CRYSTAL LAKE – McHenry County College trustees recently approved reconstructing two of its parking lots, but some auxiliary expenses were too much for two trustees who rejected the project.
At a Committee of the Whole meeting last month, the MCC board voted, 5-2, to rebuild parking lots B and D for a cost not to exceed $2.3 million.
Trustees Ron Parrish and Dennis Adams turned it down.
Parrish called the spending “out of control.”
“These ancillaries go on and on,” Parrish said at the January Committee of the Whole meeting. “That’s not our need right now.”
Adams preferred a Band-Aid fix.
“I think we could patch it and make it go another year,” Adams said. “When you look at the private sector, there’s a lot of bad parking lots because of this economy.”
College officials argued that because the parking lots already are being dug into, it was a good time to include other repairs at the same time.
“These other projects make sense to do as long as you’ve got everything torn up. ... As long as you’re buying asphalt and digging it out,” MCC President Vicky Smith said at the meeting. “It would be much more costly if you did it two years from now.”
The parking lot cost includes refurbishing a storm sewer draining system that runs through the lot, completing a sanitary line to the C and D buildings and installing LED parking lot lights.
The scope of the project was expanded to include resurfacing Ring Road, installing a plaza at the Building B entrance, basic landscaping and constructing a safe drop-off area in parking lot C where the day care is located.
The project also includes installing a water hydrant to the athletic playing fields. During last summer’s drought, the college had to bring in a tanker to water the infield before games, and then spent $28,000 to replace the ruined ball field’s playing grass. The hydrant portion of this project amounted to $23,000 of the total project.
The project costs were $200,000 higher before trustees nixed a plan that installed charging stations for electric vehicles. Instead, trustees preferred to install conduit where charging stations for these vehicles could be in the future.
The cost includes planning and design. Funding for the project came from the college’s deferred maintenance fund.
