Construction delays coming soon along Route 47 in Yorkville
By Steve Lord slord@stmedianetwork.com June 14, 2012 12:46PM
Updated: July 16, 2012 6:23AM
YORKVILLE — Depending on which residents you talk to, they’ve been anticipating or dreading the beginning of the Route 47 expansion project downtown.
The long-awaited project to expand the state highway from two to four lanes through Yorkville has been bid, awarded and is almost ready to go. But city officials this week said they have yet to get a detailed construction timeline and phasing plan from the Illinois Department of Transportation.
Bart Olson, city administrator, told aldermen in a memo that ComEd, Comcast and Nicor have been relocating utility lines along the road for the past several months and are almost finished.
Officials expect storm sewer construction to begin in July. That means the familiar orange construction signs and barriers could up by the beginning of next month.
The project has been years in the making, and is considered key for better traffic flow both for local traffic and through traffic on the state highway.
The plan is to do the widening from Kennedy Road to Route 71 in three phases, with the section from Route 34 to Route 71, which includes downtown Yorkville, to start first.
The other phases of the Route 47 widening are from Route 71 south to Caton Farm Road, and from Kennedy Road north to Sugar Grove. While those projects are in the Phase I engineering stage, they are not on the state’s six-year funding plan yet, so they are a ways off in the future.
But the section between Kennedy Road and Route 71 is funded and ready to go. The city must still find its local match for the project, which, over 10 years, will be $3.375 million.
Olson said the local match ended up being about $100,000 more than the city budgeted, to be paid out at $9,600 a year over the next 10 years.
“The bad news it’s more, the good news it’s not that much more,” he said.
