The city of Aurora is taking early steps to tear down its Central Garage now that operations previously housed there have been moved to the new Public Works facility.
Heading before the Aurora City Council next week is a contract for a third party to do a “comprehensive site investigation” of the property at 720 N. Broadway, which used to house the city’s Streets Division. Earlier studies found some contamination, which prompted the comprehensive investigation, Capital Projects Manager Ian Wade told the Aurora City Council’s Infrastructure and Technology Committee late last month.
“Nothing unexpected, but it definitely indicated that there was this additional work that was required,” he said of the early findings.
Aurora recently consolidated multiple buildings’ worth of fleet operations into a single building: the new Public Works facility at 2185 Liberty St. which opened last year. The previous three buildings — Central Garage along with one for the Electrical Department and one for the Water and Sewer Department — needed about $5.3 million in repairs, officials have said.
About $4.2 million of those repairs were needed at the Central Garage, and so it was said at the time that the building would be torn down. The nearly 8-acre site, which runs along the Fox River and nearby bike trails, was considered a prime development location.
Now the city is moving forward with fully decommissioning and demolishing the Central Garage to get that property ready to market for future development, Wade said at the Infrastructure and Technology Committee meeting on Jan. 26.
Then on Tuesday at a meeting of the City Council Committee of the Whole, Ald. Carl Franco, 5th Ward, asked if there was a plan for the site once the building was demolished and remediated. Brian Caputo, director of fiscal integrity and operations management, said the city didn’t have anything concrete and that it was still being looked into.
A phase one review of the site has already taken place, according to Wade.
Initial phase two investigations found contaminates in samples taken at the site, although the results don’t mean that there are “alarms going off” — the findings were to be expected from a site that had been used for fueling and similar things, he said at last month’s Infrastructure and Technology Committee meeting.
So now, the city is looking to have a comprehensive site investigation done by Fehr Graham of Rockford at a cost of around $135,000. That contract is heading for final approval at the Aurora City Council meeting on Tuesday, where it will likely pass since it was placed on the meeting’s consent agenda, which is typically reserved for routine or non-controversial items that are all approved with a single vote.
Aurora also previously had an asbestos and lead paint survey done in 2025, according to a city staff report about the project, and so contracts for work to remove asbestos from the building may come forward for City Council approval later this year.
rsmith@chicagotribune.com
