Aurora officials are working on a new measure that would strengthen the city’s ability to keep vacant buildings from deteriorating and becoming blighted.
The proposal will likely be brought forward to the City Council in May, said Carrie Anne Ergo, Aurora chief of staff.
She said it would amend laws already on the books regarding vacant properties, allowing city inspectors more access sooner when a building is vacant. It also would “add safeguards” to make property owners take care of a building that is vacant more than 90 days, she said.
“It would allow us to take action sooner,” Ergo said.
Mayor Tom Weisner alluded to the proposal in his State of the City address Thursday, although it is still being worked on.
Keeping vacant buildings from deteriorating, and getting buildings redeveloped or torn down, has become a key goal of Weisner’s. The city has been negotiating deadlines into recent agreements with building owners.
When the Dreyer Medical Clinic recently announced it would build a new clinic on the northwest side of town, city officials pushed for a deadline on the fate of the building it will leave on West Galena Boulevard. Dreyer will have a year after leaving to either have a developer with a project for the site or tear the building down.
A similar deadline will be put on the Aurora Public Library building, at Stolp Avenue and Benton Street, when it is vacated. The new library two blocks away will open in June.
The city has had many problems with vacated buildings, Aurora officials said. Recently, it spent about $1.2 million to tear down the old West Aurora High School building on Blackhawk Street. It originally was to be turned into housing, but the developer went bankrupt during the recession. The city was stuck with tearing it down after it deteriorated.
Another problem property has been the old Copley Hospital site on Lincoln Avenue on the near East Side. It is deteriorating, and has become a danger, Aurora officials said. The city has gone to court to try to get the building torn down.
There are two other properties that are likely tear-downs – the former Masonic Temple building at Lincoln and Downer Place, and the former Visiting Nurses Association building on Downer, across the street from City Hall, city officials said.
The Masonic Temple was used as a banquet facility for a while, but has so deteriorated it is impossible to be renovated, according to the city.
The mayor also announced a success story for rehabilitation at the State of the City address. The former St. Charles Hospital on New York Street, across from McCarty Park – most recently known as Fox River Pavilion but long-closed – could become a 164-unit senior housing complex, redeveloped by Chicago-based VeriGreen Development LLC.
The long-closed building was recently included in the expansion of a state-sanctioned redevelopment zone, the same one that helped with the development of RiverEdge Park in Aurora. City officials said the tax credits available to the developer because of the old building being in that zone covered a gap in funding needed to make the development happen.
The old Copley site is within that zone now, too, in case there is a new effort to save it.
