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Hinsdale awards what it hopes will be last contracts for new parking garage, nearly $250,000 for landscaping and waterproofing

Government agencies like to point out when they work cooperatively on a project, but Hinsdale village officials will not be celebrating anytime soon their partnership with School District 181 to build the parking deck next to Hinsdale Middle School.

“I really feel the school district abused us in this process,” Hinsdale Village President Thomas Cauley, Jr., said Tuesday after the village board approved spending $118,300 on waterproofing and $130,900 on landscaping for the upper level of the two-story garage.

With a price tag of $9.6 million, the two-level parking garage, which is expected to open next month, is costing the village a lot more than the village board expected in February 2017 when it decided to build a garage with about 315 spaces to share with the middle school.

At that time, the estimated cost was $4.5 million, but it took more than two years for the village and Hinsdale Clarendon Hills School District 181 to sign an agreement on the details of the project.

Officials of the village and the school district disagreed vehemently on what the weight-bearing capacity of the deck should be.

Based on its engineers’ evaluation, the village proposed the garage be built to support up to 50 pounds per square foot, but the school district insisted on 100 pounds per square foot in certain sections, per the recommendations of its experts.

After meeting with an independent mediator, the village, as Cauley said, “capitulated to have the deck built,” and paid approximately $500,000 more for the 100 pounds per square foot design.

“The issue of the landscaping to my mind is even more outrageous,” Cauley said. School district officials want large bushes and trees planted on the deck, he said, which necessitated concrete planters deep enough to hold sufficient dirt for the roots of trees and bushes.

The school staff and visitors will be able to walk directly from the upper level of the deck into the school. Although, the main entrance to the new middle school currently appears to be on the south side facing Third Street, district officials have said that is the back entrance because that is where the school buses drop off and pick up the students.

The main entrance to the school will definitely be from the parking deck, School Board President Margaret Kleber said.

On May 19, the village board awarded a contract to Breezy Hill Nursery in Wisconsin for up to $130,900, the lowest of three bids received, to landscape six planters that will line the south and west sides of the deck and for some plantings along Garfield Street. Some of the planters are as long as 60-feet and 4 to 6 feet wide, Village Trustee Neale Byrnes said.

“The level of landscaping on the deck will be far greater than the school district put in around the rest of the school, which is very, very scant,” Byrnes said. Breezy Hill’s bid includes a year of maintenance of the plantings.

Cauley said the village had to redesign the “underbelly” of the deck to support the concrete planters and install a system to drain them.

The village also is paying about $118,000 for waterproofing, which includes installing a waterproof membrane in the planters and installing an expansion joint where the parking deck abuts the school.

“We agreed to pay this to get the deck done, but I think the school district did a disservice to the community by demanding we put in these very expensive and unnecessary planter boxes,” Cauley said.

Although the village, not the school district, is paying for the landscaping and planters, Cauley pointed out that many of District 181’s residents live in Hinsdale, so the money comes from the same pockets. District 181, however, also includes Clarendon Hills and parts of Burr Ridge.

Kleber said it’s ironic that village officials continue “to publicly berate District 181 when it is the district’s cooperation that has enabled the village to solve its serious and long-standing shortage of downtown parking.”

The school district had planned to build a parking lot for its staff and visitors. Village officials saw the construction of a new middle school adjacent to the downtown as a great opportunity to build a parking garage that could be used by both the school and the people coming to shop and dine in downtown Hinsdale.

The lower level of the garage will be open to the public. The upper level will be used for school staff during the school day and available to the public in the evenings and weekends.

District 181 agreed to pay $1,308,000 as its share of the garage, regardless of the final cost.

“To claim that District 181 has not been a collaborative partner in the construction of the parking deck is simply false,” Kleber said.

“Both parties signed an intergovernmental agreement in 2018, which included detailed construction specifications. Once the village began to understand the overall cost of the project, it approached the district with a request to change the mutually agreed upon specifications,” Kleber said. “District 181 agreed to reduce the original structural capacity of the deck, to cut out certain architectural elements and to scale back the landscaping plan. The village signed off on these cost-saving modifications as well, but they now complain about the deal they made.”