Five-year deal for Northwestern Medicine and Kane County

The new cross-country track coming to the former Settler's Hill landfill in Geneva will likely be known as the Northwestern Medicine Cross-Country Course. The pending deal marks a financial win for the Kane County Forest Preserve District that comes even before breaking ground on the facility.

Commissioners on the district's finance committee took a preliminary unanimous vote to approve the naming rights deal this week. The full commission must take a final vote Feb. 13. Assuming final approval, the course will immediately take on the new moniker. Actual construction on the course won't begin until this spring and the course opens in 2019.

The naming rights deal is a five-year contract. Northwestern Medicine will pay the district $25,000 a year for each of the final three years of the deal. At the end of the five years, the two parties will renegotiate terms. The money will help fund maintenance costs of the course.

The deal means Northwestern Medicine will remain a prominent feature throughout the entire Fabyan Parkway campus owned by the district. Northwestern Medicine already owns the naming rights to the stadium where the Kane County Cougars play. District commissioners said Northwestern Medicine will also have a full contingent of advertising and banners to pair with the actual signs containing the name of the field.

Commissioner John Hoscheit said all signs are positive in the run-up to the spring construction of the course. The district made two other major moves to secure the financial viability of the course in the past year. The first involved forming an agreement with an all-volunteer group to manage the event planning and operation of the course. The second move shrank construction costs by creating a clean fill operation at the former landfill. Instead of buying the soil needed to form the course, the clean fill operation has local contractors paying the district to drop uncontaminated construction project refuse and dirt at the landfill. That move transformed a cost into a financial gain.

"We promised Geneva we'd have a positive venue there," Hoscheit said. "We fought and debated. Now we are going forward with the course, and it's an even better win than we expected from the initial estimates."

The construction contract for the course will total $2.98 million or about $700,000 less than expected.