The project to build the first new police station in Wilmette since 1968 is now estimated to cost $51.4 million, village officials have said.
The village does not yet have an architect or architectural plans for the police station, which will be the village’s largest public facility investment in the last 50 years, according to village staff.
Officials much earlier suggested the station would cost $34 million, but Village Manager Michael Braiman said that was a pre-pandemic placeholder figure.
The $51.4 million figure is considered by village staff to be a high-level preliminary budget
estimate because there is still much yet to be determined about the project. No location has been selected for where the new station will be built.
The Village Board at its Sept. 19 meeting discussed what the new building will contain and what it will allow the police department to achieve. The current police station is roughly 20,000 square feet and village leaders plan for the new building to more than double that to facilitate modern features that weren’t a priority in the 1960s such as functional training spaces, adequate locker rooms for female officers and community spaces.
Resident Dan Kaplan expressed concern that the board hasn’t done enough to make sure that the police department’s needs can be addressed by adding on to the current police station at 710 Ridge Road.
Village Trustee Stephen Leonard said the village evaluated renovating the current station but they found it would limit what the department could do and wouldn’t save much money.
“After all this work and after all the investment that we’re going to make, accepting
programmatic limitations ahead of time, planning in programmatic limitations in my mind doesn’t make sense,” Leonard said. “I want to make sure the public understands that this is not something we’ve taken lightly. We have evaluated this, we haven’t fully designed something because that would cost a tremendous amount of money.”
“We’re going with the new construction alternative,” Leonard said.
Plans for a new police station have been in the works since the early 2000s. Since last spring the village has hired three consultants to assist with the project. FGM Architects was hired to conduct a space needs analysis, Williams Architects was hired to conduct a peer review of the space needs analysis and CCS International was hired to assist with pre-design services, including selecting the building’s architect.
The village has launched a website dedicated to the project with regular updates and details at https://www.wilmette.gov/659/Police-Station-Project-Updates.
The Village Board will again discuss the police station project at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Nov, 14. Braiman said the village board is expected to discuss the building’s location at that meeting.