Springfield’s decades-old proposal to build a second lake remains a distant prospect, but the city is moving ahead with land acquisitions nonetheless. On Aug. 18, the Springfield City Council approved the purchase of a plot of land owned by Carl Tega of Springfield. The land is on the projected shoreline of where Hunter Lake would be. Tega purchased the land in November 2014 for $116,000, according to property tax records, and the city is paying him $160,000 for it less than a year later. It’s a nine-acre strip at 7020 Brunk Cemetery Road near Rochester, zoned as farmland but with only a narrow strip of farmed acreage cutting through a field with different owners on either side of Tega’s strip. The $160,000 price that the city is paying Tega breaks down to about $17,817 per acre, which is higher than even the best farmland price of $16,150 recorded by the Illinois Society of Professional Farm Managers and Rural Appraisers for 2014.
This article appears in Oct 1-7, 2015.
