Kane County’s Regional Office of Education will move — assuming all the dominoes fall into place within a “tight” timetable — from the former Sixth Street School building to new digs “behind the Little Owl.”

“Behind the Little Owl” is the shorthand description for the office space at 28 N. First St., South Tower, Geneva, IL 60134 owned by Batavia Enterprises, LLC.

Regional Office of Education Superintendent Patricia Dal Santo announced the future location of the ROE during a Kane County Administration Committee meeting Wednesday morning at the Kane County Government Center.

Once a resolution gains full Kane County Board approval, the ROE will enter into a seven-year contract to lease the first, second and third floors of the office building’s South Tower, which takes up about 9,500 square feet of office space. The county has budgeted $130,000 for the lease. Any amounts spend over that would be picked up by the Regional Office of Education.

While the new office space is about half the square footage of the ROE’s Sixth Street building, Dal Santo sounded thrilled with the price, the building layout and the location, location, location.

“It was very important that we stay in the center of county,” she said.

The Regional Office of Education provides training for school district educators throughout Kane County. It does fingerprinting, hosts conferences, provides license renewal, inspects all Kane County school buildings, acts as a school testing center and performs myriad duties that make a central-county location attractive.

Dal Santo said the parking at the First Street office is “adequate” for the ROE’s needs, and there is substantial public parking near that location.

The ROE decision signals what has the potential to be a “musical chairs” of Geneva government offices over the next couple years. In theory, the shuffle would looking something like this:

• The ROE will move to the offices at 28 N. First St. in June, allowing the demolition of its present digs, the former Sixth Street School.
• After passing a referendum, the Geneva Public Library would move from its present building on Second Street in Geneva to a newly constructed building or buildings on the Sixth Street site.
• The city of Geneva, which has the right of first refusal on the existing library building, would move its City Hall into the library’s historic limestone structure.
• And Geneva’s present City Hall would become a cultural arts center.

Obviously, a lot has to happen in the next few years for that scenario to play out, including the passage of a referendum, which has been much more difficult in the economic climate of the past seven or eight years.

More immediately, Kane County is looking at jumping through a series of approval hoops if the Sixth Street building is to come tumbling down in 2015.

Kane County Operations Staff Executive Don Biggs said Wednesday that those hoops include demolition approval from the city of Geneva’s Historic Preservation Commission and the state of Illinois Historic Preservation Board.

It also includes a renegotiation of the contract with the Geneva Library Board, following the discovery of asbestos and an underground storage tank at the Sixth Street site. Under the original agreement, the Library District agreed to pay $1.5 million for the purchase of the property and another $300,000 for the county to demolish the building. Since then the cost of demolition has been established at about $409,000 with an additional $38,100 budgeted for contingencies.

“We hope we don’t have to use the contingency funds, other than for the storage tank,” Biggs said.

The Regional Office of Education building is the former Sixth Street School in Geneva.