If Five Governments Could Once Solve a Flood, Why Can't Two Approve a Fence?

A decade ago, five Winnetka governments buried enough stormwater beneath the parks to win a national award. This decade, two of them can't agree on a dog-beach fence — and residents are paying for the standoff.

For more than thirty years, dogs ran off-leash at Centennial Beach. They don't anymore. After complaints, Cook County told the Park District the off-leash area no longer met its rules without a barrier. The Park District's own ordinance now requires leashing until a fence goes up. The fence needs Village approval. And four Village bodies in a row — the Zoning Board of Appeals, the Plan Commission, the Design Review Board, and on May 19 the Village Council, 5–1 — have said no.

A thirty-year amenity now sits in limbo, trapped between three governments' rules. And now, the Council is taking matters into their own hands, by calling a "Special Meeting" tomorrow night to move the dog beach to Tower Beach (more on this below).

A fence is a small thing. What the fight over it reveals is not.

How we got here

A decade ago, five Winnetka governments pooled land, money and authority to solve a flooding problem none could fix alone — and won a national award for it.

That capacity for partnership has not vanished; on the lakefront, it is being withheld. Beginning in 2023, the Village asserted a new authority to permit construction on shoreline land the Park District owns and operates, and so far it has used that authority to refuse: four rejections of a county-prompted safety fence the Park District had already cut nearly in half, and, to date, an unwillingness even to discuss the intergovernmental agreement the Park Board has formally requested.

The Village has every legal right to review these plans. What it has not shown is any willingness to use that right to reach a yes. That — not the dog fence, and not the law — is the question Winnetka should be asking of both its boards.

The Village's stated reasons are not frivolous. The Park District lakefront is a community asset, not merely a dog park, and a chain-link fence running into Lake Michigan raises questions about safety, public access and the public-trust doctrine that protects the shoreline. Trustee Kim Handler called the design an excessive answer to a limited problem. A fair concern.

The Park District listened after the Plan Commission's denial and met those concerns. The Park District cut the off-leash footprint nearly in half — from 490 feet to 265 — and moved the fencing onto the existing steel groins to avoid putting new barriers in the lake. It downsized, it adapted, it answered the design concerns. The Zoning Board, regardless, recommended another denial anyway, unanimously.

Park District responded in good faith. It halves its own request and still hears "no" four times.

The Park District is not the source of the gridlock, the Village Council is.

Nor does the claim that residents never asked for this hold up. Trustee Bridget Orsic, a lakefront liaison, said that after years of meetings no one had ever come forward to say "this is what I want." The record says otherwise. A resident-led petition drive saved the beach in the first place, after the Park District's own 2016 master plan had quietly slated the dog run for relocation; dog owners have packed Park Board meetings since 2021; and in the very same vote, a fellow trustee, Scott Myers, said residents have made their desire for an off-leash beach clear for years. The Village Council ignored the support and voted no anyway.

And the gridlock has a price. By the Park Board's own accounting, the fence would cost about $6,000 to install. Enforcing the leash rule instead — the status quo the denials preserve — would run roughly $34,500. The cheaper fix was blocked; taxpayers are left holding the costlier one.

It wasn't always like this

After the historic floods of 2008, 2011 and 2013 swamped a town built with almost no stormwater management, five public bodies — the Village, the Park District, New Trier, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District and Cook County — pooled land and money to bury more than 150 acre-feet of storage beneath fields and the golf course, prevent an estimated $1.9 million in damage a year, and win a national award.

Five governments, one problem, one solution. That was the habit.

On the east side, this decade, the habit is gone. The break traces to the lakefront — and to one extraordinary project. In 2023, after Justin Ishbia combined three lakefront lots — which had been done several times before by other Winnetka property owners — and received approval by the Village Council for his property to build what will be one of Illinois' most expensive homes. An alarm set off community activists, who moved quickly to vilify the owner and criticize the house. They created misinformation, and some people were sadly mean spirited.

However, they achieved their desired result: passing of six ordinances from the Village Council between 2023 and 2024 asserting authority over lakefront and bluff construction — including a permitting overlay it drew directly across the Park District's public beaches. The Village calls it bluff protection. The practical effect is a Village veto over land another elected body owns and is charged with running.

The posture showed early. When the Village adopted the centerpiece bluff ordinance in February 2024, its own president, Chris Rintz, urged the council to slow down and seek common ground with the property owners who were threatening to sue. Five voting trustees passed it anyway. Asked to wait and talk, the Village chose to proceed and litigate — the same instinct that now has it saying no to a dog-beach fence.

The lawsuit arrived three months later, and a judge dismissed it last fall based on "not being ripe" — lacking enough concrete evidence of its negative impact. The judge did not rule on the merits. The lakefront owners have refiled showing substantial property damages based on specific property assessments by Cohn Reznick. Four properties were evaluated with an average adverse impact of $4 million per property.

The net-net: Any property owner — be that the Park District or residential property owners — are stuck from making any improvements or landscaping changes to the property they own. The Village can't point to anything being done illegally or nefariously on the lakefront by a homeowner — if anything, those property owners are spending their money to fortify their bluffs for the long term.

This is bad public policy and it most glaringly is costing Winnetka taxpayers at Elder-Centennial and the east side stormwater study, study, study project. We deserve execution.

The right isn't the question — the judgment is

Start with what is not in dispute: the Village has the legal right to do this (see Sidebar below). The question was never whether the Council may review the Park District's plans. It may.

The only question worth asking is how it has used that power. Trustee Rob Apatoff defended the Council's role by saying its oversight is essential to keep the lakefront accessible to the public. As a principle, that is reasonable. But a right to review is not a license to produce only refusals — and the Park District is also elected, also accountable, with the recreation mandate and the multi-year Waterfront 2030 planning process, built on dozens of stakeholder interviews and resident surveys, behind it.

When the board that studied the shoreline is overruled four times by a permitting layer created in 2023, the fair test is no longer who holds the authority. It is what the authority has produced.

What it has produced is a government of "NO." Oversight promised to keep the beach accessible has made it less accessible to the dog owners who used it for three decades.

Questionable timing by the Council, RE: dog beach

Handed a downsized, county-prompted safety fence, the Village Council's answer was no — and its proposed alternative is to move the dog beach to Tower Road for a few morning hours before the beach opens: 6 to 8:30 a.m. on weekdays, 6 to 9 a.m. on weekends.

That new ordinance proposal is being brought up — in a special council meeting — tomorrow, Tuesday, June 30 as the solution. Our Town Winnetka questions the Council's motive and ethics of holding a special meeting on the eve of a national holiday, when Winnetka residents are busy with family, travel, and celebrating our country's 250th Anniversary.

A right exercised only to refuse, with no path offered to yes. Village Council has stopped being stewards and have started looking like obstructionists.

And it isn't only about dogs

The same east-side lakefront carries an unsolved stormwater problem; the Village began studying bluff and shoreline flooding in early 2025 — the very kind of challenge the two governments once solved together on the west side. The beach improvements first envisioned in 2016 still aren't built. The federal lawsuit the dispute spawned was dismissed last fall as not yet ripe, resolving nothing between the governments.

Here is what should change. The Park Board has voted to seek an intergovernmental agreement — the very tool that delivered the award-winning stormwater system a decade ago. The Village's answer, so far, is that it is "not prepared to discuss in substantive detail" such an agreement.

That is the choice in front of Winnetka's two boards: keep saying no, one body at a time, or sit down and build something — as they once did, on the other side of town, when they remembered they answer to the same residents.

The authority was never the question.

Winnetka's Village Council has every right to weigh in on its lakefront. What it has not shown is the willingness to use that right to reach a yes — to treat a co-equal elected board as a partner rather than an applicant to be turned away. Residents waiting on finished beaches, safer bluffs and a dog beach that can simply follow the law are entitled to ask both boards a plain question.

If five governments could once solve a flood, why can't two approve a fence?

Sidebar: Does the Village have the authority?

Yes — and that's the problem.

The Village's defenders argue the Council is simply doing its job. On the law, they are largely right — and that is the point. Winnetka is a home-rule municipality, which gives it broad authority over land use within its borders. Illinois courts have applied that authority even to other units of government: in one appellate case, a school district was required to obtain permits under a home-rule town's land-use rules to build on its own property, because the municipality has a vital interest in regulating all land within its boundaries.

A park district is not legally identical to a school district, and a land-use attorney should confirm exactly how far the analogy reaches — but the Village almost certainly may require the Park District to seek its approval for lakefront construction. So strike "they have no right" from the argument. They do.

The vulnerability was never in the authority to review — it is in the reasonableness of the denial. Even a home-rule body's land-use decision can be set aside if it is arbitrary, capricious, or unrelated to public health and safety. Four rejections of a county-prompted safety fence the District had already shrunk by nearly half is the kind of record that invites an as-applied challenge: a claim not that the Village lacks the power, but that it has used that power unreasonably.

And here is the part worth saying plainly. No one has actually litigated the Village's authority over the Park District. The only lawsuit so far came from the lakefront property owners — not the District — and a federal judge dismissed it last fall as not ripe, without ruling on the merits. The legality of how Winnetka has applied its lakefront authority is, at this writing, genuinely unresolved.

That gap is not an accident of timing; it is the structure. The only real check on an unreasonable denial is a lawsuit, and lawsuits are slow and expensive. A small sister agency like the Park District is far more likely to revise and resubmit — four times now — than to sue. A board whose decisions can only be tested at great cost faces little near-term consequence for pushing the edge of its discretion. Whether or not Winnetka's Council intends that, the arrangement rewards it.

The failure here is not of authority. It is of judgment, and of good faith. A government with the power to say no also has the power to say "here is how we get to yes." Winnetka's has chosen the first and refused the second: no negotiated agreement, no workable alternative beyond a dawn relocation, and a stated unwillingness to discuss the intergovernmental agreement the Park Board has formally requested.

That is the abuse worth naming — not of the statute, but of the public's reasonable expectation that two elected boards, both answerable to the same residents, will find a way to work together.

The Village holds the authority. It has not earned the deference.

Sources & notes

This article draws on contemporaneous reporting by The Record North Shore, Winnetka Park District and Village of Winnetka public records, project engineering records, and two primary-source memoranda submitted to Winnetka officials and the Winnetka Caucus Council by Amy and Warren James (May 15, 2026, on the six lakefront ordinances and related federal litigation; June 7, 2026, on lakefront ownership and access policy). The James memoranda are advocacy documents; their factual assertions were cross-checked against the independent sources below, and the Village's stated rationale and the federal court's ruling are included for balance.

1. "Stormwater Management Program in Winnetka Wins APWA National Project of the Year Award" — Strand Associates, May 19, 2025 (2008/2011/2013 flooding; 85%+ built without stormwater management; multi-agency partnerships; 150+ acre-feet storage; ~$1.9M annual flood-damage prevention; APWA National and ACEC IL awards).
2. "Skokie Playfields" — Gewalt Hamilton Associates project page (40-acre floodplain park; synthetic turf fields; 20+ acre-feet detention; underground vault below turf; coordination with Village of Winnetka and MWRD).
3. "Stormwater Management" — Village of Winnetka; and "Water" — Winnetka Park District (holding tanks under New Trier's Duke Childs Field, the Park District golf course, and Crow Island School; release to the Skokie Lagoons; four-million-gallon Skokie Playfields tank reused for Winnetka Golf Club irrigation).
4. Waterfront 2030 — Winnetka Park District (2016 Master Plan; $119,000 IDNR grant; 12-member steering committee; Maple 2019, Tower Road and Lloyd 2021 improvements).
5. "In once-in-a-generation opportunity, Winnetka Park District acquires lakefront property that separates Elder Lane and Centennial beaches" — The Record North Shore, Oct. 17, 2020.