County Supports Bouse Road Upgrade
by Randy Pierce
Planned improvements to Bouse Road in Troy are receiving financial support from Madison County as a result of its board’s unanimous approval of an agreement resolution at its regular monthly meeting held on Wednesday, January 15.
According to the legislation brought forward by the county board’s transportation committee, chaired by Bobby Ross of St. Jacob, an appropriation totaling $150,400 has been designated from this source for the Bouse Road project.
That money will be used as a matching share with a federal grant, administered through the Illinois Department of Transportation, to enhance the free flow of traffic and insure the safety of the motoring public by reconstructing Bouse Road from 125 feet east of Chamberlain Drive to 500 feet east of Whitworth Drive.
The project will consist of oil and chip pavement removal and replacing it with new 30-foot-wide concrete street to include curb and gutter and sidewalks along with the addition of hot-mix asphalt shoulders, reconstruction of access/egress points, updating road signs and a shared-use path with the appropriate pavement markings plus other work as needed.
The Bouse Road improvements will occur in two phases, the first from Chamberlain to just east of Tramore then the next and final component going from that point to Formosa.
The federal Surface Transportation Program grant, applied for by the City of Troy last February then subsequently approved, will cover a significant share of the cost of this project in an amount of $740,000 and was approved by the regional clearinghouse based in St. Louis called the East-West Gateway Council of Governments. Both Madison County Transit and a homeowners association connected with a development fronting on Bouse Road had provided letters of endorsement for the grant.
The aforementioned shared-use path, commonly referred to as a bicycle trail but also suitable for walking, running, roller-blading other more pedestrian-oriented modes of conveyance, was the subject of an additional grant of $49,523 received from the Metro East Parks and Recreation District based in Collinsville.
Helping to justify the grant awards and need for this project is the expansion of Waterford Place near Formosa Road with the addition of a two-acre, 14-unit residential development of villa duplex units which is adding to the number of motorists using Bouse Road.
At a meeting of the transportation committee held earlier this month, the county’s highway department engineer, Adam Walden, explained the process by which the additional funding for the Bouse Road project has been approved.
Local governments, such as the City of Troy, Walden said, can request 10 or 20 per cent of the cost of a project like this, the amount dependent on the funding source. The county levies and collects a tax, he added, for this purpose with that money designated as a local match for those communities required to provide it per the terms of the specific federal grants.
There are usually from eight to 10 such agreements with cities or villages that the county will enter into annually, Walden went on, with multiple requests of this type ranked by the EWGCOG, known as this region’s metropolitan planning organization, which authorizes the funding awards based on how much money is available and has been sought.
There is an existing standing agreement, Walden noted, among all of the entities involved that each municipality is allowed to seek the county’s matching funds only once per year in order to avoid shutting out those who need it and having a large sum designated to only one or a small handful of potential recipients.
