Central DuPage Hospital plans parking deck

Central DuPage Hospital officials have unveiled plans to build a new $7.4 million parking deck at the hospital's Winfield campus.

The project is part of a planned multimillion-dollar expansion at Central DuPage's sprawling campus that includes a new hospital wing with 202 private rooms and a proton cancer therapy center, both of which depend on state approval.

The five-story, $235 million patient wing, in particular, would be built on parts of the hospital's parking lot. Central DuPage plans to offset the lost spaces by building the two-story deck.

The roughly 150-yard-long structure would be located along the eastern edge of Winfield Road, just north of Highlake Road.

The deck would accommodate 370 parking spaces. At that size, the cost of the deck would be roughly $18,000 per parking spot.

"We tried our darndest not to make it look like a parking deck," Larry Bell, the hospital's director of construction, said during a Thursday night village board meeting.

Earlier this week, Central DuPage officials pulled a plan to temporarily move the hospital's helicopter pad to the west side of Winfield Road to make room for the 202-room patient wing.

The helicopter site would have been located on the property of the former Frank's Family Foods grocery store, which the hospital bought in January 2002.

The former grocery store property also is part of a roughly 19-acre area village officials are eyeing as a potential redevelopment site for its tiny downtown.

Instead, the hospital will ask the village for permission to build a temporary helicopter site on its campus.