Naperville City Council delayed the transition to Phase II of Ryan Companies’ concept creation for the Fifth Avenue development.
Several councilmembers and public speakers voiced concern for the unknown direction of the DuPage Children’s Museum as a reason to pause the project.
“The two initial concepts presented in late August do not address the needs of DCM,” said DuPage Children’s Museum Board President Mark Trembacki. “One option presents a series of safety and other concerns, while the second scenario removes us from the site completely.”
While Concept A includes the museum, it eliminates most of the building’s on site parking. Concept B moves the DCM to an unspecified location in favor of retail space.
The dais voted to create a working group of councilmembers, children’s museum representatives and other experts to come up with a plan for the museum in the next 60 days.
Council hopes enough of the other concerns with the initial designs will be ironed out by the time they revisit the discussion on October 16.
Mayor Steve Chirico and other council members said there needed to be additional parking on the south side of the tracks for commuters. Other issues included building height, and density of apartments.
“If you take the 400 units and divide that by the 13 acres, you come up with around 31 units an acre and I don’t know any place in town that’s 31 units an acre,” said Naperville resident Dick Furstenau. “If you take 200 out, you’re at 15 and 15 is what we would call a high density. But 31 is out of the question unless you’re going to start building skyscrapers and that’s what this thing amounts to.”
Some councilmembers and members of the public said they would like to see more diverse concepts for the property before entering Phase II.
“I would like to see maybe some concepts that are distinct and distinguished from each other,” said Councilman Benjamin White. “If you can come up with something that gives us some more options as far as what you can come up with. A and B there are more similarities than there are differences.”
While Phase I of the concept creation involves multiple concepts, phase ii is the refinement of one concept.
“Your next step is to wind this down into one working concept,” said Councilwoman Rebecca Boyd-Obarski. “I don’t believe you have enough direction from us yet to identify one working concept.”
Naperville News 17’s Casey Krajewski reports.
