The Aurora City Council has approved contracts for landscaping and technology for the new Public Works building on the far East Side.
The contracts were approved at the City Council’s July 9 meeting.
The $952,690 contract will be for the technology requirements of the new Public Works Combined Maintenance Facility.
The contract combines three elements, involves three companies and is actually four contracts combined into one.
The reason for combining them, according to Public Works Department staff, is because they all involve the tech in the building. The work involves companies that already do business with the city, doing the same work in other buildings.
The companies are Scientel Solutions, Inc., of Aurora, Alarm Detection Systems, of Aurora, and National Technologies, Inc., which has its headquarters in Downers Grove.
The bulk of the contract, or $646,835, would go to Scientel Solutions, for Wi-Fi and network deployment, video security systems and access control to the city’s Genetec system.
The city has had a contract with Scientel since 2021 to provide those items.
The part of the contract with National Technologies would be $113,101 to bring the fiber optic from the street onto the property. The Alarm Detection Systems part would be $68,490 for the building’s alarm system.
There also is a 15% contingency built into the contract, officials said.
The only part of the contract that was not competitively bid was the one with Alarm Detection Systems, which has alarms throughout other city buildings. Public Works staff has said this would allow the city to monitor all building security from a single vendor.
The vote on the contract was 9-2, with Alds. John Laesch, at large, and Ted Mesiacos, 3rd Ward, voting against it. Both indicated at the Infrastructure and Technology Committee level that they thought the contracts should have been separated.
In a separate vote, aldermen voted unanimously for a $227,650 contract for landscaping at the new facility with Semper Fi Landscaping of Yorkville.
The contracts are among the final for the Public Works facility, estimated to have a total cost of somewhere around $44 million.
