Trucking warehouse near Wheaton Bible Church could get green light
A logistics real estate developer is gearing up to build a warehouse and truck terminal off North Avenue between Carol Stream and West Chicago.
The DuPage County Board's development committee has endorsed Timber Hill Group's request for zoning relief to put a warehouse building on an unincorporated property near Wheaton Bible Church. The full county board is expected to take a final vote Tuesday.
The proposed warehouse will be operated by a single tenant - Mainfreight - at the northeast corner of North Avenue and Morton Road. Timber Hill Group, a Chicago private equity firm, is seeking permission from the county board to construct a 47,100-square-foot facility. Of that, the truck terminal would occupy roughly 37,100 square feet.
The project reflects an active industrial real estate market along the North Avenue corridor. Amazon signed a lease in 2021 for 141,000 square feet of the nearby North Avenue Commerce Center, a warehouse built speculatively for e-commerce tenants.
Countywide, the industrial vacancy rate was at 3.4% in the first quarter of this year, compared with 4.1% in Cook County, according to CoStar data cited in a report from the economic development alliance Choose DuPage.
The Timber Hill development would include a fully paved parking lot with 81 loading docks, 44 tractor parking stalls and 86 trailer parking spaces. The site currently contains a gravel truck parking lot and two small buildings. St. Charles-based Trine Construction has owned the property for over 30 years.
"We feel that we're meeting all standards and that it is a significant improvement on-site compared to what is existing today," Connor Harmon, Timber Hill's associate director of development, told county board members this week. "We're reducing the amount of traffic trips a day. We're including stormwater infrastructure. And we're proposing to construct a Class A facility, which doesn't exist on site today."
In a May 10 letter to the county's zoning board of appeals, Carol Stream officials expressed some concerns about traffic, both on Morton Road and at the North Avenue intersection.
But the developer worked with the Illinois Department of Transportation to reconcile those concerns, county officials say.
As part of its recommendation, the zoning board of appeals says the developer should comply with a list of conditions. One stipulates that there be no use of the property on Saturdays and Sundays that would conflict with traffic patterns associated with Wheaton Bible Church to the west of the site. The zoning panel also is recommending that there be no sleeping or overnight sleeping on the property, particularly by Mainfreight employees and contractors.
The proposed hours of operation are 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.