Brookfield officials have awarded a contract for water main work along Maple Avenue as another of the village’s construction contracts remains in limbo.
Trustees on Feb. 23 voted to issue the contract to Suburban General Construction, Inc., a firm based in LaGrange Park, which submitted a bid proposal for $949,407.50, coming in more than $20,000 under the engineer’s estimate. Another contractor submitted a bid for just over $1 million.
Brookfield will cover 20% of the cost of the project, with 80% of the cost being covered by federal funding in the form of a grant from the Surface Transportation Program, which is administered by the Central Council of Mayors. That means Brookfield will only be on the hook for about $190,000.
The project will see a six-inch water main along the east side of Maple Avenue that is more than 80 years old abandoned in order to shift its services to a 12-inch water main along the west side of the street, which is only about 25 years old, according to a village memo. The move will allow Brookfield to remove the redundant, older water main and reduce future maintenance costs.
The scope of improvements includes removing the older water main’s connections to the village water system, transferring water service lines and fire hydrants to the other water main or installing new ones along it, and removing and repatching the roadway in order to access the water system.
The contract calls for the work to be completed “substantially” by May 15.
At the meeting, Dan O’Malley, a project manager at Hancock Engineering, Brookfield’s contracted engineering firm, told officials he recommended moving forward with the project as another — a project to resurface Maple Avenue from Brookfield Avenue to 31st Street — has an uncertain future.
O’Malley attributed the resurfacing project’s temporary pause to what he called a “lengthy and public legal dispute” between the Illinois Department of Transportation and the apparent low bidder on the project, a Hillside firm called Builders Paving LLC.
“IDOT has not awarded any projects to Builders [Paving] since late 2024. They’ve been at a standstill while these legal disputes continue,” O’Malley said. “We are still working with village staff to try to determine what effect this may have on the resurfacing, what effect it would have in terms of schedule and the funding that’s been committed for this project from the STP.”
It is not immediately clear when Builders Paving submitted its bid for the project, although trustees in October 2025 approved an agreement with IDOT to confirm the department’s 80% share of the costs, which total about $2,800,000, leaving Brookfield’s 20% share at about $560,000.
In February, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that IDOT had paused awarding new contract to Builders Paving in late 2024 to investigate whether the company had ties to Sebastian “Sam” Palumbo.
Palumbo has been banned by IDOT from construction projects within Illinois since 1999, when he went to prison alongside one of his brothers and their father in relation to a federal fraud case.
According to the Sun-Times, Brookfield’s village engineer Derek Treichel, of Hancock, said the firm had been planning to start the resurfacing work in April but now has no estimate of a launch date. He said IDOT was resistant to the suggestion that it proceed with awarding the project to the next-lowest bidder after Builders Paving, which came in around $14,000 higher in total, and that the delay is causing concerns around potentially rising costs.
“[W]e don’t even know if it’ll happen this year,” he told the Sun-Times.
Brookfield’s project is one of four IDOT contracts that Builders came in as the lowest bidder for but that have not seen movement due to the legal disputes. Altogether, they total about $5.7 million, according to the Sun-Times.
