New Residents Given an Incentive

Kathlene Getsoian grew up in Minooka. When it came time to move back to Illinois, Minooka was an obvious choice.

“I was born and raised in Minooka,” she said. “It’s mainly because I knew Minooka, and we were looking for something smaller.”

The couple chose to build their home and picked River’s Edge Landing subdivision, less than two miles away from Kathlene Getsoian’s parents.

“My parents are only a mile and a half from us,” she said. “It was nice because it was literally a two-minute drive to see what was going on with the house we were building.”

The couple moved in March 2 and nine days later, their daughter Clara was born.

That was not the last of the blessings this couple found while living in their new house.

Kathlene and Scott Getsoian was the first couple to be awarded the Minooka Homeowner stimulus, a program that was recently extended by Minooka board members.

 In early 2010, Minooka officials met with Channahon officials to discuss creating an incentive program to support local developers and bring residents to the two towns. Initially, there was some discussion about using impact fees, but Minooka chose a different route.

The village had an existing downtown facade program, but noticed none of the business owners was taking advantage of it.

“They all said, ‘It’s a great program, we’d love to do it, but we don’t have the matching funds,’” James Grabowski, Minooka Village Administrator said.

So, the village reassigned those funds. They committed to spending $100,000 toward the program, which would expire after 20 homes or on Dec. 31, 2010. Board members recently extended the program to Jan. 21, 2012, which corresponds with the fiscal year.

When homeowners close on their house, they get $10,000 for a single-family home and $5,000 for a townhome. Half of those monies come from Minooka and half from the developer.

The only rule is that you must build in a subdivision that is in good standing.

About half of the funds have been applied for, Grabowski said.

Permits to build homes in the village have pretty much stayed the same for 2009 and 2010.

“Whether or not that’s because of our program, I don’t know,” Grabowski said.

As for the Getsoian family, they were able to use the money in a couple ways.

“It was really, really nice, definitely,” Kathlene Getsoian said. “We did use it towards the house, we wrote a really nice big check payment for the first payment.”

In addition, they were able to buy window treatments for the whole house.

"The whole house is window treated now, within five or six months, so we were happy with that," she said.