If you’re curious about what improvement projects are underway within Brookfield, that information is now at your fingertips.
Brookfield announced March 8 that it had launched a new homepage on its website where residents are able to see and track all of the village’s capital improvement projects for 2024. The page includes an interactive map of all of the planned improvements as well as information about the scope of work, schedule and primary contact for each project.
To access the page, go to Brookfield’s website at brookfieldil.gov and click on the word “maps” under the “community” tab at the top. That will bring you to a landing page for several interactive Brookfield maps, including the map of capital improvements, which encompass Brookfield’s plans to replace water mains and lead service pipes, the Burlington Avenue improvements, the Congress Park station area improvements and more.
Big year for improvements
At the Brookfield village board’s March 11 committee of the whole meeting, Village Engineer Derek Treichel presented a list of the village’s capital improvement projects for this year, which represent $22,280,000 of work to improve the village’s streets, pipes, parking lots and more.
“We’re about to embark on what I think is probably the largest capital improvements year that we’ve had since I’ve been here,” Treichel said at the meeting.
While $22 million may seem like a large figure, about $12 million is funded through loans while nearly $6.5 million more is funded through grants. Brookfield will only spend $3.66 million altogether on the projects, covering about 16% of the total cost of the improvements.
Treichel’s list included improvements that are already underway on construction as well as so-called “advance engineering” projects that are further out but still eligible for contingency funding through the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning’s Surface Transportation Program. The program is an agreement between Chicago and the nearly 300 municipalities within CMAP’s regional area that are split into 11 groups by location, which allows them to share excess funding between them.
“The region always wants to make sure they spend all of their STP funding,” Treichel said at the meeting. “Any time one of the other councils or Chicago doesn’t spend its funding, it becomes eligible for the other councils to go ahead and apply if they have shelf-ready plans and are able to get out for bids.”
This year, he added, it is estimated there will be $100 million available in contingency funding that municipalities can apply for.
“I’m always amazed at governments and agencies giving back grant money because they don’t have the plans or the shovel ready or the match,” Village President Michael Garvey said at the meeting. “We’ve been the recipient and the [beneficiary] of it. I mean, I don’t know that we’ve ever given anything back in terms of funding.”
At the end of his presentation, Treichel attributed Brookfield’s success in finding and securing funding for improvement projects to village staff’s “aggressive” approach and the village board’s cooperation with approving engineering projects in advance.
“That allowed us to leverage a little over $12 million in [Illinois Environmental Protection Agency] loan funding,” he said. “It’s the fact that you approved the engineering ahead of time, and when some of those other projects that were approved for funding last year weren’t ready by Jan. 1, we were able to jump in line and claim this funding.”
“We had years where we had done $4 [million] to $5 million in street improvements, and that was a huge project at that time, and we’re looking at $22 million over the next year-ish or so,” trustee Kit Ketchmark said at the end of the meeting. “It’s everything coming together that allows us to do this, so it’s historical in that way, too, for the village.”
