DPW Facility Needs & Site Evaluation

STUDY SCOPE

The Village hired Barrientos Design and Consulting in November 2022 to conduct a needs assessment, site evaluation and conceptual plan for an improved facility. The work was conducted in three phases, each building upon the previous. 

The first phase, Facility Needs, established the building and site design criteria including: establishing DPW’s workflow of operations, defining facility needs, integrating future trends, benchmarking with industry standards, arranging optimal building and site plan, determining sustainability opportunities, and finalizing site selection criteria.

1. Of the many services the Shorewood DPW provides, collections tasks - refuse, yard waste and bulk leaf collections - actually require the largest footprint, due to the 20,000 square feet of space required for the transfer station (Click here to learn more about DPW's transfer station).
2. If DPW employees are to continue to provide the current level of collection services, a transfer station is required. If a future facility does not include a site for a transfer station, service levels will decrease (reduced collection frequency, elimination of some services and/or reduced level of service) OR these services will be privatized.
3. Based on current information, under either of these scenarios, it is likely that vacuum leaf collection would be eliminated and leaves would be bagged for collection. When these services were reviewed in 2016, it was determined that Shorewood employees could perform collections tasks at a lower cost than a private vendor and at a higher level of service.

The second phase, Site Evaluation, involved identifying and screening candidate sites with the Village, along with test-fit site arrangements for each site. Following a top-level review of each site’s benefits and drawbacks, sites were numerically rated for their facility benefits.  

The third phase, Conceptual Planning, took the top three candidate parcels and advanced these to a conceptual design level where Barrientos analyzed site engineering factors such as: historic character,  utility locations and capacity, roadway capacity and traffic impact, topography, soils conditions, history of potential hazardous uses, and a review of the title for any easements or land use restrictions.  In this conceptual phase, the building design was advanced with further definition on specific room layouts, parking counts, heavy equipment selection, site engineering, and yard facility features.