Kendall County Times

The Joliet city council recently made two new ordinances for facilities within the city.

During a Nov. 15 city council meeting, the council had two different ordinances on their agenda regarding trucking facilities in the city. They were both dealing with long term storage facilities dealing with cargo containers and chassis storage and were putting restrictions on how high the businesses could stack containers. The original ordinance would impose a limit of five units high.

The city council members discussed the first ordinance, which dealt with a business at 3350 Channahon Road. The business was currently stacking units five high, which was currently allowed by the village. Some council members however expressed concern over the sight and how much it encouraged stockpiling and asked to amend the ordinance to decrease the limit to just three units high.

"If you’ve ever seen, again, these containers stacked and sitting there and ruining the environment. I’ve been to places and they just get higher and higher and they sit there and rust, they’re eyesores, and they just stay there forever and it’s not good for the environment," Councilwoman Jan Quillman said at the meeting. "And again, I don’t know if that’s something we want to do, I would go with three. And we have the right to do that as a council because I just think if we want to make Joliet better we don’t need a bunch of rusty containers hanging around."

Both the first ordinance and the second, which was the same but dealt with a business at 3850 S. Youngs Road, were amended to restrict storage stacking to three units high, despite the properties already having stacks five units high. Both of the ordinances passed with a vote of 5-4 in favor, which included the mayor’s vote as the tiebreaker.