After weeks of effort, the owners of Patti’s Sunrise Café at County Line Square will have a special use permit for outdoor tables and alcohol sales—though only for the next year.
Special use permits are specific zoning variants that grant owners carve-outs from usual zoning requirements, usually for minor upgrades or use requests.
The Village Board met Monday to finally resolve the issue pending for several meetings while Mayor Gary Grasso met with representatives for the owners over years of unresolved maintenance issues at the Square. Those issues include big fixes for big problems, including roof and sewer repairs, for a center that’s home to restaurants and other popular destinations but also myriad health and safety violations the mayor has alleged the owners have neglected to rectify.
Grasso said the Garber family owns the Square and while the patriarch of the family remains the owner, a younger Garber, Michael, will take control of Patti’s and become the face of the family’s interest in the Square.
“We’ve been less than happy with how the Garbers have kept County Line Square,” said Grasso. “We’ve been very open and vocal about it.”
Grasso said — and has said in the past — the family would get citations from the Village about needed repairs and ignore them, forcing the village to repeatedly take the family to court. However, Grasso said he’s seeing progress with Michael agreeing to make all necessary repairs to satisfy village codes.
“The good news is, there seems to be major changes in some of the facilities the most recent of which is the replacement of the roof over Capri,” said Grasso. Moreover, the mayor said the younger Graber has promised the family will no longer fight code enforcers to court.
“He has given me his promise that things will change, and there will not be such an adversarial process between them and our code enforcement team all the time,” Grasso told the Board.
The mayor noted that he’d heard promises in the past that came to nothing, but he pointed to a fruitful meeting earlier Monday in which Michael and the mayor exchanged phone numbers as an assurance the relationship would improve. Even so, Grasso urged the board not to grant permanent permission to Patti’s for its request and asked them instead to approve a one- or two-year provisional permit. If, at the end of that time, the family had proved itself willing to work with the Village, Grasso said the Village could revisit the matter then.
In the meantime, he said village code enforcers would “keep an eye on the progress.”
Village Administrator Evan Walter told the Board that at present the family was caught up on its fines and seemed to be working toward compliance in some areas, although the family will face a court date in June and more fines could result from that.
Janine Farrell, the Village’s community development director, told the Board the Village has also requested the family reimburse Burr Ridge for the cost of the roofing inspector, though that request was made only last week.
Even so, Grasso said he recently heard of a sewage backup at one of the restaurants in County Line Square, and he’s already asked village staff to make sure the owners address the issue and repair the sewer in line with health code requirements. He said the outcome of all these requests will indicate whether the temporary special use permits should be extended next year.
“It’s a good test to see if the old ways will continue or if there’s a new sheriff in town and we won’t need to take them to court repeatedly.”
“I would support allowing this outdoor dining for a one-year period provided there’s progress,” explained Trustee Guy Franzese, who also expressed frustration at years of neglected upkeep.
Trustee Russ Smith asked Grasso if he planned to ask the board to grant every business owner a provisional special use permit to prove responsible ownership before granting anything long-term. Grasso said he would if the facts were the same and he said he had suggested provisional permits to other businesses until they addressed compliance issues. However, he pointed out, the issues at County Line Square were more than a few isolated incidents — and some haven’t been corrected in years.
“We’ve had to cite them repeatedly,” Grasso said. “The first letter we sent out was 35, 40 violations and that was two years ago, maybe more. Time flies,” Grasso said. Since then, the mayor said the village has spent an “inordinate amount of time” on pushing the Graber to family to get its buildings up to code.
“We’ve used up all our goodwill in the past and it’s been thrown in our face,” Grasso said.
In the end, the Board voted to approve a temporary one-year provisional special use permit with a promise to hold the property owners accountable for code violations.
Jesse Wright is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
