Help Us Stop Olympian Drive Expansion
Our idyllic pastoral setting could be destroyed if the local governments of Urbana, Champaign and Champaign County, along with developers have their way. They are lobbying the federal government to give them close to $20 million dollars to fund a road to nowhere. The extension of Olympian Drive eastward from its current location near Market Street will cut a swath through prime farmland within a 100 yards of our farm.
You can help us stop this wasteful use of taxpayer dollars. Here's how:
http://sfc.smallfarmcentral.com/dynamic_content/uploadfiles/167/Say%20No%20to%20Olympian%20Drive%20FINAL[1].pdf
For contacting our federally elected officials, including Congressman Tim Johnson, Senator Dick Durbin and Senator Roland Burris, you must go to their websites and fill out a form to send them an email. Alternatively, you can call them. The urls for their websites are as follows:
http://durbin.senate.gov/contact.cfm
http://burris.senate.gov/contact.cfm
For a more detailed description of the issues:
Our most recent postings (April 17th) related to Urbana's Voting on Spending $5 million of the state "Illinois Jobs Now" funds:
This first document outlines the trends in population growth, industrial jobs and acres for sale that are already zoned industrial or commercial in Champaign County. This is the kind of information that the City of Urbana should be looking at before deciding to spend $5 million of scare state funds:
http://sfc.smallfarmcentral.com/dynamic_content/uploadfiles/167/UrbanaIndustrialFuture22Mar10.pdf
This second document is a kind of "Request for Proposals or RFP" that our group submitted to City of Urbana staff. We requested that they hire an independent consultant to undertake an objective study addressing the questions presented in this document. Our request has been ignored.
http://sfc.smallfarmcentral.com/dynamic_content/uploadfiles/167/OlympianDriveRFP.pdf
This third document includes the key points we believe should be addressed to the Urbana City Council on Monday, April 19th.
