(Milford)– Saying they want to hear first from the public and business owners, the Milford City Council Monday evening took no action on a recommendation to convert Highway 71 through the city from four lanes to three. Mayor Steve Anderson…
“We’re hoping that we can get people that live along the highway, people that want to learn more about that, we had that, but now we’re trying to make a decision on whether we’re going to move forward with the recommendations from the D.O.T, so part of that is changing the highway from four lanes to three lanes, looking at speed, looking at traffic control devices that are on the highway, the schools, we’ve got some school zone things that we need to be looking at as well. We did have a little committee meeting. That committee was more for moving forward with it, it wasn’t a big group so the council decided that let’s just have a public meeting set up for that, so.”
A date for that meeting hasn’t been set yet. Anderson says it’s likely to bring up a number of concerns…
“There’s some concerns with speed limits, I know there’s concerns about accidents at certain intersections that I’ve heard about. People have talked to me about concerns about the kids getting back and forth from school. So those are the things that we’re going to be looking at, and hopefully the public will show up and we can have a discussion about the community moving forward.”
Anderson says they also plan to include the city of West Okoboji in the discussions…
“West Okoboji and the city of Milford share a portion of Highway 71 going north here, and so we’d like to get the city of West Okoboji and have a conversation with that as well, so we’re all on the same page and we’re all working kind of as a group.”
Regardless, Anderson says something is going to have to be done relatively soon to address the condition of the highway through Milford…
“We do know that our traffic lights need to get replaced. They’re aging and I know the highway surface, if you walked across like on the intersection at 13th Street or 10th Street, if you walk across the highway you can actually see the ruts in the road, so something’s going to have to happen eventually to get all that stuff repaired and up to date. The city doesn’t want to spend the money on traffic lights for four lanes if we’re going to go to three lanes and so that’s kind of why we’re holding off on some of that, too.”
Anderson estimates it could be at least another five years or so before any work would start. He says that would be completely at the discretion of the Iowa Department of Transportation.
