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Tinley Park to purchase Mental Health Center from state

Chicago Tribune (IL) - 10/24/2014

Oct. 23--Tinley Park trustees have agreed to purchase the multimillion-dollar former Mental Health Center to maintain control over one of the largest vacant properties in Cook County, officials said.

Mayor Ed Zabrocki said he individually polled Village Board members Tuesday and asked if they were willing to spend about $4 million to buy the property from the state of Illinois. The board members unanimously agreed and will vote formally sometime in the coming weeks, he said.

The property, near 183rd Street and Harlem Avenue, spans 280 acres southwest of the village's downtown. Until it was closed in 2012 by Gov. Pat Quinn, it housed the Tinley Park Mental Health Center.

Village officials have had their eye on the property for many years, dating back to Gov. George Ryan's administration, Zabrocki said.

In the 2000s, the village hired a lobbyist to track any potential sales of the property during Gov. Rod Blagojevich's administration.

"Probably the biggest fear I had during that administration was that I would pick up the newspaper and find that he sold it to somebody," Zabrocki said.

The property comes with significant challenges, officials have said, not least of which are estimated environmental cleanup costs that the state estimates at $6 million.

The village thinks it could be double that but expects those dollars will come through development, Zabrocki said.

Another problem is that the property is in Cook County, meaning commercial developers would be looking at roughly double the tax rate on that site compared to Will County, which is just 200 feet away, Zabrocki said.

"That's a difficulty," Zabrocki said, along with the sales tax differential.

Many of the Mental Health Center buildings were built in the 1950s and suffer from various problems including asbestos, buried fuel tanks and "some sites where stuff was buried and nobody seems to know what was buried there," Zabrocki said.

The village has no concrete plans for what will go up on the property, Zabrocki said, "not even wet sand plans."

But the village is buying it to make sure that it has a strong say with the development there going forward.

"We want to make sure that we have control over what goes on that property," Zabrocki said. "While we have some control with zoning, we have 100 percent control with ownership."

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