The crews tasked with caring for much of the green space in DuPage County operate out of a campus on the edge of the Blackwell Forest Preserve.
The grounds are dotted with garages, a timber-framed barn from the 1930s and other aging structures. That relatively overlooked area of one of the most popular forest preserves in the county is in line for a major overhaul — a project that could cost tens of millions of dollars.
After about a year of design work, architects and forest preserve officials have detailed ambitious plans for new facilities to support the district’s grounds and natural resources departments — a sprawling operation responsible for maintaining thousands of acres of land, miles of trails and waterways, recreational sites, roads and parking lots across the county.
“There’s just not enough space and appropriate space to really get the job done to the level that we think we will thrive at with this new campus update,” DuPage County Forest Preserve President Daniel Hebreard said.
The current estimates for a grounds and natural resources management operations building, garage and nursery operations building are pegged at $36.9 million, with an additional $7 million for contingency and escalation.
Forest preserve commissioners have hired Woodhouse Tinucci Architects, the firm behind the Morton Arboretum visitor center, to prepare the final design, permitting and bidding documents for the revamp of the campus off Mack Road.
“We know it’s in some ways overdue,” DuPage County Forest Preserve President Daniel Hebreard said of a proposed overhaul of the district’s maintenance campus within Blackwell.
Joe Lewnard/jlewnard@dailyherald.com
“The time is now to do this project,” Hebreard said, because “we have buildings that are well past their life expectancy.”
Current issues
The campus is centrally located and has easy access to major roads, allowing crews to start their day at Blackwell and fan out to other preserves. However, the existing structures only house or provide room for about 25% of the fleet’s vehicles.
“Those that they do house are stuffed so tightly into the facility that every morning, crews need to back one vehicle out or sometimes four vehicles out to get to the vehicle that they’re using this day,” Andy Tinucci, a principal of the district’s architecture firm, told the forest preserve board in July. “That takes really valuable time, but it’s also really dangerous.”
There is limited indoor storage for vehicles and equipment at the forest preserve district’s maintenance campus, according to a 2022 report by an engineering and architectural firm.
Joe Lewnard/jlewnard@dailyherald.com
A storage barn on the forest preserve district’s maintenance campus dates to the 1930s.
Joe Lewnard/jlewnard@dailyherald.com
The campus has been studied multiple times since the early 2000s. A report by Knight Engineers and Architects in 2007 concluded that the buildings had outgrown their usefulness due to deteriorating conditions.
“The district’s grounds and natural resource management facilities are dilapidated, undersized, inefficient and do not reflect the best safety measures or meet the future needs to adapt to changes in equipment and technologies to improve operations and are essentially obsolete,” said Kevin Horsfall, the district’s planning and development director.
Some of the structures were built with a pole barn wood frame and metal roofing.
“They’re in various states of disrepair,” Tinucci said. “The district has been using them, inheriting them, maintaining them … but they’re falling apart.”
The plans
Architects redesigned the campus with an eye toward sustainability and a more efficient workflow. Under the proposal, a main garage, workshop and office complex would be built on the northwest corner of the site. Motorized vehicles would be stored indoors to increase their longevity. And a new interior service drive would connect the east and west sides of the campus.
Plans also call for a new seed storage, processing and nursery building as well as a propagating greenhouse on the south side of Mack Road.
“We have such a great team of volunteers through the forest preserve, and they bring the seed back, and we’ll be able to process more,” said Hebreard, adding the district will have more seed to trade with other entities and use in areas where “we want to see natural resource restoration done.”
The district plans to fund the project with grants, donations and by issuing bonds. The district has a previous bond issuance that will be fully repaid in 2025, which will allow it to issue new bonds to pay for the capital investment.
If officials decide to do the project, construction could start next summer and take about a year and a half to complete.