Some seven years after chemically contaminated soil was found at the Andrew Corp.’s former site in Orland Park, the property has received clearance from state environmental regulators to be redeveloped.
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But CommScope, which now owns the 73-acre site, hasn’t decided when or if it’s going to put the land back on the market.
Before the polluted soil was discovered and the economic recession arrived, a sale of the property, 10500 W. 153rd St., just north of the 153rd Street Metra station, was in the works. Homebuilder Kimball Hill planned the Cherry Ridge subdivision with 230 single-family homes, villas and townhouses.
In late summer, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency told CommScope that the land had been sufficiently scrubbed to allow for commercial or industrial use but not for housing. A spokesman for CommScope, Rick Aspan, said the company has no plans for further remediation of the property.
CommScope, like Andrew a maker of equipment for wireless communication networks, bought Andrew in 2007, the same year that Andrew closed its Orland Park operations and built a plant in Joliet, which CommScope later closed. The 600,000 square feet of office and manufacturing space in Orland Park was demolished a couple of years ago.
In August 2005, Andrew announced a $28.5 million deal with Kimball Hill to sell the homebuilder property on the north and south sides of 153rd Street, and in 2007 Orland Park rezoned it for residential use.
The recession forced Kimball Hill to liquidate, and another developer, M/I Homes, picked up the 30 acres on the south side of 153rd, just west of the Metra station, and built Sheffield Square, a townhouse development.
Kimball Hill backed out of the deal to buy the 73 acres on the north side of 153rd Street in June 2007, forfeiting $2.5 million in earnest money. Andrew, before being acquired by CommScope, hired The Staubach Co. to market that acreage to potential developers.
However, in late 2008, when another buyer had been lined up, testing uncovered the soil contamination, and the property was pulled off the market. That land remains zoned for residential use, despite homes not able to be built there unless more extensive cleanup work is done.
Orland Park officials haven’t talked with CommScope about the site or what the village wants to see there, although the original plan of building homes is still the preferred use, village spokesman Joe La Margo said. The property is just south of the Crystal Tree golf course community.
Aspan said CommScope hasn’t made a decision on the property, such as whether it will look for a buyer or when that process might begin.
Now that homebuilding is starting to rebound, with smaller-scale developments popping up in some southwest suburbs including Orland Park, the assumption is the land would again be attractive for housing, particularly given its proximity to the Metra station. Although Kimball Hill had agreed to pay $16.5 million for the 73 acres, it’s not clear what the current value is because the recession recalibrated real estate prices.
CommScope publicly disclosed the tainted soil in the summer of 2010, and a pilot project to clean the contamination, which was confined to a fairly small area, started later that year. CommScope would not say how much the cleanup cost, Aspan said.
Equipment such as coaxial cable and antennas was manufactured for decades at the plant, and manufacturers, including Andrew, used chemicals such as trichloroethane to clean and remove grease from metals, but the use of those chemicals was phased out due to health concerns. Andrew had said it used trichloroethane to clean antennas, a process that was done outside the factory.
Early in the process, Andrew, in a letter to nearby residents, said there had been “little or no potential for the public to have extended contact” with the chemicals. Tests of soil taken from the yards of homes close by showed no contamination.
Also, initial testing didn’t turn up any evidence of contamination in an 11-acre pond on the property, called Lake Andrew, and there are no wells on or near the former Andrew site.
The Illinois EPA said an abundance of clay under the soil helped isolate the contamination, acting as a natural barrier to any chemicals spreading onto adjacent sites.
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