River Forest will post a survey on its website this week, hoping for comments and suggestions about parking and traffic around Roosevelt Middle School and the PRI district.
A village-wide email will be sent out directing people to the questionnaire, which will be available to anyone living in town, Village Administrator Eric Palm said.
“Residents will be able to say what’s on their mind,” Palm said. “We want suggestions on how to improve that. They may not live there, they may drive past it, they may have kids who attend Roosevelt, or they may go to the library or the tennis club. We have opened it to everyone.”
The survey will be one measure that a traffic engineer, hired by the village, will use to develop a strategy for parking, independent of what District 90 is proposing to ease that issue around the school.
Other information that the engineer will use will be observations and traffic counts around the neighborhood, which are currently being completed. On May 29, all the institutional players in the PRI district – the village, library, park district, District 90, the River Forest Tennis Club and First Presbyterian Church — will talk about the issue with the traffic engineer.Â
A report will be available for trustees to review in the next 30 to 45 days, Palm said.Â
The independent traffic analysis is eagerly anticipated. And District 90 officials pledged to cooperate in whatever way possible in helping the village implement a plan for the PRI, District 90 Supt. Ed Condon said.
As the work on the village’s parking and traffic study continues, a public hearing on the third iteration of District 90’s plan will have taken place. That meeting is slated for June 19 at7:30 p.m. at Roosevelt.Â
In the works for better than two years, Roosevelt’s project was tabled in 2013 after a hearing before the Traffic and Safety Commission. Another plan was drawn up and changed and drafted again before approval in December. The project again went back to the drawing board after residents during a pre-filing hearing in March, objected because of parking and traffic issues. The proposal that subsequently was drafted was narrowly approved in April.
This iteration, like the one in March, must go through a series of steps before the project can move forward. A pre-filing meeting was conducted May 22. The next important element in this process is a meeting at 7 p.m., June 2 at the middle school, where residents living within 500 feet of the school can express their opinions.
District 90’s plan calls for 46 spots, the requisite number for the PRI district—all of them will be on school property though further from the school building. The PRI, or the Public, Recreational and Industrial area, runs from Quick Avenue on the south, Chicago Avenue on the north, Jackson Avenue on the east and Lathrop Avenue on the west. This site also includes Centennial Park and the public library.
Under the proposal, the play lot on Jackson will be replaced with a 28-space parking lot, which will be designated for staff only on school days, an element residents on the 700 block of Jackson object to.Â
A lot on Lathrop will be reconfigured for 19 spaces. Five will be short-term spaces of up to 30 minutes, and four will be for parking for up to two hours. The rest are intended for full-day use by school staff, according to a report from the district. After 3:45 p.m., the spaces may be available for school or library use.
The off-site parking plan was worked out by community leaders in March so the project would better meet village scrutiny on parking—the project’s most controversial element almost from the beginning.Â
One party to that plan – the library – has come out in opposition because it does not provide enough adjacent library parking after school hours. The library board, in a statement approved May 20, also commented that it is awaiting the results of the traffic and parking study.
A final decision on whether the project can be done rests with the River Forest village board of trustees.
CONTACT: deb@oakpark.com
