By Steve Zalusky
Buffalo Grove's planning and zoning commission Wednesday gave a gleaming recommendation to a proposed state-of-the-art car wash on Milwaukee Avenue, though some expressed concerns about vehicles exiting the site to the busy road.
Now the plan for Spotless Auto Spa at301 N. Milwaukee Ave. is headed to the Buffalo Grove village board for a final decision.
Prestige Midwest Holdings LLC, the contract purchaser of the 0.89-acre site, plans to tear down a vacant building formerly occupied by Grill on the Rock Korean Barbeque and build an approximately 5,000-square-foot car wash.
In describing the operational and aesthetic details of the project, Nick Spallone of Car Wash Pro Designers likened it to a luxury spa for cars.
"We're bringing something that the area doesn't have," he said.
Unlike car washes that require customers to drive onto a track that drags the vehicle, the proposed wash would have be conveyor-belt driven and use artificial intelligence to sense when cars are piling up.
Spallone also touted the building's brick exterior, which is designed to look like a bank. The attention to optics extends to the canopy, which hides machinery and equipment, he added.
"So you can't tell that it's a wash, except when the tubes come down," he said.
Commission Chair Frank Cesario went so far as to pronounce the proposal "cool."
"It's a different kind of car wash and I think that's important," he said.
The commission recommended variations from the village's zoning and sign codes, relating to such issues as the location of accessory structures, landscape buffering and the orientation of signs, but still had questions about left turns out of the business.
Traffic engineer Luay Aboona, a consultant for the petitioner, said 18 cars will be making a left turn out during the evening peak hour, between 4:45 and 5:45 p.m.
"We feel confident that cars will be able to exit," he said.
Spallone said the car wash will expect to see 350 cars per day in a 14-hour period. "I think we all have the same concerns. You know what Milwaukee is," Cesario said. "I think the petitioner has successfully resolved my concern with the ability to get in and out of this property safely, to handle traffic."
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