Fox businesses, pols decry new lock hours
Fox River businesses and their elected officials are telling the state that its plans to slash the Stratton-Bolger lock’s hours stink like a dead fish.
The Illinois Department of Natural Resources is closing the lock Mondays and Tuesdays this year and reducing its hours on other days as a cost-cutting measure.
Businesses that rely on Fox River and Chain O’ Lakes boaters for their livelihoods say that the limit will hurt them further during an ongoing recession and in the wake of a disappointing 2008 season.
“Business has never been tougher,” said Randy Kief, owner of Kief’s Reef on the lower Fox, south of the Stratton-Bolger Lock and Dam in McHenry. “I’ve been there 22 years, and it’s never been tougher to stay alive.
“And then for them to take 30 percent away from us, and the recreational time?”
The measure is necessary because the funding does not exist to hire enough staff to maintain traditional hours for the lock, which allows boaters to travel between the lower and upper Fox and the Chain O’ Lakes.
Besides being closed Mondays and Tuesdays, hours have been cut to from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Wednesdays and Sundays, and 10 a.m. to midnight Thursdays through Saturdays.
“This is one of those tough decisions,” IDNR spokesman Chris McCloud said. “There is not enough funding to do everything we want to do.”
The hours before the cut were from 8 a.m. to midnight daily May through September, and from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily through October.
Mondays and Tuesdays are considered the “less active” days by IDNR, and therefore not as much of a pinch on the Fox and the Chain, which is among the nation’s busiest recreational inland waterways.
Business owners disagree, and they said that any pinch was a bad one, especially after a 2008 boating season hampered by frequent no-wake restrictions and $4-a-gallon gas.
They have the ears of their elected officials.
The McHenry County Board unanimously passed a resolution Tuesday urging IDNR to reconsider, and nine state legislators whose districts run along the river asked the IDNR to reconsider in an April 30 letter to new Director Marc Miller.
“The closure, well, any closure at this crucial seasonal time will only serve to be economically devastating to all our communities located along this thriving active waterway,” the letter stated.
Among the legislators was state Sen. Pam Althoff, R-McHenry, whose first elected office was director of the Fox Waterway Agency.
She and other legislators recently met with IDNR officials to determine how to find the funding to keep the locks open daily during boating season.
McCloud said funding options could include fee increases.
Kief and attorney Jim Bishop presented the County Board on Tuesday with 3,000 signatures requesting their support, which they promptly received.
Board members agreed that curtailing the lock’s hours would have a ripple effect on other county businesses that would lose visiting boaters looking to spend money.
“From the economic standpoint of McHenry County, this is huge, and for the few dollars the state would save, doesn’t make any sense,” said County Board Chairman Ken Koehler, R-Crystal Lake.