Congratulations to the Village of Beach Park

The Lake County Municipal League Innovation Awards program recognizes municipalities that developed strategic programs to solve municipal challenges and increase the effectiveness of local government. The awards program also facilitates an exchange of information and experiences to build capacity for municipalities and jointly celebrate successful programs that could benefit other communities.

This year’s award was highly competitive with eight municipal applicants. Our independent three-person panel of judges studied each application and provided scores on a variety of criteria.

Below are the 2016 applicants:

  • Village of Beach Park
  • Village of Fox Lake
  • Village of Hawthorn Woods
  • Village of Lake Zurich
  • Village of Libertyville
  • Village of Mundelein
  • City of North Chicago
  • City of Waukegan

The Village of Beach Park won the 2016 Municipal Innovation Award.

Beach Park worked collaboratively with the Villages of Wadsworth, Winthrop Harbor and the City of Zion to collectively hire an economic development consultant to help promote their northeast corner of Lake County. They have developed a cost and revenue sharing agreement to hire a consultant who will recruit new businesses to their communities and each municipality will share the 1% local sales tax collected and remitted by the State. This innovative project eliminates the community cannibalism that pits neighbors against each other and will allow for new development  to collectively occur.

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The Village of Mundelein and the City of Waukegan received Honorable Mention Awards for their submissions. Below are brief summaries about each municipality’s submission.

The Village of Mundelein’s Building Department implemented a goal of issuing minor building permits to applicants within five business days to address known areas of deficiency in the permitting process. The purpose of the program was to place a greater emphasis on completing minor building permits, which make up most of the department’s permitting workload, and this was done with the following objectives in mind: (1) to provide better responsiveness to service users, (2) to promote good government practices, (3) to increase operational efficiency, and (4) to remove obstacles for service users that apply for permits through the Village.

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The City of Waukegan’s Innovation Application detailed a lakefront development strategy designed to develop a detailed engineering plan to improve public access to the Waukegan Municipal Beach while incorporating sustainable, green infrastructure measures and resultant environmental benefits along Lake Michigan. The Plan provides a balance of public recreational use/enjoyment and protection of the unique and valuable beach habitats along Waukegan’s North and South Beach.

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Applications can be downloaded by clicking the municipal name below.

 

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