ELMHURST, IL – No one at this week’s Elmhurst City Council meeting said the new Metra station would not happen.
But a couple of officials threw out the possibility it would not, particularly if the city loses outside grants.
The project’s estimated costs have nearly doubled to $44 million over the last four years. And it continually gets delayed.
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In January, officials said the city may go out to bid in June for the train station. But no one has indicated lately that that would occur.
The station came up a few times during Monday’s council meeting. Mayor Scott Levin brought it up in the context of proposals for a new police station, which also would cost tens of millions of dollars.
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He opened the meeting, which was about the capital budgeting process, by saying it was not about specific projects.
“We are not going to talk about specific priorities whether it’s going to be the train station vs. the police station vs. lead pipe removal or whatever,” Levin said.
Later in the meeting, the mayor said the police station was a higher priority for him than the train station.
“But if there’s $20 million in grants that are going to go away because we make it a No. 2 priority, then I would look at them differently,” he said.
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Alderman Michael Bram also referred to the train station.
“We have tens of millions of dollars for the train station,” Bram said. “If all of those grant dollars went away tomorrow, some of the council might want to continue the train station because it’s a priority for them. Others might not want to because those are big dollars, so they might want to put in (a request) and say, ‘OK, we’re removing this for the time being.'”
Levin said that if the grants went away, he did not know if anyone would call for the city to spend more than $40 million for a new Metra station.
“Maybe we would, maybe we wouldn’t,” he said.
The $44 million estimate, which came out late last year, was nearly $4 million more than a year earlier.
In summer 2020, officials estimated the cost at $25 million. That’s a difference of nearly $20 million in 3½ years.
The station project is expected to include warming shelters, a pedestrian tunnel, a platform reconstruction and surface parking improvements.
The current station, which is considered undersized for its ridership, is the fourth busiest in the Metra system. It was built in the 1960s and updated in the 1980s.
Projections show that the station’s weekday boarding will increase by a quarter by 2038.
The city has several partners in the project – the Department of Transportation, Metra, Union Pacific and the Pace bus agency.
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