The village of Brookfield is taking immediate steps to replace aging and malfunctioning infrastructure within its village hall.
At its Feb. 26 meeting, the Brookfield village board partnered with two separate firms to replace the village hall’s generator and its elevator, which both failed recently.
Lyons & Pinner Electric Companies, an electrical construction and maintenance firm based in La Grange, will be responsible for replacing the village hall generator. The generator was first installed in 1972, making it more than 50 years old. According to a village memo, the average generator is only useful for 15-20 years, meaning the current generator is more than 30 years past its prime.
According to the memo, the generator failed during a recent power outage, requiring village staff to acquire a temporary backup. While the generator is still operational due to a new starter that village staff installed after it had failed, staff have called it “unreliable” and recommended waiving the regular competitive bidding process for the replacement project so it can proceed as quickly as possible.
“We need to take emergency action to replace it at this point in time,” Village President Michael Garvey said at the meeting. “It’s beyond a state of repair.”
The work will include replacing the generator with a new one as well as moving circuitry to power additional rooms in the police and fire wing of the village hall in the event of a power outage. The replacement itself will cost about $39,200 while the additional circuitry work will cost $41,500, leaving Brookfield with a total bill of about $80,700.
“We knew ahead of time that this was going to happen. At some point, we were going to have to replace the generator,” said village trustee Edward Côté at the meeting. “We did budget $100,000 to replace this generator, and it just so happened that the generator did fail. But we did budget $100,000, and the financial impact for this generator is $80,000, so it’s actually $20,000 under budget.”
Out of service
Suburban Elevator Company, an elevator service and repair business based in East Dundee, won the contract for work on Brookfield Village Hall’s broken elevator, which has been out of service since it overheated in early December. According to a village memo, Brookfield’s regular elevator maintenance provider, Otis Worldwide — which was founded in 1853 by the inventor of the safety elevator — sent a crew to service the elevator after it first broke. The crew found the elevator’s hydraulic system had lost a “significant” amount of oil and, after running tests, determined parts of the hydraulic system would need to be replaced. At the village board meeting, Garvey noted temporary repairs had been made to the elevator at one point, but it ultimately failed again.
Brookfield received proposals to replace the hydraulic parts from both Otis and Suburban Elevator. Both proposals included the cost to replace the hydraulic parts as well as the cost for additional work that could be necessary if there are complications during the replacement process. Otis’ proposal would have cost the village about $81,000 to replace the parts and another $90,000 should complications arise, totaling about $171,000. Suburban Elevator’s proposal came in at about half that price.
In the end, the replacement work will cost Brookfield about $37,000, while the extra work, if needed, will cost $50,000 for a total of about $87,000. After receiving both proposals, village staff recommended awarding the contract to Suburban Elevator and waiving the rest of the competitive bidding process so the elevator can get up and running again as soon as possible.
“We’ve had to cancel several events downstairs due to the inability to be able to get [there],” Garvey said at the meeting. “Again, we talked about it during the budget. We knew that there were going to be problems, and sure enough [the elevator] failed, and the repairs failed, so we need to do this.”
