Council postpones Gateway project

By Diane Chiddister

The current Village budget crunch led Village Council members on Monday night to postpone for up to a year a project aimed at increasing parking for downtown and enhancing Yellow Springs as a tourist destination.

Council members unanimously voted to postpone the Northern Gateway Project. Voting in favor of the postponement were Bruce Rickenbach, Kathryn Chase, Judith Hempfling and Council President Jocelyn Hardman. Council member Karen Wintrow, who had supported the project in the past, was absent.

“Anyone reviewing the budget this year has to conclude that there’s no way we have money this year,” Hardman said.

Council voted to postpone the Northern Gateway Project after Village Manager Eric Swansen suggested the postponement at Monday night’s meeting.

“At the very least, staff has enough going on,” he said. The postponement would allow Village staff to “get our arms around things that are more pressing.”

Council members have been focused for the past several months on budget concerns, sparked by an almost $1 million deficit in the Village budget this year. At recent meetings, Swansen has presented information about possible sources of new Village income or cuts in current services. Swansen spoke on the effects of various service cuts at Monday’s meeting, and a report of that presentation will appear in next week’s News.

The Northern Gateway Project included the construction of a bike spur off the bikepath which would connect the path to the Cemetery Street parking lot. The spur would have run across the front lawn of the Bryan Community Center and allowed out of town visitors who park in that lot easy access to the bike path and to downtown.

Spearheading the project was the Northern Gateway Committee, which had merged with the Bicycle Enhancement Committee, a subgroup of the Village Planning Commission. The project was slated to cost $476,000, with about 70 percent of the construction cost covered by a federal grant of $275,000 which was awarded to the Village in March, 2004, by the Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission.

However, since that time non-construction costs, which are borne by the Village and which include the costs of an engineering consultant and an environmental assessment, rose higher than expected, and several weeks ago Council received an estimate that the bridge would cost $50,000 over the budgeted amount. At that time Council members discussed dropping the bridge from the project.

But on Monday night, Council members agreed to put the whole project on hold.

During the meeting’s community concerns segment, villager Jennifer Sherwood encouraged Council, in light of current budget constraints, to drop the project.

While the project is “beautiful” and “it would be great if we had it,” Sherwood said, “The village cannot afford to pay the matching part of the federal grant. It’s like buying a fur coat when you need underwear. The Village has basic needs” that need to be addressed, she said.

Although she voted to postpone the project, Hardman strongly emphasized the need for downtown parking, and said that the Northern Gateway Project would be important in easing the downtown parking crunch. The Cemetery Street parking lot is the only current area identified which can provide extra parking for downtown, Hardman said, and she stressed that she was not voting to drop the project, but just to postpone it.

“We need parking downtown,” she said. “It’s not a luxury item. I don’t want to see this dismissed as a fur coat. More parking downtown is necessary for economic development.”

Village Planner Phil Hawkey said he will research how long the Village has before it would lose the grant monies for the project.