Pardon Our Dust: Village Construction Season Underway

By Village Manager Phil Kiraly 

Construction season is upon us once again. If you’ve stopped downtown recently to visit some of our shops on Park Avenue, you likely noticed the first of our highly visible Community Improvement Program (CIP) projects of the year, the Downtown Brick Paver Restoration Project. I am excited to share that over the course of this five-year project, we will restore (by lifting, re-grading and replacing) over 70,000 square feet of brick pavers in the downtown area, eliminating trip hazards, ponding during rain storms and refreshing our beautiful streetscape.  

But this is just one of the many projects included in Fiscal Year 2019 CIP—we plan to invest approximately $1.7 million into the Village’s sidewalks, street lights, traffic signals, sanitary sewers, water mains, storm sewer outfalls and other infrastructure this year, with a substantial portion of these projects being paid for with the bond funds approved by voters via referendum in 2015. These infrastructure projects are in addition to other major investments in capital assets such as technology at our Water Plant, improvements to training facilities for Public Safety, and a long-planned replacement of the Village’s aging enterprise planning software that will bring efficiencies to our business processes, helping to improve our operations and our customer service. Learn more about investments planned for this year and as part of the $40 million 10-Year CIP overall here.

Trust me, the Village understands that construction can be frustrating and we want to do all we can to help you navigate through the projects – whether that be by physically directing you around construction zones on your way to work, or helping you to better understand how something like a water main replacement project on your street may impact your home.

Along these lines, we recognize the importance that public communications plays in ensuring a smooth construction season. Along with our Public Works and communications teams, I have reviewed feedback we received from residents from last year’s construction season, including your responses to our 2017 CIP Communications survey. That feedback has helped us to make changes in the way we communicate regarding construction projects. We are planning an expanded outreach program to inform residents and businesses of the various construction projects and their potential impacts to you. Broken record time – if you haven’t yet signed up for Glencoe CONNECT or for our bi-weekly Village eNews updates, I strongly encourage you to do so by clicking here. We share a lot of useful information through these communication tools. When you register for Glencoe CONNECT, please be sure to add your family’s cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses as these communication methods are what we use for general weekly construction updates.   

I also encourage you to stay tuned to the 2018 Construction Projects webpage and to scroll through our interactive CIP “story map” which features timelines, project manager contract information and anticipated impacts. And if you’re on social media, you can also look for the weekly construction updates on Facebook, Twitter and Nextdoor.

As the dust settles throughout the construction season, we hope that you will continue to give us feedback—both on the projects themselves and about our communication efforts. Like last year, we will launch a CIP Communications Survey in late summer/early fall so that we can make sure to keep improving our outreach.

Thank you for your patience as these important investments in our community’s infrastructure get underway!