Sycamore City Council to meet in Streamwood Saturday

SYCAMORE – The Sycamore City Council will host a special meeting Saturday morning inside a fire station in Streamwood, as city officials continue to mull over proposed plans for a new facility.

The meeting will be held at 9 a.m. in Streamwood Fire Station, 1204 S. Park Ave. Streamwood. Sycamore City manager Michael Hall used the most recent City Council meeting to preface the special meeting.

He said he did some reading to find out how much the city paid for what it calls Fire Station No. 1, 421 DeKalb Ave., when it was authorized more than half a century ago.

“We know in 1957 that the Fire Station 1 was built,” Hall said. “It was a volunteer firefighter, police department and City Hall, and it housed all three of those. In 1956, there were eight volunteer firefighters, according to the city records. April 30, 1956, the City Council discussed an architect’s plans to build a new building. Five months later, on Sept. 18 [1956] they approved the funding for the new station at $253,750. In [1957] the general fund was $88,301.25 – amazing to me.”

Approaching 70 years later, Sycamore officials are now grappling with what to do with the aged station, which fire officials have used without building-wide air conditioning for the past two summers.

In 2017, Sycamore hired Kluber Architects, which conducted a maintenance study, but differed on the major recommended projects. In April 2022, a few months after Hall was brought on as city manager, Kluber Architects was again hired for a different maintenance study.

Hall said Kluber was rehired because he wanted to know if the current fire station is the correct size, in the proper location and has the ideal layout.

“They found out that the size, location and efficiency of the building was not there, so the question became what is the cost to build a new fire station?” Hall said during the July 15 City Council meeting.

In August 2023, FGM Architects was hired to design a new fire station for the city. In January Ideal Industries donated land in the city’s southeast for the endeavor. Hall said that donation saved the city between $250,000 and $1 million.

The fire station designed by FGM Architects would be 19,030 square feet and cost an estimated $7.6 million, but the total project could cost as high as $10.4 million, Hall said July 15.

On Saturday, Sycamore Alderpersons – and anyone who attends, as it’s a public meeting – will get a glimpse of what the new fire station will look like by touring the Streamwood Fire Station, designed by FGM Architects.

“We have a tour set up at Streamwood station,” Hall said. “Their station is 23,194 square feet, ours is 19,000, so when you do go there, realize that our station is 4,164 feet smaller than their station. But the layout is roughly the same, I think where they’re bigger is probably their day area, offices for sure, they have a lot more offices than we do. So just to keep that in mind. We’ll point that out as we go around in the tour and show you kind of what the differences are.”