Shooting range dropped from Glen Ellyn police station plans

Despite pushback from department heads, Glen Ellyn village trustees will scrap a shooting range from plans for a new police station as they try to hit a new budget target.

The board now aims to spend an estimated $13.51 million on the construction of the station along Park Boulevard and about $617,000 on the purchase and demolition of homes to may way for the two-story building. That's roughly $2 million more than what they originally earmarked for the work.

After architects and general contractors began crunching numbers late this summer - specific to the site, more than half of which lies in a flood plain, officials said - police and other village leaders appealed for more money.

Village President Alex Demos and Trustee Pete Ladesic favored building a fully-equipped shooting range, saying it would offer officers consistent and regular training. But the $1.6 million range failed to get enough support among other board members.

"I would be lying if I didn't say I was disappointed that we're not building the whole thing," police Chief Phil Norton said.

The board informally decided to shoot for the $13.5 million, the cheaper of two alternatives it focused on Monday night. Village Attorney Greg Mathews said he will draft a resolution for a board vote next Monday that will include terms for incentives if the village's design-build team stays on budget.

Representatives from Leopardo, the village's construction firm, cautioned they have two more rounds of budgeting ahead, but the $13.5 million plan calls for just one building instead of constructing a second, smaller building to house the range.

While he supported that concept, Trustee Tim Elliott said he couldn't get behind the dollar amount.

"I still feel like we've never seen what the building looks like at or around $11.5 million that frankly you were all charged with getting," Elliott said. "I haven't seen what we have to give up to get to that point and incrementally what we would be adding to get to the $13.5 million, and without that analysis, I just can't get comfortable with the $13.5 million."

This summer, the board authorized the village to issue $13.43 million in bonds, about $1.5 million of which will finance a separate project to alleviate flooding when Lake Ellyn overflows. The rest of the loan was set aside for the construction of the station.

Now, the village plans to pay for the additional increase in the budget with $1.16 million seized during arrests on drug charges - about half of that is in the bank, and officials hope to receive the rest over several years - and $350,000 from the capital and water and sewer funds.

Former Trustee Diane McGinley sought to explain how the previous board arrived at the $12 million benchmark.

"I know there's been a lot of statements made about $12 million kind of formulated out of the air. And it was. It was my idea," McGinley told the board. " ... One of the reasons why we did that was because all of the designs that came back to us were extremely high. Some of the designs that we were looking at were over $26 million and the board, at that time, we all sat back and said, 'You know, we're not comfortable spending this money.'"

Most on the board rejected an alternative that would have cost $14.54 million to build the station and the "shell" of an auxiliary structure that would have eventually held the shooting range. Another key difference to that plan called for using $990,000 from operating fund reserves. Village Manager Mark Franz said, conservatively, the so-called drug forfeiture funds could replenish reserves over a decade.

But the trustees who opposed that alternative said dipping into reserves could have constrained other possible projects. The board is commissioning an engineering study into a pedestrian bridge over the Metra tracks downtown and plans to evaluate the volunteer fire department's two stations in January.

Several trustees also said they were more intrigued by College of DuPage's new shooting range on the Glen Ellyn campus, about a mile and a half away from where police wanted the range next to the new station.

"I'm just not comfortable taking a million dollars out of the reserve fund for the range," Trustee Timothy O'Shea said. "I just don't see immediate payback with all the other potential capital expenditures we have going on in the village and the unknowns with the state budget."

Trustee Mark Senak called COD's range a "state-of-the art" facility.

Police have questioned the long-term availability of a range on a college campus, but Deanne Mazzochi, vice chairwoman of the COD board of trustees, assured village trustees that college leaders are committed to its facility.

Still, Norton said a village range would give police more flexibility to schedule training. Officers now train monthly at Wheaton police's range.

"It's not a question of the beauty of the COD facility or how great a facility it is. No matter how nice it is, it does not present the same training opportunities as if we had our own," Norton said. "Wheaton, the range which we use now, provides the same training opportunities to us that COD really does. They have some bells and whistles there, but we will be able to conduct the same type of training for much bigger bang for our buck at the Wheaton facility."

Construction on the police station could begin in mid-June, and the project could be completed in summer 2017. Then police would move out of what they say is a cramped space on the first floor of the Civic Center downtown.