While construction was slated to begin next month, the village’s planned infrastructure improvements to Oak Park Avenue will be put on hold for at least another year.
The village did not receive any on-budget bids for the large scale project which is set to redesign the streetscape and overhaul the water and sewer systems underneath Oak Park Avenue between Ontario Street and Randolph Street. The only construction bid the village received was for over $22.7 million, well beyond the $18 million the village budgeted for the project.
Construction on the project had been scheduled to begin next month, with the hope that it’d be finished by Thanksgiving 2025. Construction will not begin until at least 2026.
“We don’t love the delay,” Village Board President Vicki Scaman said, “But I absolutely appreciate the staff for the due diligence they’re doing here. As good fiscal stewards we have to be careful and we have to be sure that we’re using the dollars we have available as wisely as possible.”
Many of the buildings in the work zone are more than 100 years old, which makes planning how to update the underground infrastructure work more complicated, Scaman said.
“The beautiful, gorgeous buildings south of Lake Street are over 100 years old and so the work under the sidewalks that is the driver for having the streetscaping in the first place is complicated,” she said. “It does appear as if the process and the engineering plans could better communicate how the work should best be done. As well as where staff might want to try and reign in the proposed streetscaping to keep us on budget.”
The existing underground water and sewer infrastructure has gotten quite old, Scaman said, and is in danger to fail if these updates don’t get done.
Earlier this month, the village’s public works leadership advised Village Manager Kevin Jackson and the Village Board to deny the lone bid and take time to revise the plan so that it can be completed under budget. In a memo to village leadership, Village Engineer Bill McKenna and Public Works Director Rob Sproule wrote that the delay is necessary because conversations with local construction firms and other stakeholders revealed that a “large number of items” in the project would “need to be redesigned, value engineered or renegotiate with the contractor during construction.”
“Revising the design of the project and deferring construction to 2026 will allow for staff to work with Terra Engineering to obtain more competitive pricing and hopefully reduce the overall cost of the project,” they wrote in the memo. “Deferring the project to 2026 will also allow for continued coordination with the businesses and Hemingway Business District to reduce their impacts from the project; better coordination with the CTA regarding their proposed Green Line Station improvement project; and coordination with other stakeholders and agencies including Oak Park Township, Nicor and AT&T.”
Scaman said she is disappointed that they have to shift the timeline after small businesses in the Hemingway Business District had already prepared for the disruption.
“They’ve been preparing for that, making their own investments, making hiring decisions and making marketing plans,” she said. “That kind of did break my heart ever so slightly.”
Moses Valdez owns the Style Society Club, a fashion storefront on Oak Park Avenue, and is president of the Hemingway Business District Association. He said that Oak Park Avenue businesses now have the opportunity to further prepare for the construction while continuing to plan events to promote district businesses before the project gets underway.
“We can get through anything,” Valdez said. “It was a bit of a surprise but it’s ok, it means now we can continue having all these wonderful events. We’ll just continue to do what we do best.”
The village has provided grant opportunities to the businesses in the district in an effort to offset some of the impact that the construction will have, and has extended the deadline to apply for those grants into 2026, which Valdez said is a positive for business owners.
Scaman said that the village intends to use the extra time to focus on how it can best support the affected businesses, on top of figuring out how to keep the project under budget.
“A silver lining, outside of making sure we do this right, is that we have an additional year to roll out the business support programs, and it gives us an opportunity to evaluate how they’re working,” she said. “These decisions are tough when you have to postpone something like this, but in this case, I believe it’s necessary.”