By this time next year, Ehlert Park will likely have received another major facelift.
At its March 11 meeting, the Brookfield village board approved a contract with Wight & Company, an architectural firm with two locations in Chicagoland, to oversee the analysis, design and construction of the village’s project to renovate the southwest corner of Ehlert Park.
At the meeting, Luke Gundersen, Brookfield’s parks & recreation director, said the design process will take place in March and April before the project is sent out to bid for construction in May. Construction will start in late July or early August, he said. According to a village staff memo, Brookfield’s goal is to complete the project by March 2025. The village first set its sights on the project in 2022 as the last piece of redevelopment work on Ehlert Park that has been underway for more than 16 years.
Renovations and additions
The project will see the park’s playground and the nearby picnic shelter, memorial plaza and baseball field get full renovations. The renovated playground will sit on top of pour-in-place rubber, which will “dramatically enhance the accessibility,” Gundersen said. The memorial plaza will be updated with repurposed pavers, new places to sit and short plants. The baseball field renovations will include new fencing and seating for spectators, mixed soil for the infield, newly seeded turf for the outfield and accessible dugout connections. Some parts of the outfield will overlap with green space traditionally used for football practices, but it will not prevent the space from being used in that way, Gundersen said.
Beyond the renovations, additions to the park will include a new, dedicated soccer field west of the playground with spectator seating, as well as a new game table space with pingpong and chess tables between the playground and the picnic shelter. A new rain garden next to the playground with native plants will provide green infrastructure for the park alongside low grasses, perennial flowers and other plants that cover the ground.
“The proposed improvements will be located to minimize site disturbance and preserve the existing mature tree grove on that northeast corner” of the project area, Gundersen said.
“It’s exciting to have this grant coming to us, and it’s going to be nice to have an inclusive playground put in here and have the updates done to this park,” Trustee Jennifer Hendricks said at the meeting. “I’m excited for it.”
Disruption concerns
At the meeting, Trustee Nicole Gilhooley raised concerns about construction on the project disrupting athletic groups that heavily use that area of Ehlert Park. Gundersen said he had been in contact with AYSO soccer and Riverside-Brookfield football groups, which use the park for sports practices, and informed them of the project and its proposed timeline. He said other groups that use the space, like Western Conference baseball and Brookfield Little League, “shouldn’t be affected too bad” aside from parking constraints that may arise.
Gilhooley also asked whether the construction would affect the Brookfield Chamber of Commerce’s National Night Out, a day of celebration for public safety officers, on August 6. Gundersen said construction “could affect” the event but that it might begin after National Night Out rather than before it.
Wight and the parks and recreation department are planning to get resident feedback on the project through online surveys and a community open house, Gundersen said, although the details have yet to be finalized.
How did this project come to be?
Partnering with Wight will cost Brookfield $125,000 and up to $2,500 more in expense reimbursements for the firm, according to the agreement between them. Brookfield is receiving funding for the project in the form of a $600,000 grant from the Open Space Lands Acquisition and Development Program, an Illinois-financed initiative that helps local governments acquire or develop land for public park space. Illinois awarded Brookfield the grant, which will cover nearly half of the expected total $1.26 million cost for the project, in early 2023.
According to Brookfield’s request for proposals for the project, the OSLAD grant will cover up to 15.25% of the project cost due to the village partnering with an architectural firm. That means Brookfield will use up to nearly $19,500 from the grant for this piece of the project, depending on how much it ultimately reimburses Wight.
Wight — the same firm that designed more than $60 million of renovations for Riverside-Brookfield High School that were completed in 2010 — was selected from five groups that submitted proposals. The firms’ qualifications, experiences, references, methodologies and proposed costs were each evaluated and ranked, Gundersen said.
The three firms with the best overall scores were invited to complete virtual interviews with him, Hendricks and Parks and Recreation Commissioner Kyle Whitehead, who then selected Wight — which had the best overall score out of the five initial applicants — as the recommended firm for the project.
“All five of them did have high qualifications. They were all very qualified and able to do the job,” Gundersen said at the meeting. “After speaking with [Wight] in their interview process, they did stand out out of all these companies.”
