Evanston City Council is poised to take a step closer to a $3.4 million renovation of the city’s Ecology Center and another $200 million in renovations to other aging city buildings is on the horizon, officials said.
“We have six ‘legacy’ buildings,” said City of Evanston Capital Planning Manager and Engineer Lara Biggs. “These are buildings that have been in use for a long period of time that are sort of experiencing these multiple building system failures.”
She also said the city recently started construction
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on a new $8 million animal shelter to replace the old shelter and ensure the north suburb has a shelter in the decades to come.“Unfortunately previous administrations made decisions to not deal with those things because they didn’t want to deal with the dollar values,” she added. “Now we get into a situation where it’s very possible we could have to shut down buildings if we don’t deal with the challenges we’re experiencing.”
Biggs said the four aging city buildings that need renovations in the short term include the police and fire headquarters in the 900 block of Lake Street, the Public Works service center in the 2000 block of Asbury Avenue, The Lorraine Morton Civic Center in the 2100 block of Ridge Avenue and the Noyes Cultural Arts Center in the 900 block of Noyes Street. She said the city estimates it will cost about $200 million to make the necessary fixes and renovations to those buildings.
“You cannot have a building for 50 or 70 years without having to make some major upgrades,” Biggs explained.
City Council has yet to make a decision on those extensive upgrades, but it is scheduled to take a vote during its July 10 meeting to award a $248,000 engineering contract for preliminary engineering work on the Evanston Ecology Center in the 2000 block of McCormick Blvd, Biggs said.
She said there are serious problems with the subfloor in the center, and a slew of other structural and system issues in the building, which is almost 50 years old. She said the estimated cost to renovate the building and bring it up to code is $3.4 million.
“My take away from the city council is that they just wanted to address the challenges in one shot as that’s most efficient,” she explained. “That is how we’re planning on proceeding. It’s a definite possibility that once they do remove sections of the floor and get into the crawl space … that we could find other things that are also a challenge.”
She also said the city will likely put the construction job out for bid in the next few months and construction could start this winter. If so, the center would reopen next summer.
“The Ecology Center does actually do quite a lot of programming,” said Biggs. “They really are a leader for us in helping to coordinate the sustainability function which is really important to Evanston.”
“We’re working with residents. A lot of the education that they do is just really foundational for moving the needle for the city of Evanston on the sustainability side,” she added. “The center focuses as sort of the hub that the community interaction comes from. We’re running nature camps with children. We’re getting people to do canoeing in the canal. We’re doing trails walks. There’s just a lot of programming that they run.”
Brian L. Cox is a freelance reporter with Pioneer Press.