Despite the City Council’s earlier rejection of the proposal, the Friends of Downtown St. Charles will pay for an East Coast transportation consultant to come to the Fox Valley to study the state’s plan for widening Main Street.
Friends Executive Director Renee Hanlon said the organization will fly Robert Burco, a research associate at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, to speak Wednesday before the council’s Downtown Committee.
Hanlon said Burco has agreed to volunteer his time to comment on the Illinois Department of Transportation’s $6.5 million project so he can use the information in his research.
“It will be a very informal presentation, sort of a sharing of his experience,” Hanlon said of Burco’s scheduled meeting with St. Charles aldermen. “There are still a lot of fine points that still have not been addressed with this project.”
Last month, the City Council rejected the Friends’ request that the city pay the consultant’s $15,000 fee. Hanlon said Burco specializes in the impact of roads on urban and suburban centers of commerce.
“I don’t have any problem with listening to anybody, but they’re not coming up with any real solutions,” said Ald. Sue Klinkhamer, Downtown Committee chairman. “This issue has been discussed and studied for so long. What can someone from Rhode Island tell us?”
Friends of Downtown and city officials have been at odds since the council endorsed IDOT’s plan to rebuild and widen Main Street, or Illinois Highway 64, through the heart of downtown beginning in 1996.
Hanlon said Friends members believe widening the road, with the subsequent loss of on-street parking and sidewalks, will have an adverse impact on downtown businesses as faster moving traffic chases away customers.
The city and IDOT maintains that wider lanes are necessary to relieve congestion and handle the growing traffic counts, particularly from semi-trailers and trucks that use Illinois 64 as a mjor east-west route.
Hanlon agreed that Main Street needs to be repaired, but added that the current dimensions should remain.
“There’s not as much congestion and bottleneck traffic as they think,” Hanlon said. “If it were such a problem today, the trucks would find some other route to take.”