A long-shelved Lake County plan to replace aging septic infrastructure with sanitary sewer lines along the Chain O’Lakes has been revived, but faces a steep funding challenge.
Houses around the lakes, once largely relegated to summer homes and weekend cabins, have evolved over the decades into permanent residences for families, straining aging septic systems and leading to environmental and health concerns from lake-health advocates.
It’s an issue that’s been championed at the county level by County Board member Linda Pedersen, whose district includes some of the chain. She first heard of the issue several years ago, she said, and after talking with county staff, learned about an older plan to bring sewer lines to the Chain that had been shelved decades ago due to the expense.
“It’s an environmental concern,” Pedersen said. “When you’re taking a waterway the size of the Chain O’Lakes, it’s a very unique waterway system, and that’s what we’re doing with the water? We’re dumping that in the water?”
The plan, dating back to the 1990s, according to county staff, was recently sent to an engineering firm for an update using ARPA funds. But the project’s price tag remains a hurdle for moving much further, multiple officials and county staffers said.
Austin McFarlane, director of the county Public Works Department, and project manager Sarah Heischberg — who is the principal engineer and permit manager for the department — discussed the project.
Chain O’Lakes sewer lines
McFarlane described three general areas for the project, totaling about 5,400 homes and businesses. If officials were to move ahead with bringing sewer lines to all of them at once, the construction price could be as much as $200 million, he said.
Instead, they are looking into taking “smaller bite sizes off,” McFarlane said, subdividing into $2 million to $5 million projects starting around Channel Lake and Lake Catherine, and then expanding in phases. It would be a far easier pitch to residents, he said.
The county has been working with the village of Antioch to use its treatment facility as one of the new system’s primary sites. While “nothing is set in stone,” Heischberg said, it is their current proposal as they apply for grants to help fund construction.
Pedersen said she wouldn’t be supportive of pushing the full cost on residents without some outside backing. Estimates she had heard would put tens of thousands of dollars on homeowners, a “chunk of change” she is “not comfortable” with asking residents to “cough up.”
“The least we can do is try to get some grant money, as much as we can to bring that cost down,” she said.
In Pedersen’s view, because the chain is a state waterway, Illinois should help with the bill. With sewage potentially leaking into the chain, it’s an environmental concern, she said.
Pedersen acknowledged such an effort would take years, but she urges the county not to sit back. In the coming months, the proposal will be losing at least one advocate: Pedersen herself, who has chosen not to run for reelection.
Lake health advocates
The project has support from many lake-health advocates, including the Lake County Lake Lovers, a grassroots organization that monitors and collects data on nearly two dozen lakes across the county.
Bob Mazzeffi has lived on Lake Catherine for over a decade. His home is fairly new, and his septic system runs into a large septic field facing away from the lake. But many of his neighbors live in homes going back to the 1950s, he said, with aging, sometimes failing septic systems.
“It’s just not equipped to handle today’s amount of water flow,” Mazzeffi said.
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He’s also a member of the Friends of Catherine and Channel Lakes leadership team and monitor of Catherine and Channel Lakes for Lake Lovers. While he said septic systems are “100% a driving cause” of phosphorus in the lakes, it is hard to understand the full extent of the impact, given other sources, from fertilizer, runoff, and old decaying matter in the waters themselves.
But addressing the septic problem would be an important step regardless, Mazzeffi said.
Mazzeffi is also part of the leadership team for Friends of Catherine and Channel Lakes, and participates in the water-quality monitoring program. They “strongly” support bringing municipal sewer service to the 300 homes around the lakes.
The lakefront is densely developed, and many properties were constructed before modern wastewater infrastructure, Mazzeffi said, and limited lot sizes and proximity to the lakes make more conventional septic systems “particularly challenging.”
Some homes near the lakes have systems that release treated effluent directly into the lakes or stormwater sewers, according to Mazzeffi, since the properties are too small for septic fields. These typically use other methods to clean the waste, which are subject to regular county inspections.
But failing systems “raise concerns about the potential introduction of bacteria into waters extensively used for swimming, fishing, and recreational boating.” And even functioning systems “do not necessarily remove phosphorus and nitrogen,” Mazzeffi said.
“We believe the long-term solution should include extending municipal sewer service throughout the Lake Catherine and Channel Lake communities, rather than addressing only the 22 properties currently discharging treated wastewater directly into the lakes,” he said.
“This is not simply about replacing failing septic systems,” Mazzeffi continued. “It is about modernizing wastewater infrastructure in densely developed lakefront neighborhoods to better protect our waterways for future generations.”
Rob Bryson of the Fox Waterway Agency Advisory Committee said the agency was in support of expanding sanitary sewer, considering septic systems as a “significant contributor” of bacteria and phosphorus, which lead to excess plant and algae growth, and algae blooms.
Its plan identified thousands of septic systems within the watershed, reportedly with 80% within a thousand feet of a lake. Bryson said generally 10% of septic systems are either failing or have failed.
However, those numbers can vary depending on the source. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has previously estimated about 10% to 20% of septic systems fail at some point in their operational lifetimes.
And Michael Adam, director of environmental health with the Lake County Health Department, said he typically hears 8% as the national estimate. However, he said the county doesn’t have “any concrete information” on the rate of septic system failures locally.
The Health Department has the authority to make homeowners fix failing septic systems, Adam said. It also monitors all the swimming beaches throughout the county, including the Chain O’Lakes, which often sees spikes of E. coli after rain events.
While the Chain has “a lot of septics,” he wasn’t able to provide exact numbers on how many may be in need of maintenance. In the last two years, he said the department has issued 22 permits to either repair or replace septic systems.
Adam said septic systems can actually do a “very good job” keeping material out of the water, but they need to be maintained. Additionally, around the Chain O’Lakes, many residential lots are smaller, meaning they can’t utilize septic fields to absorb materials.
While the department “definitely shares those concerns” of elected officials regarding septic systems around the Chain, it does not necessarily have a stance on replacing them with sewer lines, Adam said.
It is difficult to know the full impact of failing septic systems on the lakes, he said, but noted that a major contributor of phosphorus comes from the Fox River, which drains up in Wisconsin. Getting the best results requires looking at the issue “collectively,” and balancing how many resources are needed for different aspects.
“It’s a multifaceted problem,” Adam said. “There are lots of sources for the phosphorus or different bacteria.”