Per the Illinois EPA’s summary of the Village’s plan:$16 millionto serve one business —and 114 homes not built yet

How do we know those 114 homes will be built?

The state summary doesn’t say. It never says where the 114 homes are, who would build them, or whether anyone has approved them, and we found no mention of the number in the recording of the July 8 hearing.

The only 114-home plan we found in the Village’s own records is in a June 2023 draft feasibility study by Robinson Engineering, which the Village has posted on its website. Its table of “Anticipated Short Term Population Growth in Service Area” lists about 50 acres on 159th Street east of Cedar Road as a “Conceptual Site Plan showing 114 residential Lots, no commercial” — on the stretch of 159th Street that the $2.6 million Cedar Road sewer extension was awarded to serve. The study called its table “a possible short-term forecast of development” whose buildout “would likely take at least the next several years.” The number matches; the state summary doesn’t say whether that is where its 114 came from.

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Three years later, the 50 acres in that table are still vacant: the Village’s June 2026 bid memo describes the parcels its new sewer will reach, along the north side of 159th Street, as “currently unserved vacant parcels,” and we found no zoning request, subdivision plat or Village approval for homes on that land in Plan Commission or Village Board agendas from January 2024 through September 2026. (A separate, larger plan on the south side of 159th — Dunn Farm, proposed at 241 homes and later cut to 217 — has been to Village workshops in April and October 2025; we found no approval for it.) The Village’s own consultant gave an answer in 2023, in the same study: developers had approached the Village, but it was “limited in its ability to process development applications” without “economical and long-term infrastructure being readily available.” So the homes may well follow the pipe. But the state summary counts on them within five years, and beyond a line that the Village “will reevaluate the projected user rates once actual costs are known,” it doesn’t say what happens to the bill or the proposed subsidy if they come slower — or not at all.

Whose sewer bill this is

It depends on whose sewer you are on. If Illinois American Water handles your sewage — it runs three wastewater plants inside Homer Glen — the Illinois Commerce Commission sets that rate, and the Village’s own video says this project will not affect existing Illinois American Water customers. If you are on septic, you have no sewer bill today, but you are not outside this plan: the state summary says septic homes can connect “when they are ready,” and the Village’s video says more extensions are being studied to serve nearby unsewered neighborhoods. The customers the summary actually projects are the Village’s own sewer customers: today one business, and within five years, 114 new homes.

For them, the Village’s audited financial statements say who decides:

And the Village’s plan, as the state summarizes it, already projects the number: a flat charge of $105 a month per home in 2030, rising each year to $125 in 2035 — $1,500 a year, which the summary puts at 1.17% of Homer Glen’s median household income. To repay the loan it adds a per-1,000-gallon charge to commercial users and a “proposed Village subsidy”: $561,135 in 2030, falling to $42,859 in 2035 — about $1.9 million over six years, by our sum of its table. The summary does not say where the subsidy money comes from. In February the Village told residents the project would be paid for by “future growth and not current Illinois American Water customers,” through loans, possible grants and “connection fees from new users.” The subsidy is a separate line from customer billing, and neither document says whether it would come from those connection fees or from other Village money. The summary says the Village “will reevaluate the projected user rates once actual costs are known.”

Whatever the final number, it will be set the same way: by six trustees, by ordinance — no referendum, and no Illinois Commerce Commission rate case of the kind that governs Illinois American Water.

What’s actually being built

This project treats sewage (wastewater) only. It changes nothing about where your drinking water comes from: Illinois American Water where it serves, your own well elsewhere. The two are easy to mix up because Illinois American Water also runs three wastewater plants inside Homer Glen — but the Village’s new plant is a separate, Village-owned facility.

The Illinois EPA summary describes a screening structure, an Aero-Mod treatment system, sludge holding tanks, disc filtration, UV disinfection, a building for a laboratory, electrical room and blowers, and a new lift station and force main — north of 159th Street, east of Gougar Road, discharging into Fiddyment Creek. Construction is projected from January 2028 to January 2030.

Why it exists: under a 2018 intergovernmental agreement, Homer Glen, the City of Lockport and the Bonnie Brae–Forest Manor Sanitary District arranged for the flow from the Village’s own Fiddyment Creek sewer to be treated at Lockport’s Bonnie Brae plant. Lockport has given notice that it will end that arrangement on January 1, 2030. Without its own plant, the Village would need another outside provider — a new agreement with Lockport, or Illinois American Water — both for that flow and for the new homes and 159th Street parcels it is planning for; under the current agreement, Lockport had already refused any new connections in 2022.

Where the idea came from

The Village has told residents it chose to build after a “detailed feasibility study and cost-benefit analysis.” Neither that study nor the September 2025 project plan is on the plant’s page on the Village website, and we haven’t found any Village communication that lays the options Lockport offered side by side, with their costs, for residents. Here’s what we found going back through the record.

The trouble was on the record by the fall of 2022. On September 28, 2022, the Board heard that Lockport’s Bonnie Brae plant was degrading rapidly; on October 26, 2022, then-Village Manager Carmen Maurella read the Board an email from Lockport: Lockport would not authorize any new connections or additional growth for Homer Glen. On January 11, 2023, under then-Mayor George Yukich, the Board voted 5–0 to fund an $18,250 Robinson Engineering feasibility study of a Village-owned treatment plant. That spring, before the April 2023 election, Maurella announced in the Village’s own Spring/Summer 2023 newsletter that he had put a team together to pursue a Village-owned facility, and trustee candidate Ruben Pazmino — running against Christina Neitzke-Troike’s slate, not with it — said in an April 3, 2023 election preview: “There was always an understanding that the Village would eventually develop its own system.” The idea predates this administration: the Board under Mayor Yukich voted 5–0 to fund the study (Pazmino, who was running against Neitzke-Troike’s slate, seconded it), the Village Manager announced the team, and the Board seated after the 2023 election — which kept three of those five yes votes — carried it forward.

Where the decisions were made

The Village Board’s own minutes are unusually direct about this. On February 15, 2024, the minutes record that Mayor Neitzke-Troike “addressed the wastewater treatment issue and noted that most of the discussions take place in executive session,” and asked residents to contact the Village for correct information and “to not believe everything they read on Facebook.” Three months later, on May 8, 2024, the minutes record her saying Illinois American Water, the wastewater project and 143rd Street were “three big topics residents keep asking about, unfortunately, some information can not be discussed publicly at the moment.”

Closed session is lawful and ordinary for buying land — nobody should pretend otherwise, and the Village was in the middle of a $4 million land deal whose price was voted in open session in June 2024. The problem is what came after. Residents were told by a trustee that this was the Village’s top priority, told by the Mayor that some of it couldn’t be discussed publicly, told not to believe everything they read on Facebook — and none of the follow-ups explained the bill or the subsidy. The Village’s February 2026 video says the plant will be paid for by “future growth and not current Illinois American Water customers”; it never mentions a subsidy. At the July 2026 hearing the state summary was part of the packet, but nobody said the projected bill or the subsidy out loud. They sit in a scanned state document in the packet.

And at that same February 2024 meeting, Trustee Rose Reynders described — in one report, recorded in the minutes — a choice the Village has not laid out for residents in any document since: Lockport had given the Village three options — build its own plant, sign a new agreement with Lockport, or go with Illinois American Water for sewage treatment. Homer Glen chose to build. That may have been the right answer. It was still a decision among three, with real tradeoffs, and residents were never walked through them.

What’s still unanswered

Much of what this page once listed as unknown turns out to be on paper, in the Illinois EPA summary. This is what genuinely remains open:

• Where the “proposed Village subsidy” comes from — $561,135 in 2030, about $1.9 million through 2035 — and how it squares with the Village’s word that growth pays for the plant
• Who pays while the plant fills up? — its first phase is sized for about 2,500 residents (the Village’s video), but the state summary projects 114 new homes and one business within five years, and its subsidy shrinks from $561,135 to $42,859 by 2035 on revenue the summary doesn’t explain. What happens to the bill and the subsidy if connections come slower?
• The final cost — $15,968,320 is an estimate, and the Illinois EPA summary says the Village “will reevaluate the projected user rates once actual costs are known”
• Whether homes on septic could ever be required to connect — the state summary says they can connect “when they are ready” and no Village ordinance we have found requires it, but a state rule generally bars approving a new or renovated septic system when a permitted sewer is available within 300 feet, with limited exceptions (77 Ill. Adm. Code 905.20(e))

Questions & answers

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We’ll update this page as the subsidy’s source, the new plant’s sewer rate and the septic answer become public.