Naperville Target undergoing major renovation; superstore to debut in August

Over the next six months, a Target store in Naperville will undergo a major transformation.

After the city council this week approved a request to use the northern section of the parking lot as a construction staging area, the store along Route 59 will be renovated into a SuperTarget. Representatives said the work is scheduled to be completed by August.

"Aside from building a brand new Target out of the ground, a SuperTarget is the largest project investment that Target makes," Byron DeBord, a project manager with Novak Construction, told city council members on Tuesday.

DeBord said the large staging area is key to keeping the project on schedule while the store remains open during construction. Parking, however, is a stumbling block.

The parking lot for the store, located at 1951 W. Jefferson Ave., currently has about 635 spaces. That number would drop to 431 under the construction plan, which is nearly 90 short of the spaces required by city code.

Company representatives said parking shouldn't be an issue. They provided data indicating the peak number of spaces utilized was 360, which occurred during the holiday season.

While city council members supported the idea of the renovation, they did express concerns. Benny White and Nicki Anderson asked if some of the construction traffic could be shifted to behind the store to reduce the visibility along Route 59, but company representatives said the scope of the work will make that difficult.

Fellow council members Paul Hinterlong and Ian Holzhauer asked if the company would contribute to the cost of a traffic light at the store exit on West Jefferson Avenue to improve safety. Brixmor Property Group, which owns the shopping centers south of the intersection, already has agreed to contribute to the cost as part of a business district proposal.

Naperville City Manager Doug Krieger said he and Bill Novack, the city's director of transportation, engineering and development, recently had an encouraging conversation with Target officials about the stop light.

"We will be sending some of our traffic data as well as our crash data to them so that they can take a look at it," Krieger said.