Four years after shelving a $617.6 million bridge plan over the Des Plaines River Valley, Will County Board members gathered for a special meeting this week to breathe new life into the long-stalled proposal. No formal action was taken, but the renewed conversation signals growing alarm over traffic bottlenecks that officials say will only worsen as a major reconstruction looms over one of the area’s few existing river crossings.
The special meeting, held Wednesday, revived discussions that county officials and affected municipalities had set aside in 2022 after concluding they simply could not fund the project, according to the Chicago Tribune. The proposed 11-mile corridor would stretch through Crest Hill, Lockport and Homer townships, connecting U.S. Route 30, Gaylord Road and Caton Farm Road in Crest Hill with Cedar Road and 159th Street in Homer Glen. Jeff Ronaldson, director of the Will County Division of Transportation, has said the project’s cost has likely climbed well above that 2022 estimate.
The idea itself is not new. Will County has discussed some version of the Caton Farm-Bruce Road regional transportation corridor for more than 25 years, with talks dating back to 2001, per the same report. The plan calls for new bridges over the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, the Des Plaines River and the Illinois and Michigan Canal, along with roughly 157 acres of right-of-way acquisitions spanning agricultural, commercial and residential land on both sides of the river.
Why the Project Stalled in the First Place
When the Will County Board voted in 2022 to convert the stalled effort into a Planning and Environmental Linkages study, it relinquished direct county sponsorship of the project — a technical maneuver that preserved roughly 20 years of planning data without discarding it, according to documentation from the Illinois Department of Transportation. That pivot came after more than $6 million in tax dollars and two decades of Phase I engineering work, and it allows officials to pick the project back up without starting from scratch — though Ronaldson has cautioned that information from the earlier study may now be outdated…