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
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.
March 2011: While we have managed to stave off the full project of connecting Olympian Drive to Highway 45 (east of Lincoln Avenue), we tried to convince the Champaign County Board that the best way to connect N. Lincoln Avenue with Olympian to have it track as westerly as possible, thereby minimizing loss of farmland and residential land. This strategy did not prevail.
The current plan is to extend Olympian Drive eastward over the railroad tracks to dead-end at North Lincoln Ave. This would put the road within 200 yards south of our driveway. The County Board approved a separate project to reconfigure North Lincoln Avenue to connect up with Lincoln Avenue with a series of curves. Lincoln Avenue won't be "improved" until at least two years after Olympian Drive would be completed (probably started in 2013 and finished in 2014 or 2015), leaving trucks nowhere to go once they cross the bridge heading eastward.
August 2011: We continue to make citizens aware that this road is NOT needed, and would a HUGE waste of taxpayer funds. For more up to date information, please visit the "Stop Olympian Drive" Facebook page. Thank you.
