Street improvement projects in Elburn’s 2023-24 budget, new police station out after failed referendum

The Elburn Village Hall is currently also home to the Elburn Police Department.

The Elburn Village Board approved the 2023-24 fiscal budget at its April 16 meeting with two items deleted – the $9.9 million of revenue the village would have received from the sale of bonds for the new police station and budgeted expenditures of $5.4 million for the station’s architectural work and the first year’s construction costs.

With those omissions, the 2023-24 budget is $7.4 million.

The police station referendum failed in the April 4 consolidated election with 62% of the voters rejecting the proposal.

Elburn Police Chief Nick Sikora said he will be getting together with the project’s task force in the next month to begin exploring other options, including looking at other possible funding sources and evaluating ways to scale back the costs of the building.

“We’re going back to the drawing board,” Sikora said.

Now, the big-ticket item in the budget is $1.8 million to pay for street work, including resurfacing, reconstruction of specific streets, villagewide patching and crack sealing and more.

This is year three of major street work identified in an evaluation of the condition of village streets and the development of a plan to get the work done, Village President Jeff Walter said.

“The plan has worked out very well,” Walter said.

The improvement project will include replacing the manhole cover linings, Walter said. He said he hopes this will help prevent stormwater from getting into the sanitary sewer system during heavy rains, a problem the village has been experiencing.

Walter said street work has been a large expense. However, he said the village has been extremely frugal in recent years, resulting in a surplus of available funds. In addition, a few years ago the village increased the local sales tax by 1%, with half of the additional money collected used for parks and half for street work.

Other expenditures in the budget include additional staffing, a building inspector/code compliance enforcer for Building and Zoning and an additional full-time police officer.

Public Works will spend $110,000 to buy two trucks – one with a snowplow and a larger, heavy-duty dump truck – and $20,000 for sidewalk work.