Lombard to spend surprise $1.3 million on Finley Road

For Lombard, 2011 is turning out a little better financially than village staff expected.

The village has about $1.3 million of “unanticipated revenue,” and that funding likely will allow a road construction project to get under way next year, Village Manager David Hulseberg said.

The village board agreed Thursday to put some of the extra money toward a design engineering contract for re-paving Finley Road between Wilson Avenue and Crescent Boulevard using a process called whitetopping. Getting the project designed soon will allow the village to start the road work next spring if economic conditions are right, Hulseberg said.

The design engineering is expected to cost about $200,000 and will be completed by Civiltech Engineering because the firm designed a previous whitetopping project on the north side of the village with good results, said Carl Goldsmith, director of public works. The exact cost of the contract will be brought before village board in September for consideration, he said.

Whitetopping involves paving a road with a thin layer of concrete instead of asphalt.

Lombard's use of whitetopping won the village recognition from a trade magazine, and Trustee Greg Gron said he's looking forward to seeing the same technique used on Finley Road. Finley's existing pavement base is in “poor condition,” according to the public works department, so it may need a thicker layer of concrete than was used in the earlier whitetopping project.

The entire project including design engineering and construction is estimated to cost $1.9 million — about a half million more than the unanticipated revenue the village brought in so far this year.

And where did the extra money come from?

“We had a balanced budget going into this (year),” Hulseberg said. “We had some great bids that we received for some projects and that created some savings.”

Finance Director Tim Sexton agreed savings are the main factor contributing to the positive balance, along with about $200,000 more in sales tax revenue than what was projected.