Village Board Looks to the Future with Dempster Street Construction

With work on Dempster Street inching past the one-year mark, many citizens and business owners have grown curious as to the actual amount of progress being made.

Morton Grove Village Engineer Chris Tomich was among the first to speak up Thursday's Dempster Street Construction informational meeting, and for good reason.

“We're in year two of a construction project that was supposed [to be finished in] year one," Tomich said.

Tomich said the redevelopment project, designed to give Dempster Street a facelift between Ferris Avenue and Central Avenue, is continuing at a comfortable pace. He expects construction to cease sometime in July – more than half a year past the original deadline.

Several setbacks, including a number of slow-moving utility relocations and a crippling labor strike have pushed back that deadline until summer. The blizzard that hit the area earlier this month and the cold snap that followed had a minimal impact on progress, he said.

The 45-minute meeting offered a more substantial timeline and several details into the ongoing project, including the scope of the work being done.

“What's left to do is finish up the traffic signals on the north side at four signalized intersections; to plant the trees; to put in the street furniture and trash cans; and that will finish up the north side,” Tomich said. “The south side really hasn't been touched.”

Tomich said work on Dempster's south end will begin soon after the north end is fully completed, with heavier roadway work starting up sometime in May.

Fielding questions from the audience after his presentation, Tomich assured the dozen or so in attendance that the new planters and street furniture would not affect snow removal, which, in recent months, has been and not the village itself.

Another concern was with the new street lamps the village plans on installing along Dempster.

Tomich confirmed that the village will be using high-pressure sodium bulbs in its streetlights, to the chagrin of the audience. High-pressure sodium bulbs emit a warm, orange, almost “Halloween-ish” color, said one attendee, as opposed to the white glow of other models.

Despite the disappointment, Tomich said the sodium bulbs make more sense from an engineering standpoint, and that the lamps carrying the bulbs would be just as pleasing to the eye as any other bulb selection.

Perking up the morale of the room was the Village Board's selection of the type of surface that will coat Dempster in the coming months. The new asphalt roadways the board selected will last about 15 years before needing to be redone, which is a pretty good chunk of time for such a highly trafficked street, Tomich said.

As always, stick with Morton Grove Patch for of the construction on Dempster.