Will County Gazette

The Bolingbrook Village Board recently voted to approve an amendment to an intergovernmental agreement regarding a roadway project on I-55.

During a Nov. 15 Village board meeting, the board discussed an intergovernmental agreement with the villages of Romeoville and Plainfield in regard to sharing the cost of a roadway project on I-55. The original project agreement, which specifically concerned I-55 at I-126 and I-55 at Airport Road, was made in August of 2009. It has since been changed twice, in July 2011 and July 2019.

Due to increased costs of the study, which is part of the Phase 1 engineering work, the agreement has to be modified again to reflect the current price of the project that will be split between the three municipalities as agreed. The new price to be shared among the three communities is $3,301,363.22, which means the Village will pay $94,166.93.

"We actually started the interchange study for a full interchange at Route 126 and Route I-55 on our own," Lucas Rickelman, Bolingbrook co-adminstrator, said in the meeting. "At the same time, Romeoville had been looking at the Airport Road interchange, and one of the comments we got back from IDOT was that we needed to combine the two studies. So we went to Plainfield and worked with them as well and got all three communities and that’s how we came up with the initial agreement. This basically completes the first phase of engineering which includes all the environmental, kind of a preliminary design and gets that access justification report done which is required by the federal highway administration. After that point we will turn the project over to IDOT and that’s where the 170 million comes in for both interchanges, and they will complete the actual final engineering and then that’s construction, land acquisition and any utility relocation."

The Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) has budgeted $170 million for the project, and they will take over once the first phase is completed. The Village hopes to reduce traffic in other areas of the villages and create new routes that are more efficient.

The board approved the change and moved forward with the project.