No bids for Geneva school land, so board decides to use a broker

Nobody has placed a bid to buy the 28 acres at Keslinger and Brundige roads the Geneva school district is selling, so the district is going to use a real estate broker to try to get rid of it.

For now, the minimum price will be the same as the minimum price the district set for bids: $2.2 million. That’s required by state law, said Donna Oberg, the district’s assistant superintendent for business services, before the school board voted on the matter Monday.

The broker can list the property for 120 days, and can make a commission of no more than 7 percent, Oberg said.

If a buyer were to offer less than $2.2 million within those 120 days, and the district was inclined to take the offer, it would have to again offer the property through a public bidding process, she said.

The district bought the land for $1.6 million in 2006, and had to contribute $600,000 for road improvements and a Brundige Road bridge replacement done by Kane County. It had intended to build a bus storage facility on the site, centralize its maintenance equipment, and use part of it for practice fields for athletics. The district lost a practice site when it built Williamsburg Elementary School.

District officials discovered, however, that required detention ponds would have taken up at least 30 percent of the site. And critics disputed whether the district really needed a bus storage site, given it already had a bus maintenance facility that could store 43 buses inside and seven outside. Leftover buses are parked overnight at the middle schools.