Vernon Hills police station $3.7M renovation set to begin
After extensive study and review, a major renovation of the Vernon Hills police station is set to begin.
Construction crews next week are expected to begin staging materials in advance of a remake of the wedge-shaped headquarters built in 1992 at 754 Lakeview Parkway.
Despite coming in over budget, village officials recently approved a bid package that put the revised project cost at a not-to-exceed figure of about $3.69 million, which includes a $158,000 contingency for unforeseen expenses. The project is overseen by MTI Construction Services LLC of Elgin.
"We gave them the go-ahead to spend the additional dollars so we could do the full renovation," Trustee Jim Schultz said. Trustees were presented with options to reduce the cost but decided none of the suggestions were aspects the board wanted to do without, Schultz added.
The bid package covered about two dozen contractors from excavation, to masonry, structural steel, roofing, lockers, plumbing and other services.
About $164,000 of the contract will be used to create locker facilities and other work at the neighboring 740 Lakeview Parkway, which was purchased by the village in 2006 for telecommunications operations.
The main building contains the administrative offices, locker rooms, a specialty area with work stations for officers and command staff, an investigations division, evidence storage, prisoner handling and jail, gun range and a lunchroom. A dispatch center that had been housed there moved in 2007.
The work is intended to transform what has been described as an outdated and underused building. Features such as a two-story lobby area and a courtyard in the middle of the building will be repurposed for a better use of space and efficiency.
Increasing facilities for female officers, for example, is considered a priority as the number of female employees was not anticipated when the facility was built, according to police officials. Other improvements include expanding the investigations division with two interview rooms, new evidence processing, storage, roll call and report writing areas.
How best to utilize the two police buildings has been a consideration for nearly 10 years. Planning began in earnest about a year ago when Hezner Corporation of Libertyville was hired for a not-to-exceed cost of $213,000, which is not part of the renovation budget. MTI was hired this past December as the construction manager and those fees are included in the project cost.
"It's not your typical design/build model where you hire someone to design and build it," Building Commissioner Mike Atkinson said. In this method, MTI assumes all the risk and guarantees the price, he said.
"The village is far more protected by this model," Atkinson said.
Construction is expected to take about six months.