Kane County Chronicle
February 19, 2007
As the deadline approaches for public comment on the Prairie Parkway, opponents pledge to keep up the fight.
The Prairie Parkway, or outer beltway, a proposed highway linking
Interstates 88 and 80, has been controversial since it first was
proposed in the early 2000s.
Although the last public meeting was Feb. 13, the Illinois Department
of Transportation is accepting comment until Feb. 28. IDOT will use the
comments to help choose among three possible options, one of which is
not building the road.
A decision is expected this year.
With construction possible by 2009, outer beltway opponents said they planned to continue fighting the road.
Jan Strasma, head of Citizens Against the Sprawlway, said the group
soon would submit its comments on the draft environmental impact
statement.
“We’re working with several other environmental groups
throughout the state, and we’ll be submitting our comments before
the Feb. 28 deadline,” Strasma said.
He said the group’s next step would be to lobby local officials
and state legislators to “muster their opposition and see if we
can get this thing derailed.”
Kaneville Township voters will be able to mark their support or
opposition in an advisory referendum on the April 17 ballot. The
referendum will have no effect on IDOT’s final decision but will
poll voters on their opinions.
“We just wanted to see what percentage of our people would feel
the same way we did that the beltway is a bad idea and especially a bad
idea here,” said parkway opponent Marvel Davis, 79.
Davis, a lifelong Big Rock resident, has hosted many anti-parkway
rallies at her farm and was the first name on a failed class-action
lawsuit against the project.
“I’ve been going to write to IDOT and plead with them to do
the right thing and to again remind them that this beltway would extend
through the finest farmland in the world, and we don’t have an
extra amount of that,” Davis said. “It seems to me that
when we are all talking about global warming as the ‘Inconvenient
Truth,’ there is another inconvenient truth we have to talk about
– the loss of farmland.”
However, longtime parkway proponent and Kane County Transportation
Committee Chairman Jan Carlson, R-Elburn, said the road was needed to
bolster the road system before growth reached the western edge of the
county.
As the first phase will go up only to Route 30, the majority of the work could take years, Carlson said.
“They’re starting from the south and working north so it
may be a number of years before it gets up here,” Carlson said.
“That’s really less than half of its route in Kane
County.”
Some parkway opponents are on a wait-and-see plan.
“We really don’t know how we’re going to come out on
this deal,” said retired farmer Bruce Thompson, 80, of Big Rock.
The current issue is the parkway’s route. The three options are
the $896 million B2, which cuts from Big Rock to Morris; the $955
million B5, which cuts east to Minooka; and the “no-build
option,” doing nothing.
The route through Kane County is the same, meaning that the road will
cut Thompson’s land, in his family for four generations and still
farmed, diagonally in half, rendering it impractical to farm.
The project hit a hitch when U.S. Rep. Denny Hastert, R-Ill. –
the man credited with obtaining $207 million for the project in the
2005 federal transportation budget – lost his role as speaker of
the House.
“I thought maybe with Hastert out, the money would dry out a
little bit, but I’ve been informed that they have enough money in
the pipeline,” Thompson said.
Comment on the parkway
Public comment on the Prairie Parkway’s draft environmental
impact statement will be accepted until Feb. 28. The statement is
available at www.prairie-parkway.com
To comment, write:
Diane O’Keefe, P.E.
Deputy Director of Highways
Regional Engineer
Illinois Department of Transportation
District 3
700 E. Norris Drive, Ottawa, IL 61350