Committee decides traffic won't be rerouted on County Highway V

By Lyn Jerde, Capital Newspapers

OKEE — There will be a curb and gutter. There will be sidewalks. There will be parallel parking and some additional angle parking. And the road will stay in its current path instead of being rerouted partly along Shamrock Road.

The Columbia County Board's highway committee Thursday made an array of crucial decisions regarding a $6 million, four-mile project on county Highway V.

In a meeting that lasted more than four hours, the committee set several basic parameters for the road work, which will start at Highway 113, proceed through the unincorporated community of Okee across a Lake Wisconsin causeway and curve twice before ending in a rural area at county Highway J.

One of the first decisions to be made was that V would not be rerouted along what is now Shamrock Road at Highway 113.

Ayres Associates, the Eau Claire-based engineering firm that's working with the county on the project's design, had proposed that as one alternative for improving safety at the 113-V intersection.

The committee decided, however, that V would stay in its current path.

Highway Commissioner Kurt Dey said town officials could, if they wished, turn two nearby roads - Shamrock Road in the town of Lodi and Old Sauk Road in the town of West Point - into cul-de-sacs, to discourage local drivers from using those roads as alternate routes, thus decreasing traffic on those roads and increasing safety.

West Point Town Chairman Dean Schwarz said town officials have gone on record as favoring an alternative that would include turn lanes on Highway 113.

"The most important thing is safety," he said.

But, noted highway committee Chairman Andy Ross of Poynette, any decisions regarding reconstruction of Old Sauk or Shamrock Roads would be up to the towns.

A controversial proposal for curb and gutter - one that has generated signs on Okee lawns saying "Keep Okee Rural" and "No Curb and Gutter" - was met with resignation by about a dozen Okee area residents who attended Thursday's meeting.

Dey said he, like the residents, would have preferred ditches to curb and gutter, because that would have made snow-plowing easier.

However, he said, homes in Okee are built so close to the road, adding ditches would entail acquiring large portions of homeowners' front yards.

Lodi Town Chair John Pickle said he agreed that curb and gutter was inevitable - but people in the area still have concerns about how it would affect storm water runoff into nearby Lake Wisconsin.

With the current curbless road, Pickle said, storm water gets filtered through the sand that's in the ground on homeowners' lots before it winds up in the lake.

"You're looking at draining water from the road - with things like fuel and fertilizer runoff from lawns - and having it go directly into the lake," he said. "Our people are concerned about that. It's the major issue."

Mike Stoffel of Ayres Associates said questions regarding drainage and storm water treatment will be addressed as the road design process gets more detailed.

Howie Blanchar, owner of Fitz's on the Lake, a restaurant located on Highway V in Okee, expressed mixed feelings.

On the one hand, he said, people would stop wanting to come to Lake Wisconsin if the water quality were compromised to the extent that the fishing were affected.

On the other hand, the use of a curb and gutter instead of ditches allows for more parallel parking on both sides of Highway V from Shamrock Road to the Lake Wisconsin causeway, and additional angle parking stalls on the road's south side. This would be a boon for his restaurant business, where parking is at a premium on busy weekend nights.

There would be no parking on the causeway, but in the area of V east of the causeway, there would be new parallel parking on the side of the road facing a hill, but not on the side facing a Lake Wisconsin bay.

Other decisions that the committee made include:

• A new causeway bridge would be built north of the existing bridge, to allow at least one-lane traffic access throughout the construction period, which tends to coincide with the warm-weather tourism season.

• The new bridge would be built to allow 5 feet of clearance under the bridge during high-water periods, the minimum clearance required by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

• Through Okee, there will be sidewalks alongside the road, and boulevard (bare green space) between the sidewalk and the 11-foot-wide road wherever possible.

• A decision was delayed, however, on whether there also would be boulevards between the road and the sidewalk on the eastern portion of the road, pending more engineering study to determine whether there would be room for boulevards in that area.

• As V turns away from Okee into farm country heading toward the intersection with Highway J, there will be a curve to replace a Y-intersection with Ryan Road. The curve at the existing intersection has a suggested speed of 15 to 20 mph; the new curve would have a suggested speed of 45 mph.

Setting these basic parameters, Ross said, clears the way for more detailed, specific decisions that would lead to a final design.

Ross said construction on the road would not start any sooner than the spring or summer of 2011. Plans call for federal money to pay for 80 percent of the project, with Columbia County providing the remaining approximately $1.2 million. The funding, however, is not firmly in place.