Hard choices about Riverside’s most ambitious public building plan in decades were discussed at the Nov. 7 meeting of the village board. A while back, the trustees made the right decision to fully replace current police and fire facilities from the ground up. Then they kept adding pieces to the plan to address genuine needs for more community spaces, such as meeting rooms, a fitness facility, and ultimately a full-sized gym.
Those add-ons did two things. They drove up the price of a project the village has limited capacity to fund from $20 million to just north of $50 million. And according to its architectural firm, the new spaces compromised the plans for state-of-the art police and fire facilities by squeezing too much building onto a finite-sized piece of land.
All of this led to a healthy debate among board members. Ultimately, a narrow majority directed the architects to scale back the project by removing the gym and limiting other public spaces on the site.
One trustee, Elizabeth Kos, raised concerns that support for the project among residents might wane without upgrades such as the gym. Kos chaired Riverside’s parks and rec board from 2018 to 2023. She said the village is seriously lacking indoor recreation space and rejected the idea that gyms at public schools could be available for community use.
These are seriously tough choices for this board. But good for them to have an honest discussion early in this process. To us, the priority must be to build first-rate police and fire facilities that will be functional for decades. Whatever can be added in terms of public spaces must fit the budget — affordable yet without overwhelming this limited and lovely site.
A wise consolidation
Speaking of police facilities, Riverside will begin to house people it arrests and winds up holding overnight in the lockup in Berwyn. Since 2019, Riverside has had a similar arrangement with police in North Riverside. That village recently chose to end the service.
Riverside now follows Brookfield in shifting its prisoner-holding process to Berwyn. This is a logical and necessary consolidation and Berwyn has the facilities, security and staffing to make this a long-term solution. Along with a consolidation of police and fire dispatch services, this move represents another important effort to consolidate aspects of police and fire services that simply make no sense for the size of Brookfield or Riverside.
Current discussions about rebuilding public safety facilities in Riverside (see above) specifically do not include a lockup. That’s good.
Our question: What is the next opportunity to consolidate these always expensive services among neighboring communities? Our suggestion is to look at fire services. Not a popular notion but a worthy discussion.