An exterior view of Yorkville’s new City Hall and police department headquarters on Prairie Point Drive. The facility was officially dedicated on June 13. (Photo by Jack McCarthy/Chronicle Media)

Tight quarters and office sharing is now a thing of the past for Yorkville city officials, employees and police.

The rapidly growing Kendall County community was introduced to a spacious home for municipal services inside a three-story structure at 651 Prairie Pointe Drive that was officially dedicated on June 13.

“The staff has been really excited for the building,” said Yorkville Mayor John Purcell during ribbon-cutting ceremonies and an open house attended by more than 125 people. “Some of the cops — all they knew was the old building — said to me ‘I didn’t think it was every going to happen.’”

“Well, it happened.”

The dedication was held in a tent outside the building’s main entrance under gloomy skies and an occasional light drizzle.

But the weather hardly dampened the enthusiasm of city and state officials and developers who participated in the project.

The three-story, 42,000-square-foot structure is located northeast of downtown Yorkville and about two miles from the much tighter, 18,000-square-foot former home on Game Farm Road near the city’s library and Yorkville High School campus.

The new site is adjacent to a post office, childcare facility and baseball and softball fields. The rest of the immediate area is currently undeveloped, with 18-inch corn stalks waving in a breeze.

The Yorkville City Council will have plenty of room to conduct business in new chambers on the third floor of the city’s new City Hall building. (Photo by Jack McCarthy/Chronicle Media)

Planning for the project dates back to 2019 and the building was used as a Kendall County COVID-19 vaccination center at the height of the pandemic.

Total cost for the project was around $10.5 million, including a $1.9 million purchase price for an existing office building, which emptied as workers switched to work at home status. The city began renovation work last year and new offices opened in April.

Building new would have cost as much as $20 million.

“This is a great job that government has done for the people,” said State Rep. Jed Davis, R-Newark. “You owe your government officials a great deal of gratitude because they saved the taxpayers a fortune by finding an existing building and renovating it. (That’s) an amazing stewardship of tax dollars.”

Yorkville’s population grew 10 percent between 2020-22 to an estimated 23,835 residents and the new building has ample space for current and future needs.

“This set up the town for decades,” Purcell said.

Yorkville Parks and Recreation Department staffers are settling into an area that includes individual offices plus work pods with clear dividers designed to encourage easy connections between colleagues. (Photo by Jack McCarthy/Chronicle Media)

Citizens can have easy access to municipal services via a large lobby on the first floor of Yorkville’s new City Hall, including police to the left of the main entrance. Information on other services is available immediately to the right. (Photo by Jack McCarthy/Chronicle Media)