Surprise. Confusion. Suspicion.
These are among the feelings of residents in the quiet rural town of Manhattan, who have been drawn suddenly and belatedly into the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority’s long-term expansion plans for Will County.
They are surprised that a new, far-western tollway corridor footprint has been inexplicably added to an array of other year-old alternatives–each of which appears to provide a more direct route, if Interstate Highway 355 is ever extended from Interstate Highway 80 east to Interstate Highway 57.
They are confused at the backwards, boarding-house reach of the new preliminary corridor alternative, which goes west to go east.
It is only after backtracking for several miles southwest below I-80 from Cedar Road in New Lenox that the new, so-called alternative corridor “H,” cascades down along the west sides of Gougar and Cherry Hill Roads toward Gallagher Road, where it begins to curve to the southeast a mile south of Manhattan.
After touching the far northeastern tip of the former Joliet Arsenal property, the corridor heads east for 11 miles in the vicinity of Pauling (also called Hoff) and Offner Roads to an intersection with I-57.
The new alternative’s total distance is more than 22 miles–at least five miles more than the next longest of the authority’s 10 other preliminary alternatives still under review.
As much as they are surprised and confused at the way the new Manhattan alternative appears to have been charted, beleaguered Jackson Township residents and business owners like Dick Ookaas also are suspicious of the latest planning twist, at least for its irony.
It was Ookaas and neighbors such as Linda Bradley who recently led a successful campaign to detach their Jackson Township neighborhood from Joliet High School District 204 and to attach the western Jackson Township area to Lincoln-Way High School District 210.
The move was made on grounds that their kids had a community of interest that they shared with the New Lenox-based district.
Barring a reversal in court, which the Joliet district is seeking, the western boundary of the Lincoln-Way district will be extended more than a mile west of Cherry Hill Road in the vicinity of newest corridor alternative.
“When (Alternative H) hits Baker Road and Cherry Hill Road, where it starts running south, every house it hits is involved with the petition to detach from Joliet,” Bradley said.
“Why are they zig-zagging all over the place?” asked Ookaas, whose 160-acre tree farm skirts the west side of Cherry Hill for a half-mile. “Who is going to benefit? I think it just looks silly.”
“I’m the last one to forestall progress. But if they are going to do this, they should do it in a manner that causes the least amount of disruption to people’s homes and their businesses,” said Ookaas.
Lidia Pilecky, the authority’s project manager, acknowledged that the addition of the newest alternative–two others she unveiled April 9 are combinations of parts of the original seven–is related to school boundaries.
She said it was drawn in direct response to public comments received earlier this year suggesting that the authority refrain from splitting the Lincoln-Way district with a tollway corridor.
The far western alternative roughly straddles the high school district’s western and southern boundaries, Pilecky said.
“It’s being tested in direct response to public comments. The public perception is that the Lincoln-Way School District boundaries are significant,” she said.
The Lincoln-Way school board has not taken an official position on any possible routes, said district Supt. Lawrence Wyllie.
The tollway authority hopes to pare the feasible alternatives by summer, Pilecky said.
“In terms of fitting into the planning process, we need to keep in mind that the mid-June (1997) time frame I’ve mentioned isn’t the time frame when we are going to decide on a (single) location for a south suburban corridor,” Pilecky said.
“It’s a time when we are going to announce which alternatives aren’t reasonable to continue to evaluate,” she said.
The authority’s schedule calls for a preferred corridor to be selected by mid-1998.
Pilecky said the far western alternative may be eliminated over the next 60 days, at which time the authority plans to narrow the study area by several alternatives.
“Maybe this first-tier evaluation will prove that it’s not reasonable and technically doesn’t make sense,” she said.
“It’s certainly the longest (alternative) and the farthest removed from populated areas. That could be a plus, but in terms of serving a transportation function, it could also be minus from that perspective.”
As of Wednesday, Manhattan Mayor James Doyle said he still hadn’t seen an official tollway authority map identifying the new alternative.
From what he was able to glean from a photocopy, however, Doyle said, “It will draw us out from being a rural community into being a metro community, a suburb. We’d more urban than rural.
“It would suck us up into the metropolitan area, and I don’t know how people are going to like that.”
Doyle said he was surprised the alternative would be submitted for evaluation without prior warning to the village of 2,500.
Last summer, he said, Manhattan told tollway officials that “if they are going to stick this on us, we want to put it where we want it. This (alternative) isn’t something that seems acceptable.”
