Planners hope to have room for factories and granges in news Lake County comprehensive plan

Ned Kovachevich, the county's executive planning director, said that sets the foundation for an updated zoning map to ensure future development will harmonize with the agricultural nature of the southern portion of the county.

The Arsh Group of Merrillville, HWC Group and Structurepoint, of Indianapolis, and Teska Associates, of Chicago, are bidding on the project.

Although Kovachevich said his staff of nine full-time and five part-time employees are in the field daily enforcing the county's zoning and building ordinances, he said they don't have the environmental or transportation expertise to draw up their own plan.

"Its easy to identify the potential of U.S. 41 and Ind. 2, but we are asking them to figure out where else the new growth will be," he said.

Lake County is best known for its industrial might, but south of the smokestacks and suburbs are the wide open fields that attract developers.

Kovachevich said work began this year at the request of newly-elected Commissioner Jerry Tippy, R-Schererville, who said he reviewed the current county zoning ordinance when he learned he would be serving on the Plan Commission.

He said he noticed it is 21 years old. "We definitely need to upgrade the zoning ordinance, and it just made sense to start with the comprehensive plan and do the zoning ordinance afterwards," Tippy said.

Tippy said he, Kovachevich and others are preparing to recommend a consultant to the Board of Commissioners as early as next month.

"Unincorporated Lake County is primarily rural, and some of the consultants were coming in with a lot of overkill in terms of economic development," Tippy said. "We've narrowed it down to two."

State law mandates a comprehensive plan be a road map for future highways, protecting wetlands and providing adequate public utilities, health, educational and recreational facilities and healthful residential areas as well as balancing the needs of agriculture, industry and business.

Kovachevich said one thing that won't change with a new plan is the goal to preserve farmland from suburban encroachment by guiding new business and residential development to locate on the outskirts of existing communities.

"The bulk of our zoning will remain agricultural even with the new plan. That is what we are," he said.

Planning now focused on cohesion, similarities

Nevertheless, that goal was under severe pressure a decade ago when "developers were buying property everywhere they could to build subdivisions, in a lot of places that we weren't in favor of."

The executive planning director said the downturn in the economy in recent years has tamped down the demand for sprawl for now, and developers have opted for subdivisions close to existing municipal utilities.

Kovachevich said the county now needs a plan that will work with the comprehensive plans of Crown Point, Lowell and other communities that border the county's unincorporated areas.

"Because we are broken up into so many government units, there is no cohesion. We think it would be beneficial to have a plan built around similarities," Kovachevich said. 

When looking into the distant future, the planning department, the nine-member Plan Commission and the County Council review plans as minor as replacing a church's sign to as controversial as the Singleton Quarry, which was approved despite ferocious opposition by local farmers.

Kovachevich said "people come into our office when they want to build. If they don't have proper zoning, we take them before the Plan Commission."

If approved, the office issues a building permit. If someone wants to complain about a building straying from the restrictions on the permit or about a junk car or other unsightly trash, Kovachevich's office gets the call. He said they handle about 1,000 code violations annually.

"We do what we can. Nobody goes to jail for a zoning violation," Kovachevich said.