Car dealers shouldn’t
use EDC for sign variance

First of all, why do the car dealers get to use the Downers Grove Economic Development Corp. to do their petitioning for them? As a tax exempt, but partially tax funded (hotel/motel sales tax) 501 entity, should the EDC be the ones spending their time petitioning for variances for private entities?

Wouldn’t I, as a small private contractor and developer, have to spend my own time or money on a lawyer to petition for such a major variance when you consider how many properties this variance will actually affect along Ogden Avenue? Is that fair to all the other businesses along Ogden that would like to have their signs bigger, too? Is it because the car dealers, which further greatly congest Ogden Avenue as it is, pay so much in taxes to the village each year and have  representatives on the board that they get preferential variances?

It’s pretty hard to mistake a car dealership when you’re driving by one. The signs on their buildings say enough.

Tim Zievers, Downers Grove

Spend efforts telling others
not to speed on roadways

No amount of improvement to the Maple Avenue crossing will be sufficient to prevent irresponsible drivers who choose to drive 70 to 100 mph on a residential street from killing themselves and/or innocent drivers and pedestrians.

Tim apparently had no reservation against speeding — if he hadn’t crashed at this site, he likely would have done it somewhere else. His mother’s crusade to alter the Maple Avenue roadway would have been better served speaking to his classmates about the risks of driving in a manner that risks their own life as well as others.

Leave Maple Avenue the way it is, and use the money elsewhere to improve our roads!

Frederick J. Schuster, Downers Grove