Batavia council picks future site of bridge

If a second downtown bridge is built in Batavia, the city council thinks it should connect Webster Street to First Street.

It picked that corridor Monday by a 10-4 vote. Aldermen Alan Wolff, Jim Volk, Eldon Frydendall and Janet Jungels voted against it.

The other option Main to Adams Street failed, with 11 aldermen voting against it. Jungels and Wolff preferred this location.

“I think we are doing the right thing, creating something down here, not waiting for something to happen,” Wolff said.

Frydendall and Volk voted against both options because they don't think the council should pick a site at all.

Earlier in the evening, the council refused to add a “no bridge” resolution to its agenda. The motion by Volk failed 9-5.

Mayor Jeff Schielke reiterated the city has no plan to build a bridge, and he doesn't think there will be any state or federal funding for one, so Batavians would have to pay for it. The cost has been estimated at more than $20 million.

Aldermen such as Wolff and David Brown have said the city should designate a site so downtown landowners can make plans for developments, and so the city has an idea where to locate water, sewer and electrical services.

Aldermen Vic Dietz and Volk have said the city council said there would be a “no bridge” option when it gave a residents advisory committee on bridge crossings its mission in 2007.

Volk made a lengthy plea to scrap both corridors and focus on other ways to improve traffic flow across the Fox River. He noted additional crossings have been proposed over the last 20 years, “and they have all been studied to death.”

“Both now are poor locations,” he said. “If there were a good location, it would have been built years ago.”

Voters rejected a Webster Street bridge in a 2000 referendum.

“I got the message very clearly all through that time that basically you were going to destroy (the southeast side),” said Frydendall, who represents the area the bridge would go through.

He also questioned claims that siting a second bridge would spur development in the downtown.

“I'm really beginning to think that the bridge is an excuse for the lack of (economic) activity in the downtown. I think it is an excuse so that we don't have to do anything,” he said.

Resident Yvonne Dinwiddie told the council it should be ashamed of itself.

“You effectively took property that belongs to people in that corridor without due compensation and just compensation,” she said. Her comments echoed the concern raised by Dietz that designating a corridor could put a cloud on the titles of properties that lie in the path of a bridge, decreasing their value. The city attorney was absent from the meeting, and no other alderman spoke to that issue.