Village Nixes Tattoo and Body Art Business Along Sauk Trail

The South Chicago Heights Village Board of Trustees denied a business license   to two tattoo and body art professionals last week. The two had hoped to settle in an area which may one day be home to a new Metra station.

Shawn Ward and Denise Rhoads, of Hard Luck Tattoos, said they were disappointed by the decision, adding that the fact that the site, 41 W. Sauk Trail, is in “a nice area” is what drew them to it in the first place.

 “We run a high-quality establishment,” said Ward, who works with Rhoads at their current shop in Rockford. “When people look at us they tend to assume things, but we’re a family business. There’s myself and my husband, my best friend and their husband.”

Rhoads also said at the meeting that she and Ward would bring a higher-quality professional service to South Chicago Heights and surrounding communities.

“We’ve had to fix a lot of tattoos," she said, explaining that they've had to alter mistakes made at other parlors in the area.

A business license for a computer store, Wisdom Computers, had been approved just before theirs was denied, and Ward said she was sure that the nature of what they do was a factor. Mayor David L. Owen acknowledged this, but said the location itself was the most important factor.

“(This site) is in a TIF district and it’s also in the area where the train station is going to be in five years,” he said. “This is not the type of business we want in this area.”

TIF is an acronym for tax increment financing. When a part of town is designated a TIF district, the municipality is able to finance improvement based on future gains in taxes. The improvements will theoretically create conditions in which those taxes will go up, because once an improvement is completed, the surrounding area should rise in value.

The village also has a plan in place that anticipates the building of a new Metra station. Owen said at an earlier meeting that funding for the station was passed by the legislature last year.

Ward said she and Rhoads were aware of Sauk Trail’s TIF district status and of the Station Area Plan. But South Chicago Heights is coping with a lot of empty storefronts, along Sauk Trail and elsewhere, and she and Rhoads said they would have been willing to work out an agreement whereby they would leave after a given number of years, once the station was underway.

They are currently looking at sites elsewhere in the south suburbs and in Indiana, Ward said.

“I don’t want to have to leave [Illinois],” said Ward, who is a Chicago Heights native. “I want to keep our money in our own state.”