They say the key to success is persistence. I don’t remember who said it, but I’m counting on it being true.

On September 13, 2022, ZW Ranch bought a property on Crawford Rd. in Antioch, Illinois. We had been leasing the land on Deep Lake Rd.

After we closed on the property, we went directly to the Lake County Zoning office (Building Planning and Development) to apply for an agricultural exempt permit. We didn’t even go home first. We didn’t even stop for a celebratory drink. We went directly to the zoning office and applied. Our plan is to move the existing structure that is our arena and lengthen it and then also build a pole barn for hay and a few stalls as well as a feed and a tack room. We were hoping to have everything at least started in November or December before winter 2022 really set in.

But that was not to be. The first submission to Zoning was given back, with 10 comments for us to address, on November 4, 2022. The main hurdles we needed to get done were:

• A Wetland Delineation
• We had to show on an engineering map:
• Geometric Plan, showing the two buildings on the property, access drive, and locations of future well and septic field.
• Grading Plan, proposed grades and any swale or ditches
• Erosion Control Plan and details.
• Drainage calculations if required by County
• Combine field measured topo and County’s topo information into one single drawing. Show the wetland(s) limits on the same drawing.

Those words may or may not seem innocent enough, but they required we hire a Wetland Specialist and an Engineer. And it took over a month to get the data required for those reports, and two months to get the engineering maps revised.

The Wetland Delineation was sent to Zoning December 7, 2022. The updated engineering plans were resubmitted January 17, 2023.

On February 8, 2023 we got 38 more comments back from the engineer at zoning, building, planning and development.

• We were told we had to move the driveway so as not to damage a culvert near the existing driveway, which required a permit from the Highway Commissioner.
• We needed to apply for 3 permits from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA). Which took two months to get.
• We had to get a Flood Elevation Study (BFE) done – costing a lot of money and time.
• We had to pay additional fees and a fine
• We were also told they couldn’t finalize the wetland delineation until the growing season began, even though our buildings were not impacting the wetlands at all.

We resubmitted around March 8, 2023.

On March 23, we got 20 more comments back from the engineer at Zoning.

We were required to:

• Get approval from the Lake County Stormwater Management Commission (SMC). Which takes 30 days.
• Clarify many of the points already given
• We were asked what green infrastructure measures we were incorporating
• A Letter of No Impact or LONI was required for the wetland areas.
• They wanted the name of a DECI (Designated Erosion Control Inspector) that we had to hire.

Now we are really scared because the lease where we were renting on Deep Lake Road was up at the end of March. We asked our landlord for an extension to stay through April, which she okayed. This whole time we’ve been paying both a mortgage and a rent payment each month.

We resubmitted to Zoning on April 6, 2023.

The next week the wetland specialist from county came to evaluate the wetlands, now that it was officially growing season. However when the wetland specialist came out he decided there were two other – very small areas that would qualify as wetlands, so our maps would need to be updated and the Wetland Delineation revised.

April 9 we finished all the perimeter fencing that we put up ourselves as county allowed us to at least do that.

April 21 we get 16 more comments from the engineering division of zoning office:

• We still needed written approval from Stormwater commission
• They wanted different colored shading to differentiate things on the map
• They wanted us to label things differently
• They wanted specifics on how we were going to address the green infrastructure areas we had to create.
• We had to pay a review fee of over $200

Our wetland specialist was busy work on revising the wetland delineation and had someone from the Army Corp of Engineering out to verify.

We got the approval from Stormwater and we wrote up a list of all the native grasses we would plant.

Our engineer tried numerous times to get the zoning Engineering division to contact him with specifics on what they wanted for the green infrastructure. After a week and a half he told us basically to read the code, which we had done, but it is not specific.

We emailed Linda Peterson on the Lake County Council and she called and got the county engineer to call our engineer and discuss.

We started drilling our Well on April 25, as we begged for that, as we needed to bring the horses over to the property.

We moved the herd of 19 horses over to the new land on April 30.

We have only two corral shelters that maybe 3 horses could squeeze into if they needed to get out of the weather.

We had to borrow a water tank from a neighbor to put water into as the well drilling was still going on. What was supposed to take about 4 days took more like 2 weeks as they struggled to get water out of the well.

We got our Stormwater Mgmt approval on May 10, 2023.

We sent in the revised Wetland Delineation on May 19, 2023.

Even though the horses were moved, we still paid for the month of May because we needed to take down the remaining fencing and everything inside the arena. We were also trying desperatly to get ClearSpan Fabric Structures to give us a date when they would move the building. We needed it gone by end of May.

The horses are enjoying the property for the most part, but when it rains, they don’t have much shelter.

We resubmitted our revised engineering maps to Zoning May 30, 2023.

The Zoning, Building and Planning Engineer called us on June 15 and we were informed that the wetland specialist was no longer employed with the county and Stormwater Mgmt would be finalizing our wetlands. Meaning they had to come to our property one more time to verify. But everything else seemed good.

June 21, 2023 we got 9 more comments, so apparently everything was not good.

• Our engineer was required to create a whole new page of cut and fill diagrams to show a water storage ratio of 1.2:1.
• Our wetland maps unfortuanltey didn’t match between the wetland delineation and the engineering maps so we had to fix that. That was our engineer’s error.
• Some of the labeling was not to their specifications so we needed to change the wording.

Our engineer worked for three days straight doing the calculations they wanted and we resubmitted on June 27.

Clearspan Fabric company started dismantling our arena from the Deep Lake Rd site on June 22. And it was brought over to our new property and sits in pieces until we get permits to put it up.

So here we are July 14, 2023. We have followed up with both the engineer at Zoning as well as employees at Stormwater Management and no one has bothered to get back to us. So now we are contacting Linda Pedersen again.

We’ll keep you post on what comes next.