P&Z Commission Overrides Staff Denials, Rescuing Special Use Permits for Joliet Wedding Venue and Romeoville Barge Terminal

Will County Planning and Zoning Commission Meeting | April 7, 2026

Article Summary: The Will County Planning and Zoning Commission voted to overturn administrative denials for two delayed commercial projects—a rural wedding venue in Joliet and a petroleum barge terminal in Romeoville—after applicants missed strict deadlines to file for special use permit extensions.

Zoning Appeals Key Points:

• Rosalio Acosta Enterprises won Appeal #AA-26-001 after missing a February 13 deadline by 12 days for a special use permit extension for a Joliet wedding barn on Baltz Road.

• The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD) and Ducere LLC won Appeal #AA-26-002 after missing a January 15 deadline for a barge transloading facility on the Chicago Sanitary & Ship Canal in Romeoville.

• County zoning code forces the Zoning Administrator to automatically reject late extension requests, requiring applicants to appeal to the Commission and claim the staff made an “error” to keep their permits alive.

• Commissioners voiced frustration with the required legal wording of the appeals, noting that staff did not actually make a mistake by following the ordinance.

On Tuesday, April 7, 2026, the Will County Planning and Zoning Commission utilized the administrative appeal process to rescue two major commercial developments from bureaucratic death, voting to override staff rejections caused by missed paperwork deadlines.

The commission heard two back-to-back appeals: Appeal #AA-26-001 for Rosalio Acosta Enterprises LTD regarding a property at 26228 W. Baltz Road in Troy Township, and Appeal #AA-26-002 for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD) and Ducere LLC regarding a 39-acre parcel at 18500 W. 9th Street in Romeoville.

In both cases, the applicants had previously received Special Use Permits (SUPs) from the Will County Board that required periodic extensions while they worked through complex building and site development permitting. And in both cases, the applicants filed their extension paperwork after the expiration dates.

Development Services Director Brian Radner explained that the zoning ordinance explicitly states that extension requests must be submitted before the special use permit expires.

For the Acosta property, which is developing a wedding barn with ancillary liquor service, the previous extension expired on February 13, 2026. The applicant submitted the new request 12 days later, on February 25. For the Ducere LLC barge terminal—a facility designed to transfer petroleum products from pipelines to barges—the permit expired on January 15, 2026. The applicant’s agent, Dave Nelson, submitted the extension on February 25, having mistakenly calculated the deadline from the date of his previous county board meeting.

Because the deadlines were missed, the Zoning Administrator was legally forced to reject the applications. The only recourse for the applicants to avoid starting the expensive and time-consuming SUP process completely over from scratch was to appeal to the Planning and Zoning Commission.

“They’d like the Planning and Zoning Commission to decide if we made the correct decision, and if you want to overrule staff’s decision,” Radner explained to the commissioners. “The implication of not siding with the applicant would mean that they’d have to go through the special use permit process again.”

To grant the applicants relief, the commission had to pass a motion explicitly stating that the “administrative decision being appealed is an error.”

This legal phrasing drew significant irritation from the commissioners, who universally agreed that Radner and his staff had followed the law perfectly and made no actual error.

“I think that something needs to be changed about the way these cases are worded,” Commissioner Kimberly Mitchell stated during the vote. “I mean there needs to be another way that we can approve but not say that staff is wrong.”

Chairman Hugh Stipan echoed the frustration, noting, “It is painful to say that staff made a mistake when they really didn’t make a mistake, and that’s the way we got it worded.”

Despite the semantic objections, the commission voted 4-1 to approve the Acosta appeal, and 5-0 to approve the MWRD/Ducere appeal. The affirmative votes mandate the Zoning Administrator to accept the late extension applications, which will now be forwarded to the Will County Board’s Land Use and Development Committee for final approval.