‘This isn’t the end’: Itasca scraps Fourth of July fireworks in 2025

The small town of Itasca has prided itself on one of the largest Fourth of July fireworks shows in the region.

This summer’s festivities, however, won’t have quite the same spark.

The village has pulled the plug on the 2025 fireworks spectacle at the Hamilton Lakes Business Park, with officials highlighting a number of challenges posed by crowds, traffic congestion and loss of available land. But key to the decision are looming lane closures along a major thoroughfare.

“We are just as disappointed as everybody else that it can't happen this year, but at the end of the day, making sure that we can hold a safe event and a fun event, that people aren't frustrated, really comes first,” Village Administrator Carie Anne Ergo said Friday.

The celebration on the large grassy campus featured live bands, food trucks and picnicking. The show itself was synchronized to music. Hotels in the area — spectators could stay at the Westin, walk over to the grounds and avoid traffic — generally were booked solid the weekend of the event.

“Everybody understands that the fireworks are important to our residents, and so the goal is to try to find a way to bring them back in 2026 in a way that's meaningful for the town,” Ergo said. “It might not be the same as it was in the past.”

Challenges

In recent years, crowds have grown significantly.

Some residents expressed “concerns about the event and the commotion that was caused, the parking problems, the driving problems, the picnicking on people's private property, urination on private property,” Trustee Patrick Powers said.

“It really got out of hand,” he said.

Conservative estimates pegged last year’s crowds at between 15,000 to 18,000 people with more than 5,200 cars parked, Ergo wrote in a six-page board memo outlining the challenges.

“Hamilton had never parked that many cars previously for any event,” she said in an interview.

Elk Grove Village and Illinois State Police representatives also raised concerns about crowd and traffic control, including drivers abandoning vehicles on roads, stopping vehicles on roads, trespassing, and blocking access drives.

“Especially dangerous were the many cars that attempted to park on I-390 and watch the event,” Ergo wrote in the memo.

Ergo also pointed to the loss of land within and around the Hamilton Lakes Business Park since 2017. Developments include more than 50 acres at Devon Avenue and Rohlwing Road, the American Academy of Pediatrics facility and the NTT data center campus.

“There was one time that Hamilton was a big open green space, and that's not the case anymore,” she said.

Trying to make it work

The 2025 proposed budget prepared by Hamilton Partners with input from the village anticipated a roughly $130,000 increase over last year. The village’s contribution to the event would total $274,647 — an increase of almost $83,500 over the previous year.

Organizers suggested additional message boards, traffic control fencing and barricades, having a band play a final 30-45 minute set to encourage some visitors to delay leaving, and lowering further the shell size of the fireworks, among other changes.

“We put a lot into actually making this year happen. We've been working on it for quite some time, and there are a lot of things that were considered,” Ergo said.

But complicating matters further, NTT and the Itasca Fire Department have major construction projects along Arlington Heights Road that are expected to impact the adjacent roadway. There’s utility work that needs to be done in the right-of-way and under the roadway, Ego said. There’s no clear schedule on when it will be completed.

Because ComEd does not guarantee construction timelines, Ergo wrote in the memo, it is impossible to schedule this work around the celebration without lengthening the construction schedule.

“Yes, there were a lot of issues in 2024, but staff and Hamilton had spent a lot of time on a very solid plan to mitigate those issues,” Ergo said. The “potential lane closures on Arlington Heights is just something that we did not think that it would be safe to move forward, given what we experienced last year, if there wasn't full circulation around the site.”

Officials plan to reevaluate the event by the end of the year.

“This isn't the end,” Ergo said. “We're taking a pause, and then we're going to take a look again in 2026.”