By Ted Schnell • BocaJump
In February, the Elgin City Council authorized the city staff to seek an $80,000 grant from the Regional Transportation Authority to lay out long-range plans for the Chicago Street Metra station and the surrounding area as a transit-oriented development.
On Wednesday night, the city staff will request that the council release the city’s $20,000 share of the cost of that study and enter into an intergovernmental agreement with the RTA and Land Vision Inc. to prepare that plan.
Assistant City Manager Rick Kozal said Monday that even though little development is going on at the moment — and little is forecast into the foreseeable future — the city wants to establish a plan for the area now, while it is slow, so the city will be better able to control development around the Chicago Street Metra station in the future.
The planning process, he added, it similar to the one the city went through for the National Street Station Area Plan, which is in its final stages of preparation. The National Street plan likely will come before the council for acceptance in the coming months.
Like the National Street Metra Station plan, city officials said in February that the lion's share of the funding for the study comes from an RTA Regional Technical Assistance Program grant.
These types of plans, officials said in February, take a long view of how these areas might be redeveloped to best serve the city's transit needs 20 to 30 years from now. The Chicago Street study, however, may look toward the more immediate future – gauging the city's transit needs in that corridor just 10 to 15 years down the road for planning purposes.
In February, when coming before the council for permission to apply for the grant for the city, the city's staff's documentation on the matter stated that the Chicago Street Metra station area can accommodate more growth and concentrated development that would benefit from and support the existing public transportation system. Staff documentation in February indicated site has the potential “to become an active, transit-oriented community, linking neighborhoods, natural resources and recreational land uses.
The right mixture of uses would offer the types of goods and services needed by transit users — whether Metra riders or those catching the Pace buses and even those riders now seeking cabs. But those goods and services also would have to appeal to transit employees as well as residents of the nearby neighborhoods.
When discussing the study in February, City Manager Sean Stegall said proper planning would set the area up as a central gathering place that would minimize conflict between, and balance the very different needs of, persons arriving by foot, bicycle, car, bus or train.
The Chicago Street Metra station has been the subject of much conjecture for more than a decade, with various proposals for change coming from Metra itself, as well as from the city and from citizen groups, Stegall said.
