Columbia residents keep fingers crossed
By Michael Shaw
STL Post-Dispatch
02/09/2004
--------------------------------

Some Columbia residents are hoping their pleas have been loud enough to reroute the "gateway connector," a planned expansion of Illinois 158 into an outer-belt highway similar in concept to Interstate 270 in St. Louis County.

Mike Van Riper, a resident of the Pines subdivision and a member of the Monroe County Planning Commission, said the residents are awaiting word from the Illinois Department of Transportation over suggestions to send the road farther south of residential subdivisions.

"As is, it would affect five developments," he said of the most likely route through Columbia suggested so far. The Pines is a collection of about 120 high-end homes in the southern end of Columbia. Van Riper has been acting as liaison between IDOT and residents who want the road rerouted. They aren't objecting to the highway itself, as other Monroe County groups have, he said.

The road itself is still at least 10 years away. But the project is rolling and in the study phase. The agency hopes to pick a route by July that would connect interstate highways near Troy in Madison County, running past Scott Air Force Base and hooking up to Interstate 255 near the Jefferson Barracks Bridge.

Cindy Stafford, location studies engineer with IDOT, said the agency has heard residents' concerns and workers are evaluating whether to study alternate routes beyond the current study area.

Studying another route even less than a mile south means delays.
"We have to consider what the public wants," she said. "But there are other issues - traffic, environmental impact. And moving it doesn't mean other people won't be affected by it." The agency has already moved a proposed route about 800 feet away from the Pines.

She said IDOT will decide soon whether to expand the study area and consider new routes around Columbia.

The current proposals for the corridor show five possible routes through the city.

Columbia Mayor Lester Schneider said any routes to the north shouldn't be considered because of commercial development there and problems with undermined topography. Plus, those routes wouldn't alleviate the increasing traffic jams along Illinois 3 south of the city, he said.

Columbia drafted a resolution to support alternate routes as suggested by residents, and Schneider said he supports the idea and sympathizes with their concerns.

But if IDOT can't bend on the route, he says the area still needs the new highway.

"I have to look at what's good for the whole population of the city," he said.

Once a route is selected, the state's corridor protection statues will be in effect, limiting development within several hundred feet of the planned road, including home improvements.

That's a major reason for concern, said Pines resident Joseph Kellett, an engineer who works in St. Louis who moved to Columbia within the past year.

"(But) I don't want to seem critical of IDOT because they are working with us," he said. He noted that the proposed route goes right through a demonstrator home in a new subdivision called Joyview where homes are still being built.

Van Riper, who bought the first house in the Pines subdivision in 1996, and Kellett are among the latest newcomers to Monroe County, representing people who work in St. Louis who have looked east for less congested living areas.

"The reason I probably got involved is because I'm a resident of the Pines," Van Riper said. "That being said, I don't think what IDOT has planned now is good for Monroe County."

Reporter Michael Shaw
E-mail: mshaw@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 618-235-3988