New Lenox, Illinois

NEW LENOX , I LL INOI S hosts the annual Proud American Days festival the last weekend in July, which includes food vendors, carnival rides, a craft show, and live music. The Annual Kids Fest includes a day filled with fun activities just for kids, and the Chamber of Commerce’s Halloween Parade & Costume Contest features frightful fun for hundreds of area families. “With regards to infrastructure and other municipal projects, we invest a lot back into our facilities, especially our utilities,” Ellis adds. “A lot of our water mains in the older areas are the original mains, so in 2018, we did a major water main replacement along our main north/ south corridor. This past year, we awarded the bid to do a water main replacement and upsizing from eight inches to twelve inches on the water main along Route 30. We continually invest and reinvest in paving our streets; we rehabilitate about seven miles of road every year. The biggest thing we have going on, now, is we’re in the design stage of building a new wastewater treatment facility. Right now, we are operating three separate wastewater treatment facilities, one of which is right in the middle of our town and another is right in the middle of a residential area. So, the Village Board made the decision to purchase land on our fringe and we’re going to be building a brand new, state-of- the-art facility that will have a lot of sustainable functions built into it. Then, we will take the other three offline. “And we are just breaking ground on a new Metra Station, which is our commuter rail. We actually have two, but we are rebuilding the one that’s the oldest in the center of town and relocating it. The platform and station are very close to a street crossing, and when you have 20-plus trains going through there, it causes a lot of traffic disruption. We’re relocating it further away from that road so that the gates don’t have to stay down while the train is loading and unloading.” Construction of the new Metra Station, including an extended platform, is slated to be completed by November 2020. A new parking lot configuration is expected to be