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Highland hears master trail plan; residents urge repairs to aging sidewalks
Summary
Oates & Associates presented a grant-funded Master Trail Plan highlighting school connectors and several high-priority routes; residents urged the city to prioritize repairing existing sidewalks, and officials said limited grant options mean new trails are largely funded externally while repairs rely on annual budget allocations.
Jody Shaw of Oates & Associates presented Highland’s Master Trail Plan on Monday, describing several grant-funded walking and biking connections the city could build next and asking residents to rank local priorities.
Shaw said the plan — funded entirely by partners of the Metro East Parks District — includes a school-to-school connector funded by a $3 million grant and several proposed routes the community identified as high priorities, including a Gilk-to-Silver Lake connector, Broadway East, Broadway West, a Woodcrest route and a Northtown trail. “We started this about a year ago,” Shaw told the council and about 35 attendees, adding the plan’s outreach drew 879 survey responses.
The plan highlights locations residents named as unsafe for pedestrians; Shaw said the most-cited crossing was Illinois 143 between Walmart and Walgreen’s and noted that any crossing approvals on IL-143 or IL-40 would be set by the Illinois Department of Transportation.
During public comment, a resident urged the council to repair existing sidewalks before building new trails, recounting repeated falls and saying one incident required surgery. “If you have extra money to build these new trails and sidewalks, you need to spend money to maintain the existing before any new ones,” the resident said.
City Manager Conrad acknowledged the concern and said sidewalk repair is part of the city’s budget process. “We do have a plan to repair sidewalks every year in our budget. We do the worst first,” Conrad said, adding the city has budgeted 800 cubic yards of concrete for replacement and repairs this year but noted the city has more than 60 miles of sidewalk to manage.
Todd Korte and Julie Korte, and another Terrace Hill resident, asked for detail on alignments, how the school connector would use existing right-of-way on Poplar Street, driveway impacts and how steeper sections such as Terrace Hill would be maintained during construction. Public Works Director Joe Gillespie said final design decisions — including which side of a roadway a shared-use path would occupy — have not been determined and will be resolved during design and developer coordination.
Shaw and city officials emphasized that many of the proposed trail projects are moving forward only as grant funding and developer opportunities arise, and encouraged residents to complete the project survey forms so public feedback can shape which connections come first.
The council did not take any formal action on the Master Trail Plan at the meeting; the presentation was a public engagement step in the planning process.
