Elgin is green...

…only when it wants to be!
(Or, Paver Madness)

Take a trip down to city hall, but first check out your own curb and sidewalk.

When you get down to Dexter and Douglas you will notice brick pavers all over the place.

Pavers at the intersections

Pavers at the curb

Pavers for a driveway to the parking terrace.

Wait, weren’t we spending $100K (down from an original request of $500K) to “go green”?

Surely someone must realize what a brick paver really is. I guess not. Let me clue you in.

Bricks are made of clay. Clay that must be dug out of the ground. They call it “strip mining.” (That can’t be good.) To strip mine the clay they must remove everything growing on top of it, along with the topsoil. The clay is in a thin layer spread over miles so off comes all the vegetation and topsoil.

Then they truck the clay to a manufacturing plant. And they truck in shale as well. The two are mixed together and formed into bricks. And then they COOK the bricks. At 2000 degrees. For 30 hours. Imagine the energy used in that process!

Then they bundle up all those brick pavers and ship them over 800 miles from North Carolina to Elgin.

Then some workers who don’t speak English (Really, they don’t. I talked to them.) pound them into the sand and cut them with a water saw. Lots of cuts to make that herringbone pattern.

But we’re saving on concrete, right? No, we aren’t. The pavers are laid on a bed of cement.

But those bricks are durable. They’ll last forever. But that doesn’t mean they’ll lay flat for very long.

Which makes it hard to shovel the snow.

Speaking of snow, with pavers there are seams every few inches. And snow and ice get down in those seams causing the bricks to pry loose after a couple of years. Look at the decorative gateway median at the tollway and Route 25 for an example. They are up and down, sinking and tilting.
All in the interest of making downtown Elgin look like The Streets of Woodfield or Deerfield Commons. There are a couple of problems with that concept:
1) Have you noticed all the vacancies at those outdoor malls?
2) Didn’t we try that already in downtown Elgin? A couple of times?
3) The upscale stores that are attracted to such malls are looking for two things – High income per capita and traffic. Elgin has neither.

Now, some of the pseudo-green bunch will say “drainage.” Those pavers allow for drainage. Not when they are sitting in a cement pan.

And another thing. They are tearing up sidewalks at the Centre that are only seven years old just to redecorate. And thirteen-year-old sidewalks in front of the police station. That doesn’t sound very friendly to Mother Earth.

Nor does it sit well with Elgin citizens who are looking at curbs and sidewalks that are 40 years old and crumbling.

Fix the problem of raw sewage in the basements downtown and skip the expensive facelift.