Hoffman Estates approves wholesale auto auction site
A 65-acre wholesale auto auction facility is expected to open just west of Hoffman Estates' Prairie Stone Business Park in about a year, after the village board's unanimous approval of the proposal Monday night.
The state-of-the-art facility of Carmel, Indiana-based Adesa Inc. will employ about 150 full-time and 100 part-time workers and may eventually sell as many as 75,000 vehicles a year.
The site at the northwest corner of Beverly Road and Prairie Stone Parkway also could expand to 134 acres if two later phases are pursued.
Brett Roland, Adesa's senior vice president of real estate, said the auction house is specifically for auto dealers to exchange product, not for purchases by the general public.
Though vehicles are expected to arrive and depart every day, the on-site auctions will be held only once a week.
Roland stressed that vehicles coming to the site will be in good, serviceable condition, and the facility will in no sense be a junk yard.
Hoffman Estates Mayor Bill McLeod, Village Trustee Karen Mills and Village Manager Jim Norris recently visited an existing Adesa facility in Plainfield, Indiana, near Indianapolis, and found it to be as well maintained as the company claimed.
"I was pretty impressed," McLeod said.
And the new facility in Hoffman Estates will be built to even higher standards, village officials said.
Neighboring Barrington-area communities, like Barrington Hills and South Barrington, are particularly sensitive to the environmental impacts of such developments because their residents use private wells for their water.
"We certainly don't want to see anything visually or environmentally with a negative impact," Barrington Hills Village President Martin McLaughlin said.
But both he and South Barrington Village President Paula McCombie said there doesn't appear to be specific reason for concern about this development, unlike the controversial Insurance Auto Auctions site in nearby East Dundee, where damaged vehicles are to be housed.
Though the Hoffman Estates facility is now approved, McCombie noted that the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency can intervene in the future if any new concern comes to light.
While wholesale transactions do not generate sales taxes, Hoffman Estates has imposed a $7 vehicle transfer tax for each sale. The village will rebate $2 per vehicle back to Adesa to help it pay for the $7,500 per acre cost of connecting to village sewers.
While only about 15,000 transactions per year are expected during the facility's first two years of operation, Roland said the higher goal of 75,000 could be reached sometime after that.