The Facility Review Committee, a group charged with selecting a plan to remodel Village Hall, indicated it is leaning toward an option that would include a glass addition to the building, preserving much of the current historic structure.
In July, the Oak Park Village Board of Trustees proposed demolishing and rebuilding Village Hall and constructing a new headquarters and police station. At the Feb. 21 facility review committee meeting, Johnson Lasky Kindelin Architects presented three potential remodel schemes. The presentation is available online.
One option was to retain as much of the original building as possible with certain modifications, including moving the council chambers to the first floor and keeping some police functions on the lower level.
Another was to create a “sunken plaza” to negate the need for an addition. This plan would keep the council chambers in its current location, with modifications, and would move all police functions into a new station. The basement would then become the entry level.
But the one that garnered the most interest would include a glass addition to the building with a connection to Village Hall. In this scheme, all police functions would be moved to a new police station, including the remodeled firing range, said Frank Heitzman, a founder of Preservation Oak Park, who attended the committee meeting.
“The shooting range is not usable during the day because it makes too much noise in the building,” Heitzman said.
Heitzman said he believes some police would prefer the new police station to be connected to Village Hall to permit better communication with village staff. Moving the firing range may still be open to further evaluation, said Colette Lueck, the committee’s co-chair.
The basement, where the police station is located now, could be used as a gathering place for citizens, for public meetings and or for voting instead, Heitzman said was pointed out at the meeting. The committee also expressed interest in moving the council chambers to the first floor for increased accessibility. Lueck said no one felt remediating the current chambers was a viable option.
“Most of the offices that are in the building are open to the public, which was always the design and the concept of the building: open government,” Heitzman said.
The council chambers may have worked well and been a progressive layout when it was built in 1975, said Daniel Roush, co-chair of the facility review committee, but it needs updating now.
Lueck said this scheme solved as many problems as it could without creating new ones. It provides a safe environment, Lueck said, because there would be one entrance into Village Hall and a level of security.
“The way it laid out staff usage was better,” Lueck said. “It allowed for offices that should adjoin each other or functions that should adjoin each other to be next to each other and facilitate conversations and working together more readily.”
There are still some kinks the committee asked JLK to address in the revised plan, including what to do with the old council chambers space.
Certain improvements were recommended for all schemes, Heitzman said, including ensuring accessibility standards throughout the building, opening the courtyard entrance to the public with safety measures implemented, adding insulation, new HVAC systems and more parking.
“All three of the schemes that were presented had a core level of changes that were just going to happen to the building no matter what,” Roush said. “There’s general consensus that this is an achievable and sensitive strategy.”
No cost estimates have been provided for the remodel ideas yet.
JLK is expected to come back with a revised proposal and potentially cost estimates at the next committee meeting on March 13. After the committee votes on its recommendations, a final proposal will be presented to the village board, which is expected to happen April 9.
“The board has the final say,” Roush said.