The Aurora City Council is set to vote on an $884,445 contract with an Aurora firm to fill in underground vaults along Broadway in the city’s downtown.
The contract would be with Aurora-based M/M Peters Construction, Inc., which was the lowest of five bidders to do the work. Aldermen put the item on the consent agenda for Tuesday’s regular City Council meeting, meaning it is likely to be approved.
The contract includes an extra $20,000 to install soil cell systems to plant trees at several of the vault locations.
The vaults to be filled in would be along three blocks of Broadway, from Benton Street to New York Street.
The work is set to be done in anticipation of the upcoming Broadway streetscape and reconstruction project.
City officials are planning to replace outdated utility infrastructure, including replacing aging water mains, removing lead water service lines and separating the city’s stormwater collection system from the sanitary sewer system. Filling in the vaults would be included in this work.
The streetscape plan includes possibly eliminating some on-street parking and enlarging sidewalks along Broadway.
The city received a $3 million grant for the Broadway project from the Rebuild Illinois Downtowns and Main Streets Capital Program that was designed to support commercial corridors that saw a slump during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Vaults connected to downtown buildings are a part of the city’s past, when constant flooding of the first floors on Stolp Avenue and other parts of downtown forced the city to, in essence, raise the island and shoreline downtown, making what would have been the second floors of buildings the new ground floors.
That made the former first floors of some buildings become basements, resulting in old former entrances and vaults in those basements.
For a while the vaults were used for utility lines, including the one-time steam utility which brought each downtown building steam lines it could tap into for heating.
The steam lines also were once used to heat downtown sidewalks in the winter to melt, rather than remove, snow. The vaults also were used for deliveries, particularly coal for coal-burning heaters.
The city has had a longstanding vault-filling program for older properties downtown.
slord@tribpub.com
