Brookfield trustees have directed village staff to begin discussions with bond consultants to find a way to realistically finance the construction of a potential community center at Ehlert Park that would cost at least $25 million.
At the village board’s Aug. 25 committee of the whole meeting, Stevie Ferrari, Brookfield’s assistant village manager, asked the board to reach consensus on one of three options to move forward with the project now that Brookfield has accepted the results of a feasibility study completed by Williams Architects.
Ferrari said Brookfield could either take no further action on the project, leaving it for a future village board to reconsider; direct staff to seek outside funding sources like grants, though those would be unlikely to cover more than 10% of the overall project cost; or instruct staff to start looking into a possible bond referendum, which would be one of the only surefire ways to cover the project’s large cost.
Ferrari said Brookfield will not be able to issue any bonds until at least 2027 after the village is scheduled in December 2026 to make the final payments on about $12 million of bonds it had issued for street improvements in 2015 and 2016. She said the village would only be able to bond $12 million at that time, leaving at least $13 million of the initial price estimate and likely $2 million in further price escalation unfunded.
The village could also wait to issue $25 million in bonds altogether after it pays off a $7 million bond for 2018 street improvements in 2028 and another $6 million bond for 2020 roadwork in 2030, she said, though there would likely be further price escalation then beyond the $2 million expected by 2027.
Brookfield has a maximum cap of $25 million on bonds, meaning the construction costs would leave the village unable to use the bonds for any other project until they are paid off, Ferrari said.
“Bottom line, this facility in its current cost of $25 million is not going to be able to be built without some sort of referendum or some combination of funding mechanisms to include a referendum,” she told trustees.
Village trustees and staffers alike said they felt it would be unreasonable to issue $12 million in bonds in 2027 rather than waiting for the rest of the village’s bonds to sunset.
“I think it would be really problematic to have to go for a referendum for half of a rec center and then, again, later, go back and say, ‘Hey, we’d like a referendum for the rest of the rec center,’” said Trustee Jennifer Hendricks. “For me, I think that’s a non-starter.”
“I agree with you. It doesn’t make sense to go for referendum,” Village Manager Tim Wiberg added. “We’re going to ask for half now, and if they give it to us, then we’re just banking on a ‘Yes’ vote in three years. That’s not sound planning.”
Village President Michael Garvey compared the high price of the center to the estimated cost to pave the remaining unpaved alleyways in Brookfield, a project he said residents often ask about; realistically, he said, it would cost upwards of $100 million to pave them all, he said, making the point that the board cannot consider the potential recreation center in a vacuum.
“We don’t have the benefit of looking at each of these issues in isolation. If we make a decision to focus on a referendum for a parks and recreation center, it would be to the exclusion of other projects going forward,” he said.
Through the course of the board’s discussion, trustees agreed they would like to consider all of the village’s potential capital projects in tandem, though several said they did not feel prepared to discuss the issue of paving alleys at the meeting, as the memo the board had received to prepare for the discussion touched solely on the recreation center.
Some trustees said they felt the option to seek a bond referendum was the only possible path forward for the project, though Wiberg and Ferrari explained that staff still needed the board to give direction to take next steps, as the completion of the feasibility study for the center did not imply the village’s pursuit of its construction.
As the board reached a consensus to start looking into the bond process, Trustee Julie Narimatsu said she felt there would always be opportunity costs to a project of the recreation center’s scope and that the board simply needed to understand what those could be.
Trustee Kyle Whitehead agreed and unscored the community value of the center, which the feasibility study found most residents would desire and be willing to pay the annual costs for bonds toward.
“It’s a huge gap in our community right now that we don’t have an indoor recreation space that everybody can enjoy. We invest so much in our parks, and our parks are awesome; unfortunately, because of the weather, they’re not used by many residents for much of the year,” he said. “A center like this could provide tremendous value in terms of the physical health and the mental health of nearly every resident if they were to take advantage.”
