Hanover to Elizabeth, on purpose.

Hanover and Elizabeth sit roughly ten miles apart along US-20 — the literal expression of the project's definition of an LSV community. Twenty minutes at twenty-five miles per hour. Two hours by horse. The corridor is short enough to walk in a long afternoon.

Both villages have intact historic downtowns, both have working farms on every side, and both sit within the gravitational pull of Galena tourism without being absorbed by it. The Apple River runs through Hanover. Limestone bluffs frame Elizabeth.

The pilot logic in plain terms.

If subdivision down to one acre is going to happen anyway, the question is whether it happens randomly across the county or concentrates along a planned corridor between two existing villages.

Concentrated, it can extend two downtowns, generate tax base, and preserve the working farmland on either side. Randomly, it fragments the farms, raises road and septic costs for every taxpayer, and erodes both villages without adding anything to either.

The pilot is an argument for the first version.

The Cost of Community Services methodology, developed by the American Farmland Trust and applied across hundreds of jurisdictions since the 1990s, asks a simple question: for every dollar a class of land use generates in property tax revenue, how many dollars in services does the local government provide back?

Working farmland typically returns somewhere between $0.30 and $0.50 in services per dollar of revenue — a net subsidy to the rest of the tax base. Residential land typically returns somewhere between $1.15 and $1.50 — a net cost. Anything above $1.50 sits in territory the literature describes as fiscally distressed.

$1.02 → $2.11
in services per dollar of revenue, before and after.

The City of Galena's projection — that the COCS ratio would move from $1.02 to $2.11 — is not a marginal shift. It is roughly a doubling of the service-to-revenue gap, and it sits well outside the typical residential range. The number is the city's, not this project's, and it is in the public record.

The Driftless Area sits on fractured carbonate bedrock — dolomite and limestone — with thin loess and residual soils above it. The coulees are precisely the places where those soils get thinnest. On a coulee shoulder with 25% or steeper slope and 24 to 36 inches to bedrock, even a single conforming septic drainfield can be impossible to site under the Illinois Private Sewage Disposal Code, let alone the reserve area the Code requires for replacement when the first system fails in 20 to 25 years.

One-acre lots, sited along a county road by a 150-foot frontage formula rather than by suitability of soil and slope, are the worst-case configuration: minimum room to relocate a failed system, maximum exposure of fractured bedrock to nitrate and coliform plumes.

The Wisconsin precedent.

The Driftless counties immediately to the north — Grant, Iowa, Kewaunee in Wisconsin — have spent the past decade documenting exactly this failure pattern: nitrate and coliform contamination of private wells from the combined load of septic systems and agricultural inputs on karst geology. The geology does not stop at the state line. Neither does the chemistry.

The honest reading of the Wisconsin data is that one-acre subdivision on coulee slopes is a public health problem waiting to happen, with the costs falling on the unincorporated residents who drink from the wells in question.

Every driveway is a low-volume intersection. FHWA and AASHTO access management guidance treats driveway density as a primary determinant of corridor crash risk on rural roads. The standards for roads with shared cyclist and low-speed-vehicle use call for fewer and more consolidated access points, not more and more closely spaced.

The 150-foot frontage minimum essentially mandates a driveway every 150 feet on every county road in the unincorporated area. That is the access management profile of a strip-developed arterial — not of a road that can ever function as a shared corridor for cyclists, eBike riders, and LSVs.

The vote on this amendment is, in practice, the vote on whether the corridor future is allowed to exist.

That sentence is the through-line between this site's seven-county vision and the immediate question in Jo Daviess. The corridor future does not require that the amendment fail. It requires that whatever amendment passes addresses access management — which this draft does not.

The better draft →

Text amendment, or map amendments?

A text amendment changes the rules of the Ag-1 district everywhere it appears. A series of map amendments changes the district boundaries on specific parcels. The distinction is procedurally consequential: under 55 ILCS 5/5-12014, a protest petition signed by owners of 20% of the frontage proposed to be altered (or 20% of frontage immediately adjoining) triggers a three-quarters supermajority requirement on the board. On the 17-member Jo Daviess County Board, that is the difference between needing 9 votes and needing 13.

A text amendment that changes minimum lot sizes countywide is harder to attack with a protest petition because there is no specific frontage being "altered" — it is all of it. Worth asking, on the record, on what legal theory this is being processed.

Comprehensive plan consistency.

Illinois Counties Code requires that zoning amendments demonstrate consistency with the County's adopted Comprehensive Plan. A wholesale density upzoning of the agricultural district is the kind of move that can be vulnerable to a declaratory judgment challenge if the plan emphasizes agricultural preservation or rural character. Worth noting which board members ask about plan consistency, and which do not.

Disclosure on the record.

Statements of Economic Interest are filed annually with the County Clerk and are public records. The cleanest accountability move at a hearing is to ask each board member to disclose, on the record, whether they, their immediate family, or business partners own land in the Ag-1 district that would gain development value from the amendment. The recording of who answered, who dodged, and who claimed ignorance becomes the primary source document for whatever follows.

Hanover

The Apple River as the front of the town, not the back. Sidewalk dining along Jefferson. The mill restored, the millpond visible from the downtown. An LSV terminal at the east edge of the village, with stabling within walking distance of Main.

The corridor

A multimodal trail roughly parallel to US-20, separated from it, serving cyclists, pedestrians, and Class 1 and 2 eBikes. A soft parallel for horses where width permits. Farmland on either side remains farmland — by design and by the zoning that authorizes everything else.

Elizabeth

Downtown Elizabeth as the eastern terminal — the limestone buildings rehabilitated, evening hours that mean something, shopping and dining that reflects what Elizabeth is rather than what Galena is. Stabling at the west edge of town for travelers arriving by horse from Hanover or by trail from elsewhere.

The villages between

If subdivision happens along this corridor, it happens as small village footprints — not as scattered single houses — anchored to their own small commercial cores. The model is the historic railroad-stop village, updated for a low-speed-vehicle century.