Sycamore City Council to meet in Streamwood Saturday

SYCAMORE — On Saturday morning, the Sycamore City Council will hold a special council meeting inside a fire station in Streamwood as city officials continue to mull proposed plans for a new facility.

The meeting will be held at 9 a.m. Saturday at the Streamwood Fire Station, 1204 S. Park Ave. Streamwood. Sycamore City Manager Michael Hall used the last 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 a half-century ago.

“We know that in 1957, Fire Station 1 was built. It housed the volunteer fire department, the police department and city hall. In 1956, there were eight volunteer fire departments, according to city records. On April 30, 1956, the city council discussed plans from an architect to build a new building. Five months later, on September 18 (1956), they approved funding for the new station in the amount of $253,750,” Hall said. “In (1957), the general fund was $88,301.25 – which is astonishing to me.”

Nearly 70 years later, Sycamore officials are now wondering what to do with the former fire station, which firefighters have used without air conditioning throughout the building for the past two summers.

In 2017, Sycamore hired Kluber Architects to conduct a maintenance study, but deferred major recommended projects. In April 2022, a few months after Hall took over as city manager, Kluber Architects was again hired for a deferred maintenance study.

Hall said Kluber was rehired because he wanted to know if the current fire station was the right size, located in the right place and had the right layout.

“They found out 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 at 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 southeast part of the city for the project. Hall said the donation saved the city between $250,000 and $1 million.

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

On Saturday, Sycamore city councilors — and anyone else who attends, it’s a public meeting — will get a sneak peek at what the new fire station will look like with a tour of the Streamwood Fire Station, designed by FGM Architects.

“We did a tour at Streamwood Station. Their station is 2,194 square feet, ours is 19,000, so when you go in there, know that our station is 4,164 square feet smaller than theirs,” Hall said. “But the layout is pretty much the same, I think where they’re bigger is probably in their day space, and the offices, of course, they have a lot more offices than we do. So just to keep that in mind, we’ll highlight that as we go through our tour and show you what the differences are.”