unless, in addition to any other requirements of such council, board of trustees or county board or the officer or officers designated by them, the plat has been approved in writing by the Illinois Department of Transportation with respect to roadway access where such access is to a state highway or by the relevant local highway authority with respect to all other roadway access and by the local health department, if one exists, with respect to sewage disposal systems if any part of the platted land will not be served by a public sewer system."

The last part of the new paragraph deals with approval of septic systems by the local health department and is not discussed in this article except to say that the need for it also arose because of a lack of early coordination of the appropriate agencies during the development review process.

The act requires the written approval of the relevant highway authority regarding roadway access before the final approval of a plat by a municipality. For a county highway the local highway authority is, in this case, the county superintendent of highways. The provisions of the act also apply to the approval of plats for developments in unincorporated areas by the county itself.

What the Law Does Not Change
In urban counties there is often a difference between what a county would allow for a land development on a parcel and what a municipality would allow. The Plat Act change does not allow any intrusion of county land development considerations into the municipal plat approval process. The county official involved, the county superintendent of highways, is required by State law to be a Professional Engineer whose role in the development review process is to help determine at an early stage how the roadway access needs of a development can best be served from a county highway, if one is involved. The determination is made using published access regulations similar to those of IDOT. The Plat Act revision does not change a property owner's right of access to public highways.

The other local highway official, besides the corporate authority of the municipality itself, is the township highway commissioner. As a result of annexation, township roads in or contiguous to the land annexed automatically become municipal streets, and therefore the township highway commissioner plays no role in approval of plats of developments within a municipality regarding roadway access.

Summary
The recent Plat Act revision formalizes the necessity for the municipal decision makers on land development, and the county and State decision makers on roadway access to major highways to communicate with each other early in the development review process. Where this has been done in the past the results have generally been satisfactory to all. As emphasis to this point, I am most proud of a recent letter from a municipality in Lake County thanking the County Highway Department's staff for joining them "on the front line" at a public meeting regarding a proposed controversial development in the municipality attended by hundreds of concerned citizens where roadway access was a major issue. The letter stated that the access considerations were clearly explained and the results of this public meeting were benefited to both the Village and the County. Where communication has not occurred between the appropriate agencies then there are practical reasons why the Plat Act revisions were necessary. •

January 1988 / Illinois Municipal Review / Page 23