Parents, residents oppose proposed Westfield access road as district seeks design phase for parking improvements

Members of the Community Unit School District 300 Board Operations Committee spent a large portion of their Jan. 14 meeting reviewing a multi-part plan to reconfigure parking and traffic at Westfield Community School and considering a proposed access road that would tie the school to a nearby Leonard development.

The proposal has drawn opposition from nearby residents who spoke during public participation and from some board members who asked for more phased cost detail. Speakers raised safety, privacy, environmental and fiscal concerns and questioned whether lower-cost changes to existing parking could resolve problems without building a new road.

Resident Michael Gall told the committee the field south of Westfield is widely used by children and community groups and said a new road “would be detrimental to the Westfield School and to the local community.” He objected that the road would run behind houses and that a connector to the Westfield parking lot could disrupt morning and afternoon pickup and drop-off operations.

Resident Saeed Hussain said the road would run directly behind his house at 1950 Cosman Way and raised similar safety and privacy concerns, asked for documented safety and monitoring plans, and asked for financial transparency about project costs and funding sources.

Resident David Rodriguez cited the district’s traffic study and questioned whether the $2.5 million road — which the study estimated would divert about 100 cars from Sleepy Hollow Road — represented a cost-effective solution. “Spending such a significant amount of money to achieve a relatively modest reduction in traffic seems hard to justify,” Rodriguez said, and he urged the district to try lower-cost changes first, such as optimizing three existing parking lots.

Staff presented three “north/east/south” parking-lot redesign options and a potential gated roadway connection to the new development. According to staff remarks, north-lot work would expand on-site queue capacity, remove poorly performing islands, and increase parking from roughly 150 spaces to approximately 170. Staff said the north-lot budget line was $757,869; the south-lot line with connection was $649,399; and a site-management/contingency line was about $300,000. A separate east-lot figure was discussed in the meeting but the transcript numbers were unclear.

Staff also said the new gated connection would be controlled by the district and, as planned now, open only before and after school for buses and (potentially, in the future) limited car use; building staff would operate the gate. Staff estimated that 15–20 buses could use the connection to avoid returning to Sleepy Hollow during their runs. The district indicated some of the work could be offset by impact fees from the development, and staff referenced an impact-fee estimate discussed in the meeting; the transcript’s phrasing around the impact-fee total was unclear.

Board members asked whether the project could be phased. Staff said the three work areas could be done separately but cautioned that staging work over multiple mobilizations could increase costs. Multiple board members suggested phasing: first reconfigure the parking areas, evaluate whether queuing and safety improved, and postpone building the gated connector until later.

No formal vote or motion to approve the design phase was recorded in the transcript; staff asked the committee to recommend initiating the design phase. The record shows discussion, questions and public comment but no recorded final action on the item during this meeting.

The district said an intergovernmental agreement with the village is in progress and that the presentation and cost breakdown will return to the committee for further review at future meetings.

What’s next: staff asked to move the item into design planning; board members requested clearer phased-cost options and a separation of parking-lot work from the gated connector so the committee can evaluate incremental benefits before committing larger sums.