Plan for Kingsmen Industrial Park still faces residential opposition in Joliet

Opposition is expected again Tuesday when a plan for the Kingsmen Industrial Park goes to the Joliet City Council for a vote.

The developer wants to use 25 acres at the Joliet Job Corps Center property for light industrial building but needs council approval for rezoning.

The location at 1101 Mills Road formerly was used for the old Joliet East High School, which had its sports teams go by the Kingsmen.

“I chose that name to honor the fact that it was Joliet East High School,” Ryan Hill, developer for the Kingsmen Industrial Park, told the council at its Aug. 10 meeting.

Hill said he plans to develop smaller lots for the kind of buildings that construction contractors need for their businesses but are hard to find.

His plan, however, may be caught up in a general resistance to the large warehouse developments on the south side of the city that have faced increasing residential opposition.

The property is now zoned residential, and several residents in the area who want to see more housing and retail development on the southeast side of the city told the council last month that they want to keep it zoned residential.

The council tabled a vote on the rezoning and suggested that Hill meet with residents to discuss his plan.

Megan Cooper, one of the residents opposed to the Kingsmen Industrial Park, went to the community meeting and said there still will be opposition to the project.

“All we’re getting is warehouses over here,” Cooper said Friday. “The scale of warehousing to whatever else comes in is very off.”

Residents at the council meetings Aug. 9 and 10 noted that the area lost its only grocery store when Certified Warehouse Foods closed. They said more housing is needed to support retail.

“Instead of seeing light industrial come to the neighborhood, we need to see residential come to the neighborhood,” Boise Walker told the council. “We need to see affordable housing come to the neighborhood.”

The site is near the closed Joliet Country Club, which the Housing Authority of Joliet wants to redevelop into an affordable housing community.

A lawyer for the project said at the August council meetings that the plan for the site would create the kind of jobs for which young people are training at the Joliet Job Corps.

Attorney Tom Osterberger compared the plan to the Oak Leaf Industrial Park located on the west side of Joliet behind the U.S. post office.

“There hasn’t been a net investment in this area for a very long time,” Osterberger told the council, calling the Kingsmen Industrial Park, “a good thing. It isn’t taking away from the community.”