DuPage County Forest Preserve plans major renovation of its maintenance campus near Warrenville
The teams tasked with maintaining much of DuPage County’s green spaces work from a campus on the edge of the Blackwell Forest Preserve.
The site includes garages, a 1930s frame barn and other old buildings. This relatively neglected area of one of the county’s most popular nature preserves is set for major redevelopment – a project that could cost tens of millions of dollars.
After about a year of planning, architects and Forest Service officials have drawn up ambitious plans for new facilities to support the county’s lands and natural resources divisions – a sprawling operation responsible for maintaining thousands of acres of land, miles of trails and waterways, recreation areas, roads and parking lots throughout the county.
“There’s just not enough space and appropriate room to really do the work at the level that we think we’re going to achieve with this campus modernization,” said Daniel Hebreard, president of the DuPage County Forest Preserve.
Current cost estimates for a property and natural resources management building, garage and nursery operations building are $36.9 million, plus $7 million for contingencies and intensification.
The Conservation Commission has selected Woodhouse Tinucci Architects, the architectural firm of Morton Arboretum, to prepare the final design, permitting and tender documents for the redevelopment of the Mack Road campus.
“We know it’s overdue in some ways,” said Daniel Hebreard, president of the DuPage County Forest Preserve, of a planned overhaul of the county’s maintenance campus in Blackwell.
Joe Lewnard/[email protected]
“Now is the right time to undertake this project,” Hebreard said, because “we have buildings that have far exceeded their life expectancy.”
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The campus is centrally located and has good access to major roads, allowing teams to start their day in Blackwell and then disperse to other conservation areas. However, the existing buildings only house or provide space for around 25% of the fleet’s vehicles.
“The ones that they house are so tightly packed into the facility that every morning the workers have to drive one or sometimes four vehicles out to get to the vehicle they’re using that day,” Andy Tinucci, a principal in the county’s architectural office, told the Forest Conservation Board in July. “It really takes up valuable time, but it’s also really dangerous.”
According to a 2022 report by an engineering and architectural firm, there is limited indoor storage for vehicles and equipment at the conservation district’s maintenance campus.
Joe Lewnard/[email protected]
A storage barn on the Forest Conservation District’s maintenance campus dates back to the 1930s.
Joe Lewnard/[email protected]
The campus has been surveyed several times since the early 2000s, and a 2007 report by Knight Engineers and Architects concluded that the buildings had lost their usefulness due to their deteriorating condition.
“The county’s natural resource management sites and facilities are dilapidated, undersized, inefficient, lack the best safety precautions, do not meet future needs to adapt to changing equipment and technology to improve operations, and are essentially obsolete,” said Kevin Horsfall, the county’s planning and development director.
Some of the buildings were constructed with a barnwood frame and metal roofs.
“They are in varying states of disrepair,” Tinucci said. “The district has used them, inherited them, maintained them … but they are falling apart.”
The plans
The architects have redesigned the campus with sustainability and more efficient workflows in mind. The proposal calls for a main garage, workshop and office complex to be built on the northwest corner of the site. Motor vehicles will be stored indoors to extend their lifespan. And a new internal service driveway will connect the east and west sides of the campus.
Plans also include a new building for seed storage, processing and cultivation, as well as a propagation greenhouse on the south side of Mack Road.
“We have a great team of volunteers at the preserve who bring the seed back to us so we can process more of it,” Hebreard said, adding that the district will now have more seed to trade with other companies and use in areas where “we want to see natural resource restoration.”
The district plans to finance the project with grants, donations and by issuing bonds. The district has already issued a bond that will be fully paid off in 2025, allowing it to issue new bonds to finance the capital investments.
If authorities approve the project, construction could begin next summer and take about a year and a half to complete.
