Wheaton close to choosing Hubble consultant
Wheaton city leaders will choose a consulting firm to help them plan for the redevelopment of Hubble Middle School by the end of August.
Three of the city's councilmen, Tom Mouhelis, Howard Levine and Phil Suess, volunteered Monday to work on a joint committee with the Wheaton Park District and Wheaton Warrenville Unit District 200 to review a list of six firms interested in helping prepare a redevelopment plan for the site and in finding developers for the project.
"To me, the idea of including the other elected bodies in this process is paramount," Mayor Michael Gresk said.
Wheaton has $175,000 budgeted this year for the firm that will ultimately be chosen to do the work, City Manager Don Rose said.
Once chosen, the firm could take as long as two years to create the redevelopment plan for the Hubble site and have interested developers lined up for the work.
"Certainly at the staff level we're interested in getting the process going," Rose told the city council on Monday.
Wheaton officials received proposals from 22 consulting firms interested in working on the Hubble project. Rose said the six selected for further consideration had the most experience in dealing with a plan of this scope.
The most recent appraisal of the 22-acre Hubble Middle School site at Roosevelt Road and Main Street valued it at $22 million.
The property won't be available for redevelopment until August 2009. That's when the new Hubble Middle School in Warrenville is set to be complete.
Redevelopment of the Hubble site will be the first major test of the city's newly-adopted guidelines for tax increment financing districts.
The guidelines denote the factors the city council wants to see before providing tax-backed financing of a project.
The guidelines say TIF assistance will only be available to projects that wouldn't occur without the city's help. Financing won't be provided just to beef up a developer's profit margin. Also, city financing won't exceed 10 percent of the property value.
The city's policy is not a law. The council may choose to apply or ignore the guidelines as it sees fit.