Legal Question in Real Estate Law in Illinois

Based on your zip you're in or near Dunlap, IL, NW of Peoria, and the aerial map shows open streams in your area. There are several considerations here, including political ones you may not be aware of. You may be able to do some legwork but at some point if it's that important to you, you may need a real estate attorney with some wills and trusts experience to help with the bigger picture since there may be important information that you don't have and may not know is needed, and may not get the municipality to help you with based on their push-back to you to date. Here are some things to consider:

-- The 1.5 mile info is potentially important but you don't say whether you're in the municipality or in an unincorporated area of the county -- annexation and county zoning/subdivision ordinances may apply although it may have to do with the way the land is zoned and how you can use agricultural land (ie. how many residential structures, etc....). Or the municipality may be required to put the line in if there is a critical mass threshold number of users met and they don't want to yet because they don't have the money and/or they don't think they'd be able to get a special assessment passed for the line extension.

-- Governments (especially local governments) do tend to over-react. As an example, in my own community, building permit ordinances were changed a few years ago (of course before I needed something) to require tearing down your old garage before you are allowed to build your new one, even if you wanted to put the new one in a different place and had a lot of stuff stored in your old one that could be ruined because you had no place of shelter to store it during the tear-down/new construction. Why? Because some jerk elsewhere in town refused to take down the old one after building the new one and the community had to spend the money to take that owner to court to get a tear-down order -- so no exceptions and one bad egg spoiled it for the rest of us. So you might want to ask why there is a concern -- did someone spoil it for the rest of you? The following question may be helpful: so if you just wanted to build an additional residence for your mom without a "split" would you be able to do so and add a septic system for that structure assuming you have enough land and "FAR" (ie. just so many square feet of structure is allowed per square feet of land - called a "bulk ordinance")? If the answer to that question is you could, a real estate attorney may be able to help you still gift the "house" without having to create a land "split" if that was your ultimate goal and if that kind of gift would work for you. And if you still wouldn't be allowed, why not.

-- there may be Illinois EPA considerations you're not aware of. You can ask locally at the municipality or county if there's an issue and may have to talk to the EPA. Where there is "lack of capacity" or ground water acquifer issues (the "streams" issue and how water flows toward them) there may be restrictions on how many septic systems are allowed within certain areas, and the EPA can veto building permits if that limit/restriction is reached.

-- a knowledgeable real estate attorney may be able to help out -- depending on why you want to go the "deed" route (apparently), you may instead be able to gift a partial interest in the total land to your mom if putting up a house for her is not the goal but creating some value is. Why you would do this is something the attorney will want to know, because usually it's the other way around: parents usually want to put assets in their children's names if possible to avoid estate and related taxes. And as a gift depending on the value of the land there may be a federal gift tax due that someone may have to pay -- a wills and trusts attorney can help you figure out what if any tax liability there may be. Again it's what you are trying to accomplish; there may be another way without having to fight the county or municipality over recording a deed.

-- subdividing doesn't always mean just creating what you may think of as multi-lot subdivisions. It has a lot (no pun intended) to do with the minimum lot size for construction of a single family home -- if you're in a 5-acre per home zoning district, maybe they'd be ok with a 4.9 acre "split" since you wouldn't be able to build on it anyhow and therefore their concern about sneaking a septic system in should go away. Or their concern may be that you already have too many residential structures with separate septic systems on your 19 acres that if you spun off 5 acres then the existing ones would be non-conforming? Is there something about the 5-acres that's important to you and your mom -- ?

Hope this points you in a good direction. Good luck.