Almost 2½ years ago, the Belgrade City Council denied a request from Town Pump to waive a requirement that it build a sidewalk along its property on the west side of Jackrabbit Lane between Madison and Main streets.
This week, ground has finally been broken for that project.
“It’s very exciting to see that finally happening,” Jason Karp, city planner, said this week.
Though a Town Pump spokesman told the Belgrade News in October 2020 that the sidewalk would be installed last year, Karp said Tuesday that design considerations delayed the project.
“There were utilities and things in the way … so they had to submit a new plan (to the Montana Department of Transportation),” Karp said. “We wanted to put it far enough away from the roadway so it doesn’t have to be torn up when we go to rebuild Jackrabbit.”
It was MDT’s plans to widen Jackrabbit between Madison and Main that prompted Town Pump’s January 2020 variance request in the first place. Town Pump argued that it made little sense to put in a sidewalk that would likely be demolished in the near future, but the council at that time denied the company’s request citing pedestrian safety concerns.
At the same time, MDT was reevaluating its planned scope of work for that part of Belgrade, keeping in mind the root cause of traffic bottlenecks there – primarily the railroad crossing north of Main Street, where the department now plans to build an underpass or overpass.
“The slowdown happened because we were waiting for MDT to finalize highway design for the expansion of the road,” Town Pump spokesman Bill McGladdery told the Belgrade News this week. “We could not really design the sidewalks until we knew what the design of the roadway was going to be.
“We’re moving forward with everything,” McGladdery added.
Karp said it is likely that a portion of the new sidewalk will need to be rebuilt once work commences on the transportation improvements in the area a few years from now, but it is hoped that most of it can be preserved.
Karp said it’s still unknown exactly when the major work in that area will begin.
In the meantime, “we’re very, very happy to see it (the sidewalk project) finally happening,” Karp said. “It should make that whole corridor safer for folks.”
While the Belgrade City Council has a history of generally approving sidewalk variance requests, that trend may be ending. As the Belgrade News reported last week, the council at its last meeting denied two requests from citizens undertaking construction projects on their properties. Such activity automatically triggers a city requirement to install sidewalks along property boundaries if none already exist.
Four council members – Mike Meis, Kristine Menicucci, Jim Doyle and Renee Mattimoe – voted to deny those residential variance applications, citing the need for better “connectivity” in the city limits. Currently, those sidewalks will stand alone because there are no others for them to connect to.
