THE HIGHWAY LOBBY TELLS US THE ROADS PAY FOR THEMSELVES. Lake County public officials beg to differ.

Lake County officials turned out en masse today to push hard for a 40-year-old plan to extend Illinois Highway 53 north from Lake Cook Road through the middle of the county.

Complaining of "paralyzing" congestion and impatient with decades of state inaction, dozens of local leaders pleaded with Illinois Tollway directors to adopt the Illinois 53 extension.

They also made a strong pitch for a companion project, the Illinois Highway 120 corridor, which would cut east-west across the county.

"The state is broke, we all know that," said State Rep. Sid Mathias, (R-Buffalo Grove). "We don't have the money. The only way ... to build Highway 120 or 53 is through the toll highway system."

The cost of building both the Illinois 53 extension and the Illinois 120 corridor would be more than $2.2 billion, said Rocco Zucchero, the tollway's deputy chief of engineering.

Lake County's growth has far outstripped its roadway system, which lacks cross-county thoroughfares, officials said. But opponents urged caution, saying building more highways wasn't the only answer to the congestion problem.

It's furthermore not a given that a tollway pays for itself.

[Tollway] Chairwoman [c.q.] Paula Wolfe said the agency was unsure when, if ever, it would expand the current 286-mile tollway system.

Wolfe and other directors stress that any new tollway would have to pay for itself, create jobs and spur the economy while treading lightly on the environment.

The Illinois 53/120 project is competing with other proposals, and Lake County must make its case that it should get top priority, said state Sen. Michael Bond (D-Grayslake).

The desire to extend Illinois 53 has been known since the early 1960s, and the project has been the subject of several studies. The General Assembly initially gave the tollway authorization to build the extension in 1993, but the project ran into considerable local opposition.

Roads are nice to have, but when they take your house, or they run it close to your house, or they run it through your fishing grounds, suddenly they're not so nice.

At one time, the plan was for the Tollway Authority to disband when the revenue bonds for the original toll roads were paid off. I think those bonds were paid off sometime in the late 1980s. Go figure.