Glen Ellyn expects to fix soil issues before building new police station
Plans for a new Glen Ellyn police station near Panfish Park have run into some obstacles with the site, where sections of the soil apparently aren't stable enough for construction.
Architects already have positioned the proposed station on the highest — and driest — edge of the four-acre property, more than half of which lies in a floodplain along Park Boulevard.
The original budget for the project set aside $100,000 in contingency funds to address soil conditions. But after testing samples, engineers determined the actual costs likely will be more than double that amount, officials say.
That prompted Trustee John Kenwood to raise questions about whether the village fully vetted the land before buying several properties to make way for the two-story station.
The issue stems from “pretty large pockets” of the ground containing peat, Village Manager Mark Franz said.
“It's not good for construction. It doesn't hold well,” he said. “So we've got to remove all the peat and bring in clay, which is more stable. And that's the majority of the costs that we're expecting to make on the soil.”
Several trustees and Village President Alex Demos support putting an additional $125,000 into an allowance that would only be spent on the soil work. But the village won't know for sure if it will have to spend the money until shovels hit the ground this summer.
“The village wasn't blind to the fact that we knew the site had some potential soil issues,” Franz told the board Monday. “Obviously, we didn't know the details of that. But the site met every other criteria we were looking for: good access, location, cost, availability, ability to enhance an asset we already own in the park.”
Kenwood agreed the site came with good and bad.
“I get there are pluses and minuses,” Kenwood said, “but sometimes when you have minuses, you do a little research.”
Demos said the village did its “due diligence.”
“That's why we know this now instead of four months from now when we're digging into the soil,” he said.
A village-hired team of architects and contractors say engineers have reviewed the plan to remove the peat and replace it with clay, the “most economical” way to stabilize the soil. Soil borings give a snapshot of the material below ground, and only until crews start digging into the entire site will the village know the full extent of the issue, members of the team say.
But Franz noted that three homes previously stood on the site for years. The village bought and demolished the structures to clear the way for the station.
Budget talks have been at the center of plans for the new station. Last 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.
But after architects began designing specifically to the site, police and village administrators said the project was underfunded at roughly $12 million. Then in December, the board set a new budget, aiming to spend an estimated $13.5 million on the construction.
Police and architects say they've now trimmed the footprint to 29,000 square feet to help meet the budget. Consultants, though, recommended a 44,300-square-foot station in a 2012 study.
Resident Cam Paige told the board she's worried about what has been eliminated from the project, including plans to install a reduced number of roof drains on the building.
“If you start doing all lower quality, what's this going to look like in 30 or 40 years?” she asked.
The new station will offer more space for evidence storage, better security and a roughly 50-seat community room. The project should take about a year, and then police would move out of a section of the first floor in the Civic Center downtown.