With Woodlore Estates subdivision now on the tax rolls, Prairie Grove School District 46 asks for more property taxes

Prairie Grove School District 46 is on track to grow the amount of money it collects in property taxes, in large part because of Woodlore Estates, its superintendent said.

The district’s school board will consider a 5% increase over its levy – the total amount it is requesting in property taxes – from last year, which totaled less than $11.4 million, part of which will be paid by existing property owners while the remainder comes from new construction.

An early estimate from the assessor’s office shows the district could see almost $6 million more in taxable property value, most of which is coming from Woodlore Estates, Superintendent John Bute said.

Woodlore Estates is a Crystal Lake subdivision that includes single-family homes, townhomes and senior living units in one community. Approved by the Crystal Lake City Council in 2018, the neighborhood sits on 310 acres of land northeast of the intersection of routes 176 and 31.

Elementary and junior high students living there enroll in either Prairie Grove School District 46 or Crystal Lake Elementary School District 47 before streamlining into Crystal Lake-based Community High School District 155.

Although people started moving into Woodlore Estates a while back, it is a bigger property, so developers are continuing to build there, Crystal Lake City Planner Elizabeth Maxwell said.

While a few other houses have been built in different parts of the district, the “overwhelming majority” of new property is coming from Woodlore, Bute said.

“We are making an attempt to capture that tax revenue,” Bute told the Northwest Herald. “As a tax-capped district, if we don’t capture it now, you never get to capture that new revenue.”

Prairie Grove District 46, which oversees an elementary and junior high school, falls under a state law that restricts how much it can raise its levy by each year, tying the increases to inflation and new construction.

The levy is meant to support the 2022-23 school year, Bute said at a Tuesday school board meeting. The school board will vote on it in December, after which it will be filed with the McHenry County Clerk’s Office.

District 46 plans on applying for the state’s property tax relief grant program, which was established in 2017, Bute said at the meeting. The program works by allowing school districts with high tax rates to lower them by replacing property tax dollars with state funds.

Should the district be chosen to participate in the grant program, it would be able to abate, or give back, $77,113 to taxpayers.

The deadline to apply for the program is at the beginning of January, Bute said, and the district should know whether it qualified at the end of that month.