Streamwood behavioral center seeks expansion

Streamwood village trustees Thursday heard a proposal from the Streamwood Behavioral Health Center to increase the size of its main building by nearly 50 percent.

The plan would add a two-story, 30,000-square-foot addition to the four-story, 66,000-square-foot building that opened at 1400 E. Irving Park Road in 1991.

In 2002, the center opened a smaller, 33,000-square-foot building closer to Irving Park Road on the campus, but that building will be unaffected by the proposed project.

Cindy Meyer, CEO of the center, said the addition would create bed space to serve up to 42 more patients.

The precise types of behavioral health care that would be provided in the addition haven't been finalized, but may be different from the kinds of specialized care already provided by the center, Meyer said.

The center has and will continue to serve children and adolescents between the ages of 3 and 17 years old. The types of service provided include support groups, counseling, inpatient care, intensive outpatient programs and psychiatric evaluations.

Though trustees won't cast their votes on the project until April 3, center officials are already preparing for construction work to begin immediately afterward, in hopes of completing it in January or February of 2009.

Meyer told trustees that while parking at the facility has been known to reach and exceed capacity in the past, part of the upcoming project will be to add more parking to solve that problem.

Though some existing parking will be lost due to the southward direction of the expansion, the overall parking on the campus will increase, village staff confirmed.

Other early concerns about the project, such as the original version's failure to sufficiently increase the size of the trash enclosure, were rectified by staff before the proposal went before trustees.

The project will now approximately double the size of the center's trash enclosure.

The possibility of a similarly-sized addition was allowed for as far back as the center's original proposal back in 1988. But the revised version presented Thursday was looked upon more favorably by village officials for being only two stories instead of matching the original building's four stories.