The future of Oak Park Village Hall and the long-promised standalone Oak Park Police headquarters came into sharper focus last week.
A 5-2 majority of Oak Park’s board of trustees voted to give support to a construction plan that would see an addition built on to the south side of Village Hall that would house a new council chambers alongside a new building entryway and welcome desk. The plan puts construction costs for Village Hall renovations at an estimated $26.2 million on top of $63.7 million in expected construction costs for the police station, whose design revolves around the adaptive reuse of a nearby bank building.
Those price estimates do not include additional costs associated with things like land acquisition, design work, finance and legal fees and other contingencies. For the police station alone, those additional costs will likely total at least an additional $10 million, according to Oak Park Public Works Director Rob Sproule.
The review of the concepts comes after village officials embraced a new plan for the future police station which differed sharply from the original vision for the station, which would’ve put up a new police HQ on Village Hall’s south lawn.
Board members voted in January to authorize an effort to acquire the U.S. Bank building at 11 Madison St. via eminent domain with the plan to redevelop it into a new police headquarters. The 37,000 square foot building is listed for sale at $2.65 million and is located only two blocks away from Oak Park Village Hall.
U.S. Bank officials spoke before the board last month to express their disapproval of the move, saying that they hadn’t planned to close the branch when they put it up for sale but planned to lease it back from a new owner. The bank vowed to fight the eminent domain bid.
For decades, Oak Park police have operated out of Village Hall’s basement, a space considered too small and outdated to suit the needs of a modern village police department. The village has been working to find a path to a new base of operations for the department since at least 2015, when it commissioned a property condition assessment on Village Hall.
Over the last decade, the village has spent millions on design work, kicked around several concepts for both building projects, fired one architect and hired another.
Renovating Village Hall has long proved to be a tricky proposition for Oak Park’s village boards. Since it opened in the 1970s the building has tried to exist as both a functional municipal building and as a funky, modernist tribute to the principles of democracy and transparent government.
Meg Kindelin, founder of project architectural firm JLK, said that the architects on the project have strived to keep as much of the symbolism and style that’s defined Village Hall alive through the renovation.
“I do think that with this kind of idea that the transparent government and this whole idea that this building means something, it’s really nice to have that at the foreground and give that back as a gift to Oak Park,” she said. “Not to be too over the top with my language. But I think it’s relevant and this building deserves it.”
The tension between art and function is particularly apparent inside Oak Park’s council chambers, which symbolically seats the village board beneath their community audience. But the room has always been plagued by accessibility and emergency safety challenges including steep stairs that take visitors from the main level of Village Hall up into a tube that opens into the “beautiful” council chambers, Village President Vicki Scaman said.
“The fact that we enter this room through a tube is insane,” Scaman said. “If there was any kind of emergency in this room, and we all had to exit, and you had between 30 and 55 people exiting in a quick time, and you’re going through one door, through a tube, and I know I’m very dramatic about that, and then down an extremely steep set of stairs, that is going to be tragic, and we are lucky that nothing has ever happened. It’s been that way since 1974, yes, but the world is changing, and it’s only changing faster.”
In its proposals, JLK architects opted to treat the chambers as too weird to live, but too rare to die.
Village trustees were instructed to vote between two different plans for the village hall renovation that differed primarily in how they replaced the council chambers.
The plan trustees ultimately rejected would’ve expanded Room 101, currently used for smaller community meetings. In both plans, the current council chambers would be left as is and used for smaller staff and community meetings.
While that plan was slightly cheaper overall, renovating that room presented a significant financial challenge and would’ve abandoned much of the symbolism of the current council chambers. The plan the board voted in favor of would build a new entrance to village hall that would allow visitors to walk straight into the new council chambers as they come into the building.
“There can be a little bit more of that that coming together between the public and the staff who do such great work here,” Trustee Brian Straw said. “I think that putting council chambers where 101 is doesn’t create that sort of transparent government element that has always been the history of this building.”
Trustee Jim Taglia stood in opposition to most of the board when he said that the village should consider a redevelopment scheme that kept the current council chambers in use with a few accessibility focused updates.
“It’s an expensive work around, in my view,” Taglia said. “I’d like to know why we have to look at abandoning this as our council chambers. Is that necessary? I mean, why is that absolutely mandatory? And why can we not do anything but one of these other two concepts? Because when we left the last meeting, I wasn’t under the impression that that was an automatic.”
Trustee Cory Wesley said he was also open to preserving council chambers as the home for village board meetings.
Kindelin said that JLK had tried to modernize the council chambers, but that doing so was both impractical and “ridiculously expensive.”
“I did desperately want to keep you in this room, because I like the symbolism, and that’s where my heart is. However, if we’re looking at what the world that this building was designed in is not the world we live in today, unfortunately, it just simply is not. I’m a historic preservation architect and an architect, and I look at buildings through time and the way they change, the way the building must change to reflect the world around it.”
Regardless of the chambers, Taglia and Wesley voted against endorsing the plan in part because of vagueness surrounding the construction costs. Both said they’d have liked to see an itemized cost list for police station construction.
“I’m trying to understand what’s the how big of a check I’m voting for tonight,” Wesley said. “I’m not sold on this one, President Scaman. Honestly, the costs here are much higher than I anticipated.”
With the board’s 5-2 endorsement of the plan, architects will dive deeper into schematic designs for the projects before returning to the village board.
