Aurora is moving forward with an environmental study looking at the site of its Central Garage, which it is planning to one day tear down.
On Tuesday, City Council approved a contract for a third party to do a “comprehensive site investigation” of the property at 720 N. Broadway, which used to house various Public Works divisions including street maintenance, downtown maintenance as well as fleet and equipment services. Earlier studies found some contamination, which prompted the comprehensive investigation, city officials have said.
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 and recently won an award from the Fox Valley branch of the American Public Works Association.
Jason Bauer, Aurora’s director of Public Works, said at Tuesday’s City Council meeting that the project was “very exciting” since his department for the last 40 or more years was in “hand-me-down” buildings that weren’t designed for these types of things and were in bad shape.
The new facility has been “a long time coming,” he said, as people who started 30 years ago were told from day one that a new building was right around the corner.
The department’s 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 working towards fully decommissioning and demolishing the Central Garage to get that property ready to market for future development, Capital Projects Manager Ian Wade told the Aurora City Council’s Infrastructure and Technology Committee on Jan. 26. City officials have said that there are no firm plans for the site yet.
A phase one review of the site has already taken place, and initial phase two investigations found contaminates in samples taken at the site.
But Wade said at the committee meeting last month that these 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.
Now that the contract has been approved by the Aurora City Council, Fehr Graham of Rockford will do a comprehensive site investigation of the Central Garage at a cost of around $135,000.
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
