West Aurora School District 129 is looking to sell a 34-acre property that it no longer needs as a potential school site.
The property is in Aurora between Edgelawn Drive and Orchard Road with Prairie Street to the south.
The West Aurora School Board Tuesday night voted 6-0 to declare the property surplus, an initial step in the process to sell the property, district officials said.
The site was originally purchased for construction of a replacement school for Greenman Elementary. However, the district decided to build a new building on the Greenman School site. The district similarly built a new Hill Elementary School on the Hill School site, West Aurora School District Assistant Superintendent of Operations Angie Smith said.
The district is required to declare the property as surplus before it can be sold. A minimum selling price for the property was established at $1.45 million.
“It is a minimum and not what we expect to get,” Smith told the board.
Establishing a minimum selling price allows the district to market the property through a real estate agent if there is not an acceptable bidder in the process, she said. The district has received a nominal amount of rental income from farming on the property over the years, according to Smith.
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“Part of it is wetlands so there is not a huge amount of land for farming,” Smith said at the June 5 board meeting.
The district recently had the property surveyed and appraised. The district does not foresee the need to hold onto the property for a future school site, Smith said.
“We have taken a look at demographic trends and as we have discussed enrollment is declining. Even if enrollment were to increase, this is likely not a place where we would build a school,” Smith said.
For instance, the site is not easily accessible for children to walk to school, she said.
“We do not foresee that we would need this as a school site given what we know about the limited amount of property remaining in our district to build-out,” Smith said. “We are not like some of our neighbors where there is undeveloped property. Most of our property is built-out and what does remain tends to be more commercial and closer to the tollway.”
The district would be best served to place the land back onto the tax rolls, she said.
Selling school property is different than when one sells a home, Smith told the board. The board must first declare it as surplus and then develop parameters for the property including zoning and preferred density. She said the district will look for a use that “benefits the district and is compatible with the neighborhood.”
“We do have the ability to craft a Request for Proposals. We would want to be very specific about being a good neighbor and making sure we get the highest and best value,” Smith told the board.
Selling the property would be a sealed bid process, which means the parcel would be sold to the highest bidder that meets the district’s established parameters, Smith said.
The district proposes to begin the Request for Proposals development process in early summer and post a notice to prospective bidders later in the season. A bid opening is proposed for late summer or early fall.
“We are looking at this proposed timeline as if this were to become residential – which is what we would propose and would anticipate. It would give them (the buyer) time to use the fall to their best advantage before having to put shovels in the ground in the spring,” Smith said earlier this month.
Smith said the district would “definitely look for it to be compatible with the rest of the neighborhood.”
“We don’t want it to be something significantly different,” she said. “We have owned this property for 27 years and at different points of time there have been conversations about things going in that the neighbors were not necessarily a fan of. We are cognizant of that. We would want to be a good neighbor. Obviously residential would blend in with the rest of the neighborhood,” she said.
The Request for Proposals will require board approval as will other parts of the process, Smith said.
“We can reject all bids if for some reason we do not get what we thought we would get. If we do not receive bidders, we would likely regroup,” she said.
The district is required for three consecutive weeks to post public notices in newspapers that the property has been declared surplus and that it is for sale, Smith said.
“Not only are we looking for the best bid but the best bid for the district, neighborhood and city. There are a lot of things we take into consideration as we discuss putting the property back on the tax rolls,” Smith told the board.
Linda Girardi is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.