New police station concept plays well with officials and residents

An 11th-hour concept for a new multi-million-dollar public facility in Wilmette earned the support of a majority of local officials and residents alike.

Wilmette trustees reached a consensus during their Tuesday, Feb. 11 meeting to move forward with an updated site plan concept for the village’s new police station. The preferred site plan was not one of the original four proposals released to the community in January.

The agreed-upon plan, while similar in many ways to the previous options, is original in a few key areas — primarily its impact on Howard Park.

Officials said the new concept is the least impactful to the playing-fields area at Howard Park while it also maintains and restores the majority of space in the coveted park. According to village documents, the plan would impact about 4,640 feet of Howard Park, or about 1.2 percent of the 11-acre site that is owned by the Village of Wilmette.

The plan, which officials estimate will cost approximately $48.2 million, also pushes the proposed new station 5 feet closer to Ridge Road, Wilmette Village Manager Mike Braiman said during the Feb. 11 session. Doing so helps mitigate park impacts, he said, adding that officials feel this plan “is a good outcome to help us ensure playability of the park.”

Part of the plan includes moving the park’s southwest ballfield about 20 feet to the east, according to Braiman. That shift will ensure that the adult softball field has the distance it needs to play while still allowing the construction of the new station.

Project costs could increase by approximately $400,000 to accommodate the shifting of the softball field, per officials. Additional costs would be added later in the process if a shift of the football field at Howard Park is needed as well, village plans show.

Additionally, another key difference in the new plan is relocating the main access point for the police station to a new entrance off of Ridge Road, said Mike Elliott, a representative of FGM Architects. That change allows for planners to push most of the day-to-day access traffic out of the existing alley, Elliott said.

The need for a new plan

As previously reported by The Record, Wilmette officials in late January released a series of four preliminary site plan concepts for the new station, which showcased details on its potential size, layout, parking, cost and impact on the adjacent Howard Park.

The village then solicited feedback on the original four plans from residents and Wilmette Park District commissioners and staffers.

Braiman said that process revealed three key suggestions: minimize Howard Park impacts by keeping the southwest field playable for adult softball and children’s soccer, minimize parking toward the east, and reduce alley conflicts between police vehicles and users of the alley.

Village officials next challenged FGM Architects, the project’s architectural firm, to develop a new site plan that addressed those high-priority needs and would “still meet the day-to-day operational needs of our police department for the foreseeable future,” Braiman said.

The new site plan — as with the previous options — calls for the construction of a two-story building with a basement.

The first floor of the facility will be larger than the second, officials said, allowing the structure to “blend in to the neighborhood a little bit more and have less impact on the immediate neighbors and potentially less impact on the park,” Braiman said.

Village trustees lauded staff and project planners for coming up with the new option and finding a solution that works better to address both their hesitations and residents’ concerns.

“Looking at this plan, you took in the residents’ comments and you’ve done a pretty Herculean job, because I saw some of the earlier plans and the impact to the park was just more consequential,” Trustee Gerry Smith said. “This plan at least minimizes it.”

Smith later added that he was “pretty comfortable with the plan as it stands right now.”

Trustee Justin Sheperd shared similar thoughts, saying “this plan seems to meet the needs as we’ve set out.”

Trustee Gina Kennedy began her comments by noting that the current plan “is so much better than what we were looking at before,” but later added that she would like to see planners continue to work toward minimizing the project cost and impact on Howard Park given that the new configuration is “so, so close” to having no impact.

During the public-comment portion of the meeting, resident Kelly Gouss, who lives right behind Howard Park on Washington Avenue, thanked planners “for considering community input.”

“I know this is a working concept and it seems to be a good compromise that protects the community’s needs for a modern police facility and preserves the recreational space that makes Wilmette special,” Gouss said.

Now that FGM has site plan direction from the village, the firm will work with its cost estimator to produce an “improved, tighter budget estimate,” Braiman said.

The site plan is still a “conceptual, high-level plan” and a lot of details still need to be fleshed out, Braiman noted earlier in the meeting.

“We’re going to continue to refine over the next 12 months and we’re going to continue to engage directly with the neighbors and the park district and work collaboratively to get to a final product that works best for everybody,” he said.

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