Wonder Lake is eager to improve its downtown area. It just has to annex it to the village first.

The 19-foot-tall Norway spruce planted Wednesday in Wonder Lake’s “Triangle” will be a centerpiece for the village and events there, Village President Dan Dycus said.

It didn’t matter to Dycus that the tree – donated by developer Andy Teegen – and the park that it stands in at Hancock and East Lake Shore drives doesn’t actually belong to the village now.

“It will be a proper tree to illuminate this Christmas,” Dycus said as a crew from Heritage Farm Nursery took out a 5-foot-tall evergreen planted a few years ago and replaced it with the new, larger tree.

It will be lit Dec. 2 as part of the Wonder Lake Community Club’s Christmas at the Lake event.

By early next year, Dycus hopes the Triangle and Hancock Drive will finally be part of Wonder Lake proper. In August, a group of business owners and residents on Hancock Drive filed a petition in McHenry County court requesting annexation.

But the road to annexation for the street has been long and winding. And it’s not a done deal.

The two-block-long Hancock Drive is Wonder Lake’s de facto downtown business district, with a bank, office buildings, gas station, restaurants and retail stores fronting it.

But the district has never been annexed to Wonder Lake proper, and each of the buildings there is on its own well and septic system, Dycus said.

When annexed, those businesses eventually would get village water and sewer via the Stonewater subdivision.

Stonewater stretches from Route 120 to McCullom Lake Road. Approved by the village in 2009, construction on the first of the 3,400 to 3,700 homes expected to be built there began in 2021. While waiting for houses to go up, Teegen and McHenry-based NRB Land built a new wastewater treatment plant and wells to serve an expected 10,000 residents and the east side of Wonder Lake – including Hancock Drive.

There are 350 to 400 residences now built in Stonewater, Village Manager William Beith said, and a total of 500 construction permits have been approved.

“This is the largest and hottest development in the entire county right now,” Beith said, adding that the village is “furiously trying to capitalize on all of that.”

If Hancock Drive is annexed to Wonder Lake by the end of this year or early 2024, the village can apply for the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency’s Unsewered Communities Planning Grant to help pay for the well and septic connections to the businesses there, Dycus said.

The move toward annexation formally began in August, when 20 owners of 34 parcels on Hancock Drive – out of 58 parcels total – filed the court petition seeking annexation to the village. There are 19 electors, or registered voters, living in the territory, too, and 12 of them signed petitions for annexation, according to the court documents.

When 51% of property owners and electors petition for annexation, the village can then move forward with the process, Beith said.

The original petitioners, however, withdrew their petition last month, pending a future resubmission, because of a “scrivener’s error” in the original filing, Beith said.

There also are three property owners objecting to the annexation, with whom Dycus and others have been in negotiations.

Steven Cuda, of the law firm Hamer Schuh and Cuda, said concerns from those objectors included “how their businesses would be zoned after annexation” or if they would need conditional-use permits or variances from the village to continue operations. Cuda’s firm has been working with the pro-annexation side.

He said it is his understanding that the village and the objectors are close to resolving those issues.

Wonder Lake is hopeful that an annexed Hancock Drive with municipal water and sewer systems will attract more business.

The lack of public utilities has limited development of those commercial properties, Dycus said.

“There are big limitations on how many customers they can have on a daily basis” because of the well and septic systems there now, he said.

He points to the former Dockside restaurant at Hancock and East Lake Shore drives. Empty for many years, the building’s dining room overlooks Wonder Lake. The well and septic there “is insufficient to manage a restaurant, but it is a fantastic building with a fantastic view,” Dycus said.

The owner of that building, Thomas Cooper, owns several of the Hancock Drive properties through various LLCs.

Cuda, the attorney working with pro-annexation property owners, said he gives Cooper and other owners credit for getting the annexation underway by “talking to the property owners and electors” about signing petitions to annex.

One of the property owners who signed on to the annexation petition was The State Bank Group, which operates Wonder Lake State Bank East.

Access to municipal water “is No. 1” for the bank, said President Jim Beckett, adding, “We are a community bank and want to do what is right for our community. We are on board with it.”

The annexation is “doable,” Cuda said. “Once we know those concerns have been addressed, we are very hopeful. The village understands the concerns, and it doing whatever it can to satisfy everyone.”

The engineering for connecting Hancock Drive to the water and sewer systems is largely finished, Dycus said, and partial funding is available. If the project can go to bid quickly, he said, work could begin by this time next year.