Vote on Joliet Catholic Academy stadium to be tabled

The city vote scheduled for today on a proposed sports stadium for Joliet Catholic Academy is likely to be tabled to a future date.

City staff and JCA are asking the Joliet Zoning Board of Appeals to delay the vote.

A spokesman for JCA said school representatives do not intend to attend the ZBA meeting, which starts at 2 p.m.

The tabling request added to the agenda today asks that the matter be tabled until June 19 “to allow additional time for the petitioner to discuss the proposed use with neighborhood residents and revise its site plan as necessary.”

Ryan Quigley, institutional advancement director at JCA, said the school agreed to table the vote at the request of city staff.

“I talked with city staff later in the day (on Wednesday),” he said. “They requested tabling.”

Quigley said JCA representatives do not plan to go to the zoning board meeting today.

JCA needs a special use permit from the city to build the stadium in what would be an expansion of its campus.

A favorable vote from the zoning board is the only city approval required for the permit. Public notice that the JCA stadium would be on the zoning board agenda came out a week ago.

The tabling of the vote comes after concerns were raised at City Council meetings this week over whether neighbors of the stadium site were sufficiently informed of the JCA plan.

Quigley said JCA has held two community meetings on the stadium plan and sent 317 notices to neighbors for one of the meetings that drew eight residents. He said the plan was also presented at two open houses that JCA held in November.

But resident Jori Gura went to a City Council meeting on Monday and urged that the zoning board vote be tabled until neighbors could learn more about the JCA plan. She said few of the 30 neighbors she surveyed had reported getting the JCA notice about the community meeting.

Gura said Thursday that she was glad the vote was being tabled but also wanted to see another community meeting as well as traffic studies for Ingalls and Wyoming avenues, the two streets that would be outlets for stadium traffic.

“Those are the three things I want before it would even go to the zoning board,” Gura said.

At a Tuesday council meeting, Councilwoman Jan Quillman urged city staff to organize a community meeting to ensure that neighbors were informed about the project.

At the time, city officials appeared unsure of the timetable for the permit approval process. On Wednesday, a city spokeswoman confirmed that the zoning board would have the final say and the matter would not go to the City Council for a vote.

Dustin Anderson, community development director for the city, said staff met with Quigley on Wednesday to discuss the possibility of tabling the vote to allow for more contact with neighbors of the future stadium.

“We asked, do you think that this is something that might be a good idea?” Anderson said. “At the end of our conversation, Ryan agreed to it.”

This is a developing story. Check for updates.