Brookfield trustees got a first look last week at possible locations for a community and indoor recreation center alongside data about residents’ thoughts on indoor programming in town.
At the board’s Oct. 14 committee of the whole meeting, Managing Principal Andy Dogan of Williams Architects led a presentation explaining the statistically valid survey the firm took of Brookfield residents, in which they asked what kinds of village recreation programming are lacking and what should go inside a community rec center. They also showed off five sites that could host a potential center.
According to village documents, Brookfield first contracted with Williams for the project in late 2022, but “several different factors,” including staffing changes in the parks and recreation department, meant Brookfield had to delay the project for about a year until village staff could handle coordinating with Williams for early steps.
Williams is the same firm tackling Riverside’s public safety and community gym project.
The locations Williams identified are Madlin Park, Ehlert Park, the St. Barbara Parish Center, St. Nikola Serbian Orthodox Church and the parking lot behind Brookfield Village Hall, although each comes with its own set of considerations, said Kim Nigro, a senior project architect at Williams.
The Parish Center, which is across the street from the St. Barbara Catholic Church, is owned by the Archdiocese of Chicago while St. Nikola owns its own land, Nigro said. Ownership of Madlin Park is split between Brookfield and Brookfield-LaGrange Park School District 95.
While Brookfield owns Ehlert Park, almost all of the park is considered floodplain aside from the northwest corner, which makes it the best spot in the park for a potential rec center, Nigro said.
The village also owns the land under and around village hall; Dogan and Nigro said a community center there would go in over the existing parking spaces in the back parking lot rather than replacing them and reducing the lot’s capacity.
When mapping the center’s possible locations, Williams used a model with an area of 30,000 square feet, although Dogan said the real thing could range from 26,000 square feet to 34,000 square feet, depending on how Brookfield weighs space and cost.
With the model, the center would neither fit in Madlin Park nor on St. Nikola’s property under Brookfield’s current zoning code, Nigro said. It would fit on the Parish Center property, but there would be little room left for parking.
Survey says?
Williams partnered with Laura Payne, the director of the University of Illinois’ Office of Recreation and Park Resources, to conduct and analyze a random, stratified, statistically valid survey of Brookfield households’ opinions on parks and recreation programming in town.
Payne, who holds a doctorate degree in leisure studies, said she and her team sent survey postcards to 5,000 of Brookfield’s 7,785 households, although only 4,520 received them, because some had an undeliverable address or had submitted a forwarding address to the post office. Of those households, 406, or about 9%, filled out the survey from the unique QR code on their postcard.
While that number may seem low, “It’s on the higher end of [response rates for] what we usually see for a community survey of this sort,” Payne said. “This response rate ensured a 95% confidence level was met, which is the industry standard.”
Payne said the random households were stratified along lines of race and homeownership, as “research shows” people of color and renters would have been less likely to respond to the survey, “so you want to oversample people in those groups.” Stratification means households were grouped based on the two demographic data points before being randomly selected from those groups.
She said the survey found the programs that residents had the highest need for were health and fitness spaces, a walking track, rooms to host programming and indoor court spaces for sports such as basketball, volleyball, pickleball and soccer. The most used programming spaces at the time of the survey included the classroom and basement recreation hall in Brookfield Village Hall, as well as Kiwanis Park and Ehlert Park.
Most residents said the village’s current programming spaces they used and could comment on were in good or better condition. The biggest barrier preventing residents from accessing parks and recreation programming was that they weren’t aware of available programs, followed by residents being disinterested in the programs they did know about.
When asking residents about funding the construction of the community center, Payne gave Brookfielders two options. A smaller center 26,000 square feet to 28,000 square feet in size would have one full-size gymnasium court in addition to programming spaces. One 30,000-34,000 square feet in size would have two courts and even more space for programs.
According to the survey, the smaller center would cost residents $270 per year over 20 years to pay off $20 million of village bonds while the larger center would cost $265 per year over 30 years to pay off $25 million of bonds. In both cases, roughly half of residents surveyed were willing to pay this cost while about 20% were undecided and about 30% did not want to pay.
Across both sizes, residents had the same desires for what would go inside the center, which matched the programs for which they had the highest unmet needs: a fitness space, a track, indoor courts, and “support facilities” like bathrooms and locker rooms.
Brookfield also conducted an open survey for residents to give their thoughts, but Payne said she and her team were still working on analyzing data from the 960 respondents. She said the open survey would be more inclusive but could contain responses from members of the same household or even duplicates from the same person on different devices with no way to tell, making the data less representative.
You can still get involved
While the open survey is closed, there’s still a chance for you to learn about the project first-hand and ask any questions you might have.
Brookfield and Williams are partnering to host an open house about the community center and study at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 23, at village hall.
Dogan said the open house will begin with a 15-minute presentation sharing a condensed form of the information trustees heard over the course of about 70 minutes. Afterward, residents will be free to look at informational boards and ask questions. Residents will be able to leave their own feedback on the plan in writing on comment cards or electronically through a QR code.
