Workshop coming on 5th Avenue plans in Naperville
A city council workshop will be the next step in a long-running process that could transform the land around the Naperville Metra station.
But consensus has yet to form around the idea of revamping the 5th Avenue area of 13 city-owned acres consisting of a collection of parking lots, a water tower, an office building and the DuPage Children's Museum.
Council members who rejected a baseline design by developer Ryan Companies last month voted early Wednesday morning to take up the matter again in a workshop likely to be scheduled for January or later.
The baseline design included a six-story parking deck near the children's museum, three five-story apartment buildings, a five-story office building, a two-story flexible-space building and a cluster of row houses, along with a public plaza, stormwater storage vaults and a new pedestrian tunnel under the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad tracks.
Council members voted 6-3 on Oct. 1 not to move forward with traffic studies and financial considerations using that design as a framework.
Without that baseline in play, the future workshop is intended to include discussion of council members' goals for the 5th Avenue area and specific changes that should be made to previous concepts, as well as consideration of resident input.
Naperville has been working toward reviving the 5th Avenue corridor for at least a decade, since a study of the area was released in late 2009. The process ramped up in February 2017 when the city sought qualifications from developers and again in October 2017 when Ryan Companies was chosen to lead a public engagement process and work toward a design.