Video: Neglected Potholes Have Grown Into Sinkholes On This Cook County Street

By Mae Rice in News on Apr 5, 2016 3:31PM

In the YouTube clip above, Troy Corsi, 34, takes viewers on a video tour of Linder Avenue.

His home is one of the half-dozen houses along this pothole-scarred stretch of pavement, which starts near 147th Street and runs a few blocks north. Corsi's mailing address puts him in the Village of Midlothian, he told Chicagoist—but really, he and his immediate neighbors fall in unincorporated Cook County (or unincorporated Midlothian, depending whom you ask). Their few blocks of torn-up road are a municipal no-man's land; no government agency feels responsible for the repaving Linder Avenue needs.

Corsi moved into his house on Linder five years ago, and said he’s “tried every avenue” for getting the potholes fixed. (“Some of the potholes, literally, are six inches deep,” he said. “That’s pretty deep!”) He's reached out to Midlothian for help, but doesn’t fall in their jurisdiction. The Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT), meanwhile, put Corsi “on hold for hours," he said. Spokesperson for IDOT Gianna Urgo told Chicagoist the stretch of road does not fall in IDOT jurisdiction.

The road does fall within the Township of Bremen, but Bremen Highway Superintendent Jim Grandy told Chicagoist that segment of Linder is currently private property; legally speaking, he can’t repave it. “There’s liability issues.” Bremen could only repave this stretch, Grandy said, if every unincorporated resident who lived along it agreed, unanimously, to be annexed by Midlothian. Grandy said he plans to send a letter to the unincorporated residents this week, gauging interest in annexation.

"It is a hazard,” Grandy said. “I have people call me [about it] who don't even live out there in those seven houses."

However, even if the residents are all interested in annexation, Midlothian would also have to agree to take them, Midlothian Superintendent of Public Works Joe Sparrey told Chicagoist. (The whole annexation process is “not even close to happening,” Sparrey added.)

Another complication: Annexation would mean higher property taxes for Corsi and the other unincorporated residents on Linder Avenue. Roughly 2.4 percent of Cook County residents live in unincorporated areas, according to a 2014 study by the Civic Federation, and that means they don't pay taxes to a municipality (like the Village of Skokie, or the City of Chicago). Around the time of the Civic Federation study's release, Crain's painted unincorporated Cook County residents as essentially freeloaders, noting that they don't pay tax to local governments but "consume local government services."

That consumption, though, hasn't been easy in Corsi's case. If anything, he said, the government has been doing the opposite of serving him—they’ve been making his stretch of Linder worse. “This is a main street," he said, which means it's used by public school buses and garbage trucks. But "it's a type of street that can’t handle them type of big vehicles." Traffic from government vehicles exacerbate the already cavernous potholes, Corsi said.

Sparrey confirms that Midlothian garbage trucks had been using the road, but he couldn’t confirm whether Midlothian school buses use it. Sparrey said that he met with Midlothian's garbage service, Republic, last week, to tell them to stop using the road.

"[It's] private property,” Sparrey said, echoing Grandy.

But even if garbage trucks stop using the road now, it won't fix the already severe damage to Linder Avenue. “Some of [the potholes] are even sinkholes,” Corsi said. A pothole is a "minor" surface abrasion compared to a sinkhole, Corsi explained. Sinkholes break all the way through the pavement to the ground below, and "it just keeps sinking, the ground.”

Corsi's video above highlights sinkholes and other problems with the street: standing water in one pothole, wood thrown haphazardly in another to raise it back to street level. Corsi noted that he filled some of the potholes out front of his house himself. “They were so bad that when it would rain, it almost looked like I had a pond out in front of my yard," he said. “I got a truck, and I went to a rock place"—Ozinga Materials—where he bought 50 dollars worth of rock, or eight tons of it, "with my own money." He used it to fill the potholes out front of his house.

But fixing all the potholes on Linder, Corsi said, would cost him hundreds of dollars, so he's holding out hope for government assistance—in part because Cook County once repaved his stretch of Linder. Corsi heard it was more than a decade ago; Grandy puts it at simply “years ago.”

“Some political person from the county… got some guys to go out there and fix some potholes,” Grandy explained. Corsi could wait forever for it to happen again, though. At least the way Grandy remembered it, the original repaving was done as a favor, not because the street was the county’s official responsibility.

"Everybody keeps their yard nice around here, and tries to take their part in helping out," Corsi said. He also noted that he and his neighbors pay property taxes (just not to the extent they would in an incorporated area). "I just think it’s unfair.”