Carol Stream residents give thumbs down to new gas station, restaurant site
Noise-weary neighbors are railing against plans for a convenience store, gas pumps and restaurants rolled into one Carol Stream site that would draw an estimated 270 trucks a day.
Their complaints came Monday during a standing-room-only public hearing before the village's plan commission on what developers are calling a "fueling center" for both semi trailers and passenger cars at the southwest corner of Gary and North avenues. But the proposed Pilot Travel Center would have many of the amenities of a truck stop, including around-the-clock operations.
"Whether they call it a truck stop or a fueling center, we've got problems with it," said Martin Findling, who lives in Windsor Park, a retirement community that turned in a 19-page petition opposing the project to the village.
Bluestone Single Tenant Properties wants to bring the Pilot Travel Center to a property where an old bowling alley still stands after closing in 2011. The roughly $9 million project would construct a 9,000-square-foot building, six lanes where trucks would fuel up on diesel and more than 50 parking spaces for cars.
An acoustics engineer hired by developers also presented findings from a study done last Friday after rush hour, rescheduled after inclement weather the day before. That timing, though, prompted neighbors to deem the data on ambient noise "flawed" because they say it ignores the loudest hours.
The engineer, Thomas Thunder, who monitored noise levels on the site's southern side, recommended a solid wall - "the higher the better" - be built between the Holiday Inn and the Pilot to block noise.
"This is not a quiet area to begin with," Thunder said.
Plan Commissioner Dee Spink took that description a step further.
"The sound is unbelievable back there," Spink said of her neighborhood on Surrey Drive. "You go outside your house, and you feel like you've just got to do something to plug your ears up."
She and Chairman Angelo Christopher urged developers to do studies of existing noise around homes on Surrey - Spink said she can hear music from a Holiday Inn tent - and at Windsor Park.
Besides dropping plans for video gambling and laundry facilities, developers have made multiple revisions intended to chip away at noise, said Donald Bastian, the village's acting community development director. He cited, among other things, additional landscaping to buffer noise on the southern side and reducing the number of truck fueling lanes from seven to six.
Chicago-based Bluestone believes there's little retail interest in the property, given the industrial business in the area and the declining Brunswick Zone structure and parking lot.
Developers also maintain that they're not targeting interstate truckers, but the "day trippers," drivers who begin and end each day at home and are looking for restrooms and a bite to eat.
The 9,000-square-foot building would include the convenience store and three "fast causal" eateries: a Moe's Southwest Grill, Cinnabon bakery and PJ Fresh Marketplace. Sales from the three, the convenience store and gas would generate roughly $264,600 in estimated tax revenues to the village a year. One part of the site would be set aside for a future retailer fronting North Avenue.
The commission agreed to continue the public hearing on July 13 to allow attorneys for Holiday Inn to present their own expert testimony.