The Kane County Board voted on Tuesday to spend up to $3 million on the purchase of a new building in Elgin that would help to expand public health services in the area.
While there was no public presentation or discussion on the item before the vote at the board meeting on Tuesday, Kane County Board Chair Corinne Pierog said in a phone call on Friday that the funds will come from Health Department reserve funds built up after it used federal pandemic-era relief funds to pay for some of the department’s salaries and programs over the last few years.
The purchase is not yet finalized but will likely cost less than the approved $3 million, she said.
Kane County currently rents a small office space in Elgin for the Health Department to work out of, but there is very little capacity to serve Elgin-area residents from that space, according to Pierog. She said that the building to be purchased, at 2170 Point Blvd. near the Interstate 90 and Randall Road interchange, will double the Kane County Health Department’s capacity in the Elgin area.
However, the 45,000-square-foot building will not only be used for public health, as it will be shared with extension offices of the Kane County clerk and Court Services, Pierog said.
Once lawyers from both sides have come to a purchase agreement and the building is formally sold to the county, more information will be made available, she said.
According to Pierog, the building’s purchase is part of the county’s long-term plan to consolidate health services at a single campus but offer satellite locations in the county’s major population centers of Aurora and Elgin.
The Kane County Board previously voted down a proposal to use primarily federal pandemic-era relief funds through the American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA, to construct a new $30 million health department headquarters at the Kane County Judicial Center campus in St. Charles.
The department’s current headquarters, which is in Aurora, is aging and no longer has enough space to support the department, county officials previously said.
Despite the board’s vote, a new centralized health department headquarters is still in the county’s long-term plans. The final draft of a Facilities Master Plan presented in May recommended that the county consolidate all of its core services including public health into a single campus — the current Judicial Center campus — and establish satellite offices in Aurora and Elgin over the next 10 years and beyond.
rsmith@chicagotribune.com
