In one suburb, weeds grow chest-high on long-dormant youth baseball diamonds. And the village's water is drawn from wells so laced with a toxic chemical that the state had to drag in a new filtration system.

They are the kinds of problems that could prompt a village to hike taxes, and Sauk Village did just that in recent years, raising them even higher than the tax-capped town is usually allowed.

But the extra cash hasn't gone to the ballfields or to the water system.

Instead, the money is going to pay off a gleaming Village Hall — for which officials borrowed big to build, without seeking voter approval.

"I don't think it was right," said longtime resident Edward Sullivan. "If anything has to do with my money, my taxes, my home — yes, I should have a right to vote on whether I want it or not."

Sauk Village represents yet another cautionary tale of how Illinois' loose borrowing rules can sting taxpayers and leave a town mired in debt — even in places where residents might have expected traditional safeguards to protect them.

Previous Tribune investigations have exposed how Illinois has no borrowing limits for many mostly bigger cities and villages, and how that has fostered risky gambles that have sent taxes skyrocketing.

But for many small towns such as Sauk Village, the oversight is supposed to be tighter. Officials are limited in how much they can raise property taxes and typically need voter approval for big borrowing.

Yet, the latest Tribune investigation found these suburbs turning to another device — called alternate-revenue bonds — to let them borrow big. This device comes from a little-known chapter of Illinois law that lets towns borrow in a way that sidesteps voters and property tax caps.

The catch for towns: They must be able to foresee paying off the loans without raising property taxes.

The catch for residents: If towns' projections are wrong, taxes are automatically hiked to make the loan payments.

While many towns' projections do work out, the Tribune found cases where bets backfired on taxpayers. In essence — in communities where taxpayers should have been most protected from tax increases, they instead awoke to hikes they never approved, ones that even exceed what the law normally allows.

That's how taxpayers in upscale Lakewood in McHenry County ended up paying for a golf course they were told wouldn't cost them a dime.

And that's how taxpayers in Franklin Park have paid about 30 percent more in municipal property taxes than what tax caps would allow.

And it's how the average homeowner in struggling Sauk Village was billed an extra $136 last year.

Guessing wrong

Supporters offered only rosy projections when they sold the provision in the law 25 years ago.

Back then, many bigger cities and villages were enjoying the "home-rule" powers granted in the 1970 rewrite of the state constitution. The new power — itself controversial — let these bigger communities borrow and raise property taxes without going to voters for approval. Such power led to lower interest rates because lenders were assured that tax hikes, if needed, would let them recoup their money.

Watching from the sidelines were municipalities that didn't have home-rule power. Unless they wanted to go to voters, these towns had to pay more to borrow, sometimes for the same kind of project.

Instead of continuing to push these towns to go to voters, the General Assembly decided to allow them to use an "alternate revenue" bond without voter approval.

Such bonds make two promises. They promise residents that the payments likely won't end up on the property tax rolls, with the money instead coming from another source, such as utility or sales taxes. The bonds also promise lenders that if the town's initial plan falls apart, property taxes will go up to make payments.

A classic example offered by supporters was for fixing up a town's water system. A town could qualify for the special loan, and lower interest rates, by planning to use higher water fees to pay back the loan.

But in northwest suburban Lakewood, the town decided to get the special loan in 1991 to buy a golf course.

At the time, officials from the small suburb said a sports management firm projected that the course would pay for itself. Some residents remained skeptical, including Roger Reid, who recalls going with a small group to the Village Board meeting to ask for assurance that taxes would not go up because of the deal.

"We were assured — up and down and sideways — that, 'This is not going to go on your tax bill,'" Reid recalled.

Then Lakewood residents were hit with the catch in the law: If projections are off, taxes can go up.

Turns out, the town's projections were so far off that the golf course couldn't even pay a penny toward its loan payment for six years. And, by the time the bond was paid off two years ago, records show, 53 percent of it was paid off through higher taxes, not the projected golf-course profit.

Voters sidestepped

On the southern edge of the metro area, Sauk Village residents never got a direct say on whether to take out millions of dollars to build the new Village Hall — but they are paying for it anyway.

If local officials had gone the traditional route, Sauk Village residents would have faced a question on the ballot asking if they wanted to borrow the money, knowing their taxes could rise to pay it back.

But officials chose to take out an alternate-revenue bond, in part, to avoid going to voters.

"Our thought was that if we threw that back out to the residents, they may not be interested in that," then-Mayor Roger Peckham recently told the Tribune.

Supporters of such borrowing often point out that residents could have forced a referendum if they had secured signatures from roughly one of every 13 registered voters in town — a so-called backdoor referendum.

But critics complain such referendums are difficult to make happen because of the effort involved in persuading scores of neighbors to sign petitions. In Sauk Village, no petition surfaced.

By then, Sauk Village had become a king of alternate-revenue loans, with the little suburb for years taking out far more than most other towns to spur industrial development. None of those loans has needed taxpayer bailouts, nor are they projected to, even with the bad economy.

That can't be said about the Village Hall deal.

Just before the recession struck, officials bet that development would continue and earmarked money from that future development to make payments on the hall. Instead, the planned development sputtered, leaving the town short, spilling the payments onto the property tax bills.