Why basement company Perma-Seal couldn't relocate to Naperville
A basement waterproofing company hopes to sell the land on which it wasn't able to build a headquarters in Naperville.
A proposed action by the Naperville City Council could help with the sale, Perma-Seal founder and President Roy Spencer said.
The city could update covenants on the 5-acre property at 1720 Quincy Ave. to no longer require Perma-Seal to build a facility there, which Spencer said will open the door to potential buyers who want to make their own use of the vacant space.
"Nobody wants to buy it with this covenant on there," Spencer said Monday, adding the legal restriction is like telling any prospective buyer, "you can't build on it, only the guy who sold it to you can."
The requirement came as part of the 2016 sale of the land to Perma-Seal for $770,000 at a time when the city was auctioning off a handful of properties it no longer needed. The idea, City Attorney Mike DiSanto said, was to get the property out of public hands and onto the tax rolls.
Perma-Seal wanted to build a 40,000-square-foot office and warehouse on the industrial site just west of Ogden Avenue and went as far as to hire engineers. But site studies identified wetlands and soil quality issues.
"We ran into a lot of problems with both the land itself and the developer who was going to build on it for us," Spencer said.
And while those challenges were ongoing, a 12-acre site in Burr Ridge that included a 140,000-square-foot building came onto the market, Spencer said. The Burr Ridge site met his company's needs for space to host 120 of its 210 employees as well as materials and vehicles. So Perma-Seal bought the Burr Ridge property and moved its headquarters there from Downers Grove in October 2018.
Spencer said he had looked forward to establishing the headquarters in Naperville.
"We invested a lot of money trying to get there, it just didn't happen," he said.
The city now is trying to ensure a new owner of the site won't be a nonprofit through a proposed modification to the covenants of the 2016 sale. The council is expected to review a resolution that would require a new owner to be a property tax-generating entity, DiSanto said.
Spencer said he understands the council's position.
"They thought it was going to be put to productive use," he said about the land. "That's our intention, too, to get it back to productive use as quickly as possible."