The Budget Winnetka Bought — and the One It Didn't

A record $39.5 million capital plan answers a problem the Village put off for a generation. Whether 2026 is the start of something — or a one-year exception — is the question.

Credit where it's due: Winnetka's 2026 budget is a serious piece of work.

Spending $116.2 million — up 23.1 percent — is the largest single-year jump in Village history. The money is going where it should: into the ground. A record $39.5 million for capital, with $18.4 million for Willow Road alone. Reserves $1.3 million above policy. The Aaa Moody's rating, held since 1989, was reaffirmed in November.

That is the budget Winnetka bought.

It's a step toward what Winnetka needs.

It doesn't go far enough.

Hold it up next to Wilmette's budget — our closest peer on the North Shore — and five things come into focus:

1. One year of maintenance doesn't fix decades of deferral

In isolation, the 2026 capital plan looks impressive.

In context, it's modest.

Willow Road, one of our most-traveled thoroughfares, has waited years for reconstruction. Its $18.4 million is now 47 percent of the capital budget. The $21.2 million FEMA grant underwriting the stormwater work is still under federal review — promised, not banked. Tower Road Pier? Shuttered for years. Not in the plan.

This isn't get-ahead spending. It's catch-up spending. Call it what it is.

A community that defers a capital obligation for a decade and then tries to make up for it in a single year hasn't solved the problem. It has paid the late fee.

2. The benchmarking shock

Wilmette has roughly 27,300 residents in 5.4 square miles. Winnetka has 12,744 in 3.9. Same lakefront. Same Aaa rating. Same school-district overlay.

Then look at what each village has decided to do.

Two numbers in this table need explaining before anything else.

Winnetka is spending $3,099 per resident on capital this year — nearly double Wilmette's $1,673. On its face, that looks like Winnetka is doing more.

The catch is the row above it.

Wilmette's $1,673 is one slice of a published, sequenced, ten-year, $406.9 million plan. Residents know — in writing — what comes in 2027, 2028, and 2030.

Winnetka's $3,099 is a one-year number with no plan behind it. We don't know whether 2027 is $3,000 per resident or $300. And the reason this year's figure is high isn't ambition. It's Willow Road, deferred for years, finally coming due.

One village is spending steadily on a schedule. The other is making a balloon payment.

Two additional numbers deserve credit. Pensions take a smaller share of Winnetka's tax levy than Wilmette's — 20 percent against 28 percent. And the Village's slice of every property-tax dollar essentially matches Wilmette's.

Which makes the rest of the picture sharper, not softer.

3. The revenue conversation Winnetka isn't having

The budget contains one quietly important move: a new 1% home-rule sales tax for downtown redevelopment. It's the first new revenue tool Winnetka has drawn from its home-rule powers since voters granted them in 2005.

To be clear: Our Town Winnetka is not for higher taxes. But the new levy points — almost accidentally — at the bigger conversation Winnetka isn't having.

In twenty years, we've lost commercial tax base from two auto dealerships. Two visible parcels — One Winnetka and the Post Office — have sat idle. Other public-private opportunities have gone unoptimized. Winnetka's ten largest property taxpayers aren't businesses. They're homeowners.

That isn't a problem the Village solves by raising the sales tax.

It's a problem the Village solves by thinking bigger — and by making it easier to do business in Winnetka.

Which brings us to the next question.

4. The staffing question — and what those staff are doing

Winnetka has 166 full-time staff — one for every 77 residents. Wilmette, with more than twice the population, has 204 — one for every 134. On a per-resident basis, Winnetka runs 75 percent more municipal staff than its closest peer. Not because Wilmette is understaffed. It runs the same services we do.

This isn't about the quality of Winnetka's staff. Many are excellent and long-tenured. It's about what 75 percent more staff per resident buys us — and what it costs residents in time, money, and frustration.

What it buys is process. A lot of it.

A recent comparative analysis of seven North Shore and Chicago-area communities — Winnetka, Glencoe, Lake Forest, Lake Bluff, Hinsdale, Kenilworth, and Wilmette — found that Winnetka has the most restrictive zoning framework in the group. Winnetka is the only community that requires a special use permit for every non-residential use in residential districts: parks, schools, churches, libraries, fire stations, government buildings — all of them.

Glencoe permits parks, schools, and churches by right. Kenilworth, Lake Bluff, and Hinsdale created dedicated districts for institutional uses, so they don't burden residential zoning at all. Even Wilmette — the closest analog — permits government facilities by right in commercial districts.

Then, in 2023, the Village made it harder.

Ordinance MC-09-2023 codified a "Major Change" framework requiring that virtually any modification to an approved special use — including routine work like reconfiguring a parking lot or relocating a walkway — restarts the entire application process from the beginning.

New Plan Commission hearing. New ZBA hearing. New Village Council ordinance. Months, sometimes years.

What it costs residents is real, and personal.

Ask anyone who has tried to build, renovate, or open a business in Winnetka. Permits take longer than in neighboring villages. Disputes more often end in legal correspondence than in conversation.

Architects and contractors who work across North Shore communities will tell you privately what they won't say publicly: Winnetka is among the hardest villages to work in on the North Shore.

The frustration isn't abstract. It's the family that waits eighteen months to add a mudroom. The small business owner who walks away from a Winnetka storefront because the build-out timeline kills the lease economics.

The homeowner who hires three sets of consultants — architect, attorney, expediter — to navigate what neighboring villages handle administratively.

The same framework applies to public projects.

The Winnetka Park District's improvements at Centennial Park and Elder Lane Beach — including in-water structures designed to address beach erosion and bluff preservation — had reached a third Zoning Board hearing as of December 2024 without resolution.

A sitting Park District commissioner resigned in connection with the proceedings, citing the Village's framework as having reduced the Park District's ability to fulfill its mission.

The Park District and the Village are both elected, both representing the same residents, and both trying to act in the community's interest — but the process has produced friction rather than progress.

The costs the Village doesn't publish

The taxes pay for the staff. The visible costs of the permitting framework end there. The hidden costs don't.

Start with the Village's own legal bill.

Winnetka's budget reports legal expenditures, but not in a form that's really apparent or broadly shared with residents. The aggregate is in the financial statements.

The breakdown — what was spent on which permit dispute, which ZBA matter, which settlement — isn't part of the conversation residents can readily have with their elected officials. When permit disputes end in legal correspondence rather than conversation, some end in settlement payments. Those numbers exist. They're just not easy to find.

Then there's the cost residents absorb privately. For every contested permit, the applicant pays for architects, attorneys, expediters, and carrying costs on stalled projects.

These costs don't appear in any municipal budget.

They appear on family balance sheets. A homeowner who waits eighteen months for an addition pays for that wait in mortgage interest, construction inflation, and consultant fees. None of it shows up in the Village's books.

And there's the cost residents pay twice.

When the Park District spends staff time, legal fees, and consulting dollars navigating multiple Zoning Board hearings on the same project, residents fund both sides — once through the Village levy that pays for the process, and again through the Park District levy that pays to navigate it.

The same is true when public school districts and other taxing bodies engage with the Village's framework.

None of this is on a line in the 2026 budget that residents can easily read. It is the cost of the system; paid by the same residents the system serves.

This is what 75 percent more staff buys.

More staff isn't automatically wrong. It can buy faster service and more attentive review. But on the evidence — peer comparisons, resident experience, even the experience of our own elected sister boards — it isn't buying speed or good outcomes. It's buying friction.

Winnetka's permitting framework isn't a quirk of local procedure. It's a deliberate policy choice — and, on the evidence, an expensive one.

5. Wilmette is planning for a generation ahead. Winnetka is starting to.

Wilmette's new police station tells you everything about how the two villages plan.

In 2017 — nine years out — the Board picked 2026 to replace its 1968 station. Not because it was an emergency. Because that was the year existing debt would retire, freeing borrowing capacity. A $50.5 million station breaks ground this spring, financed through retiring debt and reserves. No new levy.

That's what planning a decade ahead looks like in practice: pick the year, retire the debt, build the building, don't raise taxes.

Winnetka has no project of comparable ambition on its horizon.

The May 12 study session on a 20-year capital plan is a real step — worth saying so plainly. You can watch it on YouTube; OTW will provide a full POV in our next newsletter.

But let's be honest about what a 20-year plan can and can't do.

A village that hasn't published a 10-year plan won't credibly follow a 20-year one.

Twenty-year plans are forecasts, not commitments — useful for thinking about what's coming, less useful for telling residents what's getting funded.

What's needed is a layered horizon:

• A 20-year forecast of long-cycle obligations — water, stormwater, lakefront, facility replacement. Directional. Updated every few years.
• A 10-year capital outlook that names projects and sequences them — the Wilmette model.
• A 3-to-5-year funded capital budget with specific projects, specific dollars, specific years. This is what residents hold the Village Council to.

Forecast long. Plan medium. Commit short.

Update annually.

The risk of a single 20-year plan presented to residents next fall is that it becomes aspirational wallpaper — a document everyone points to, and nobody follows.

The discipline isn't in the 20-year number. It's in the 3-to-5-year commitment underneath it.

Lead service lines illustrate the gap. Both villages face the same 2037 federal mandate. Winnetka funds the state minimum. Wilmette adopted 100-percent cost coverage in 2024 and will have replaced 260 lines by year-end — two years ahead. Winnetka is on schedule. Wilmette is ahead of schedule. The difference is a planning posture, not a wealth gap.

What this tells us

The fiscal discipline is real: pay-as-you-go funding, an Aaa rating since the Reagan administration, a levy below the cap, reserves above the floor. Not the subject here.

The subject is what comes next.

Four things the Council should commit to before the Fall Caucus Town Hall:

• Publish the capital plan. A layered 20 / 10 / 3-to-5-year horizon, with a one-page resident summary digestible in five minutes.
• Hold a study session on revenue. The lakefront, public-private partnerships, and the three business districts are revenue opportunities, not just planning questions.
• Hold a study session on homeowner property rights and permitting. With an eye toward shortening timelines, reducing costs, reducing friction with sister governmental bodies, and making the full cost of the process visible to the residents who pay for it.
• Set realistic timelines for Tower Road Pier, East Side Stormwater, and other deferred infrastructure. In public. With dates.

Winnetka is a wealthy village. The 2026 budget is, finally, a budget that spends like one.

Reporting Notes & Sources

Primary source: Village of Winnetka, Annual Budget and Capital Improvement Plan, Fiscal Year 2026, adopted Dec. 2, 2025, by Village Council Resolution R-90-2025. Per-resident capital figure: $39,480,000 ÷ 12,744 = $3,099. Peer comparison: Village of Wilmette, 2026 Adopted Budget (adopted Nov. 25, 2025), including 2026–2035 Capital Improvement Program ($406.9 M total), Personnel/FTE History, and Manager's Transmittal Letter. Wilmette population per U.S. Census Bureau Vintage 2024 (27,443) and 2025 estimate (~27,126); article uses ~27,300 as midpoint. Wilmette 2026 FTE: 204 per the Wilmette budget Personnel section. New police station data: Wilmette 2026 Manager's Transmittal Letter, project cost $50.5 M. Pension percentage of levy: Winnetka 2026 Budget (police pension levy $1.15 M + fire pension levy $1.59 M ÷ corporate levy $13.94 M, plus IMRF and other pension components); Wilmette 2025: $6.21 M = 28% of tax levy per Wilmette transmittal letter. Corroborating: "Winnetka's '26 budget plans for record capital costs, $440 more in fees per resident," The Record North Shore, Dec. 4, 2025; Moody's Investors Service rating action, Nov. 4, 2024 (Aaa affirmed). Outside-counsel and litigation spending characterization based on the absence of a separately disclosed line item in the 2026 adopted budget.