Riverside is one step closer to having brand new public safety and community spaces built adjacent to village hall.
At the village board’s Aug. 15 meeting, trustees heard a presentation with three options for plans to renovate or rebuild the village’s fire and police department buildings next to Riverside Village Hall, a project the board started in February. Two of the options involved maintaining the existing fire and police space and building additions while the third, which trustees ultimately chose to pursue, will see the shared department taken down after a new structure is partially built.
That option would need to be completed in a phased approach, said Mark Bushhouse, president of Williams Architects, Riverside’s firm for the project and the same firm the village partnered with in 2018 to evaluate the public safety spaces and identify problems with them.
In the first phase of the project, Bushhouse said, the new space would be built where Riverside’s youth center sits now to the immediate southeast of village hall. The building will start with 18 parking spaces and some police evidence and other storage in the basement while the first floor will largely be dedicated to the fire department and its need to store firetrucks. The second floor will have police- and fire-specific areas as well as shared space.
“As this other building gets done, we will take down the existing addition [to village hall] that has public safety in it,” Bushhouse said. He said the current public safety space would remain until the first phase of construction on the new building is complete.
In the second phase of construction, the plan is to expand the new building’s basement parking to 26 spots and add more police and shared spaces to the first floor. The additions to the second floor would largely be in the form of two or three community spaces that residents can use, one of which would likely be a small fitness area.
After Bushhouse walked trustees through all three proposed options, he gave a list of pros and cons for each.
“Since we’re building new for all the real spaces that you’re trying to accomplish with this project, they’re all tailor-made and functionally designed to work together in the optimal way,” he said of the option trustees later chose. “In new buildings, the floor-to-floor heights that we do are higher than [in] older buildings because ductwork is bigger. We push more air. We have a lot of systems that go into public safety buildings as far as conduits and now sprinkler systems, things that weren’t there in the ‘50s and earlier.”
Other pros of building new included not having to build in awkward transitions between old buildings and additions built according to today’s standards as well as being able to use the current public safety site for parking, seating, decoration or other amenities once it is demolished.
On the other hand, there are some glaring cons that come with building an entirely new space.
“We have to demolish an existing building. The wall of the village hall that would be exposed again that’s been covered for many years” — due to the existing public safety addition — “we’re going to see what we have and how to patch that up to make it look right. It will never be quite the way it was, but we can get close,” Bushhouse said.
The biggest con, he added, has to do with the phased construction and demolition.
“I’m not going to soft-pedal what it’s like to live through a remodeling project like this. It’s going to be disruptive. It’s going to be painful,” he said. “But we think we can get you through it, and maybe we’ll all be talking at the end, because you’ll be happy with what you end up with.”
When it came to the project’s cost, Bushhouse said Williams would likely be able to keep the public safety portion under Riverside’s $20 million budget, though variables like the quality of the soil or the chance of running into water may impact the construction of the parking garage in the new basement. He said it would likely be “very hard” to fit the construction of all of the board’s desired community spaces within the $20 million budget.
After trustees asked questions of Bushhouse, they voiced their support for building a new structure over the options that leaned more heavily toward remodeling existing space.
“If we’re able to do this, we want to build something that will last 50, 75, 100 years. That one building is already 70 years old, and there are challenges with trying to retrofit it, and then you have somebody who’s in the new building and some staff who’s in the old building,” Trustee Jill Mateo said. “I prefer Option C [to build new] if that’s doable.”
Trustee Megan Claucherty agreed with the rest of the board, though she expressed concern about community spaces being relegated to the second phase of construction.
“I do understand the limitations of time, space and budgets. As a trustee, I’m not an architect; I’m not a space planner, so I don’t want to minimize the difficulty of the problem” of making sure everything can fit in the physical space and the village’s budget, she said. “While the staff and the trustees are keenly aware of the inadequacy of some of the space for public safety, I think the community is less informed about that, and they want a little something in this kind of project, too, or they’re going to expect something in this project, too.”
