Work continues to turn a northern Illinois mobile home park into a forest preserve.
What do you see now if you drive along Illinois 64 as you leave Sycamore?
A park.
It used to have 125 mobile homes.
But the area is prone to flooding. Last fall, more than 300 residents from Sycamore’s Evergreen Village mobile home park were relocated.
Paul Miller is DeKalb County's Planning Director. He says the plan is to call the space the Sycamore Forest Preserve. It could open by this fall.
But there’s still work to do before the preserve will be open to the public.
“There’s a plan to install some picnic shelters for the park-like portion of the property. The back 30 acres is being planted in prairie grasses to restore prairie in the area. There’s scrub trees and invasive species they’ll want to address.”
The total cost for the project is about $7 million. That included relocating residents and acquiring the land. The money came from the federal government and the Illinois Emergency Management Agency.
He calls the overall project “complex” because of federal rules involved to transfer the land and he says every family situation was unique in the relocation process.
