October 6, 2026
About 75 flood insurance policies in Marengo are paid at the full federal rate. A FEMA program discounts those premiums for towns that join, by 20 to 25 percent in Crystal Lake, Lake in the Hills and unincorporated McHenry County. Marengo's council first heard about the obstacle in 2009 and paid for a study in 2012. The staff who worked on it have left, and the city is still looking for the file.
Continue reading →September 30, 2026
Behind the homes on East Forest Street sits one of the biggest pieces of empty land inside Marengo's city limits. The city approved a subdivision there by 2007, which marketing materials describe as 54 duplexes and 24 houses. None were built. Public records tell the story of what happened instead, and why the land is suddenly worth watching again.
Continue reading →September 26, 2026
The Marengo City Council will discuss Monday whether to back away from a 2018 resolution in which the city agreed not to pursue or support new access onto Route 23 at the I-90 interchange. The land a new access road would reach includes a site the council approved for a travel center in 2023. This story also carries more of our own analysis than we usually run, and it says plainly what we cannot confirm.
Continue reading →September 22, 2026
A 300-megawatt solar farm covering more than 2,600 acres around Marengo was approved in 2021, then went quiet for five years. We read the federal grid filings, county land records, and years of local meeting minutes to find out what happened, who owns it now, and which deadlines it is up against.
Continue reading →September 21, 2026
The city has been setting aside downtown property taxes since 2011, and the fund has never been bigger. Here is what a TIF district is, what Marengo's two have done, and why the next thing the money buys is a parking lot.
Continue reading →September 18, 2026
Settlers' Days turns 55 this year, with the carnival, the parade and Saturday Night on Main Street back downtown October 9 to 11. Here is the full schedule, which streets close and when, and what the police chief told the council before it approved closing Route 23.
Continue reading →September 16, 2026
At this week's prices, about $1.09 of every gallon of gas sold in Marengo is tax, and the city keeps about 8 cents of it. Marengo's gas taxes are slightly lower than Woodstock's or Crystal Lake's, so a big price gap between them is not the tax. Here is every tax in the price, how a dozen nearby places compare, and what changed this summer.
Continue reading →September 11, 2026
Andrew Kjellgren has spent 20 years with the Marengo Police Department and became its chief this summer. In written answers, the new chief talks about what has changed over two decades, hiring, growth near I-90, and what the department needs from residents.
Continue reading →September 8, 2026
For a full fiscal year the Marengo Police Department worked with twelve sworn officers instead of the fourteen it is built for. The payroll fell 8.1 percent while the union contract paid a 3.5 percent raise every year. But overtime rose $87,083 over the same span, eating just over 80 percent of the salary savings, and the department's total budget fell 2 percent. The shifts still had to be covered, and sergeants covered them.
Continue reading →September 3, 2026
Chickens are not allowed in Marengo. In 2023 city staff researched what neighboring towns do, wrote an ordinance with a license, a four-bird limit and coop setbacks, and recommended the council approve it. The council voted it down. The question has come back twice since, and the reason members gave the last time was not about chickens. It was about whether the city had anyone to enforce the rules.
Continue reading →August 27, 2026
On March 30, 2006, the Census Bureau counted 1,732 people in Marengo. Not the whole town, just part of it. Under the rules of that decade a city could ask the federal government to recount only the blocks where something had changed, and Marengo did. It cannot make that request today, and the reason has nothing to do with anything the city did. A rule that arrived with the 2020 census requires a town to contain at least one whole census tract before it can ask for a partial count. Marengo sits inside two and fills neither, which puts it with 87.9% of Illinois municipalities.
Continue reading →August 22, 2026
The Open Meetings Act treats closed-door secrecy as temporary. Every six months, a council is supposed to re-read its own closed-session minutes and release whatever no longer needs sealing. Marengo's council took that review up in October 2023, put it off, and did not come back to it. On August 10 it caught up all at once, opening thirty-one sets of minutes going back three years. Here is what the paper trail shows.
Continue reading →August 18, 2026
The council approved $32,161 to take down trees on city property. The estimate lists them by address, so we mapped it: nineteen trees at fourteen places, seven of them within about 900 feet of each other on the southwest side. Nothing goes back in their place, and the city says its own code bars a resident from planting there either. That code is not an accident. Marengo used to replant, and in 2016 the council closed the parkway to it.
Continue reading →August 8, 2026
The biggest street rebuild in years is finishing on Prospect Street, and a resurfacing program covering about 2.3 miles of the numbered avenues is next in line. Here is what the city has planned for its roads this year, what it costs, and who pays.
Continue reading →August 7, 2026
Marengo is looking at a broad rewrite of its property and nuisance rules, the first piece of a full update of the city code: what can sit outside and for how long, where you can park in your own yard, and screening for dumpsters. The council discusses the package August 10, with an adoption vote planned for August 24. One change since the first draft: the trash-can size cap that, read literally, ruled out the carts residents actually roll to the curb is gone. Here is what would change, and how to weigh in before it's final.
Continue reading →August 6, 2026
After a 4-3 split in July, the plan to turn a long-idle Route 23 factory into five contractor spaces is back before the county with a lighter zoning request. The new hearing is August 13.
Continue reading →July 30, 2026
The city has paid at least the state minimum every year since the 2018-19 budget. The fund is still barely half full, the bill keeps climbing, and this spring the city dropped a $150,000 catch-up pledge.
Continue reading →July 23, 2026
The county board declined to ask voters the binding home rule question and sent two advisory questions to the November 3 ballot instead. Here is what happened, and how every member voted.
Continue reading →July 22, 2026
We compared Marengo's 2025 water-quality report against ten neighboring towns, using the annual report card every Illinois municipal water system must publish. The complaints about taste and staining check out: Marengo had the group's only manganese violation, and by far its highest levels. Safety is a separate question, and the numbers answer it differently: Marengo's lead and radium results were the cleanest of the eleven towns, and its copper was among the lowest. Here is the full side-by-side.
Continue reading →July 18, 2026
Since last summer, a code citation in Marengo can be decided at city hall instead of the county courthouse. How the city's hearing program works, what it can and cannot do, and what to know if a ticket lands in your mailbox.
Continue reading →July 17, 2026
An advisory home rule question is headed to the November ballot. Here is what home rule is, what it is not, and what it would mean at a Marengo address.
Continue reading →July 10, 2026
Marengo's annual water-quality report for 2025 is out. Most of what the city is required to test for came in under the legal limits; the one violation was manganese, which went over the state's limit late in the year. Here's the plain-English version of what the report says, and how to read it yourself.
Continue reading →July 8, 2026
Marengo overhauled its water and sewer rates in the spring. We put the new numbers next to ten neighboring towns and built a calculator so you can check your own bill.
Continue reading →July 1, 2026
Marengo's council agrees with itself most of the time. But on the rare nights it splits, who is missing from the room decides the outcome. A review of every council vote since 2009 shows how an empty seat has quietly moved the property tax levy, the garbage contract, and the ties only the mayor could settle.
Continue reading →June 18, 2026
Marengo cut the ribbon on its new $7.55 million water filtration plant on Greenlee Street on June 15. The city says the facility, now fully operational, removes iron, manganese, and radium from the municipal supply and, paired with a new 1,020-foot well, adds capacity for the town's growth. City Hall says the project will not raise residents' water rates.
Continue reading →June 13, 2026
The City of Marengo is accepting applications for a new Director of Public Works, a full-time, salaried position overseeing one of the city's largest departments.
Continue reading →June 13, 2026
The empty fields by the Route 23 interchange have frustrated Marengo for years. The exit opened in 2019, and the businesses everyone expected never showed. A new state grant is, in theory, what changes that.
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