Tensions emerged at the June meeting of the Dallas County Conservation Board when city planners from Waukee seemed to dodge questions from the board — for the third month in a row — about the city’s plans for crossing the south loop of the Raccoon River Valley Trail (RRVT) with vehicle traffic along Hickman Road west of the Waukee trailhead.
The popular bike trail closely parallels the north side of Hickman Road across the breadth of Waukee, with the portion between the 10th Street trailhead westward to R Avenue still largely vacant but facing rapid development around the 2,000-acre Apple data center and the new Waukee high school and sports complex.
The conservation board fears that if the pattern of vehicle access across the RRVT running west of the trailhead comes to resemble that found east of the trailhead — where the trail is crossed by vehicles at as many as eight points per mile — it might fatally harm the trail’s value as a public amenity.
A draft Hickman Road corridor agreement by the Iowa Department of Transportation (DOT), which controls right-of-way access along the U.S. Highway 6, would allow as many as 17 crossing points in the three-mile stretch of Hickman Road between R Avenue and U Avenue, including as many as seven trail crossings between T Avenue and U Avenue. The prospect alarms the conservation board.
“If Waukee does decide to grant access along Hickman wherever the Iowa DOT will allow, you’re basically going to eliminate that southern portion of the trail,” Dallas County Conservation Board member Mark Powell told a Waukee planner at the board’s April 10 meeting. “You’re going to see your ridership decline immensely,” Powell said.
Conservation Board Vice Chair Jim Miller was equally blunt: “You’ll destroy a gem of the community by doing that,” he said.
Miller and Powell shared these predictions in April with Andy Kass, senior planner in the Waukee Development Services Department, and Nick Halfhill, president of development services with the Clive-based developer Landmark Companies Inc. Kass and Halfhill came before the conservation board in order to propose a single easement across the trail in the Stratford Crossing development, a residential subdivision along N. 10th Street that Halfhill’s company is spearheading.
All they wanted from the board was the go-ahead for one trail crossing on the north loop about a mile from the trailhead, an access point on Sunrise Drive that would connect the 225 acres of the Stratford Crossing development lying north of the trail to the 22 acres lying south.
What the Waukee planner and Clive developer got instead was a demonstration of the conservation board’s determination to protect its asset and to see the city’s wider plans for development along Hickman Road before granting any easements anywhere.
“You’re indicating seven access points crossing the trail off of Hickman in that stretch,” said Miller. “So you’re basically going to do the same thing to that trail that has happened to the greenbelt trail east of Waukee.”
Kass implied the city of Waukee’s hands were tied by the will of the Iowa DOT.
“These access points are what have been determined by the DOT,” he said. “We don’t have access control over Hickman Road. This is all DOT right of way, so basically this is what the DOT has said they would allow for access points.”
Miller seemed doubtful the city was as powerless as Kass implied.
“That’s what they would allow for a maximum,” Miller said, “but that is not what the city of Waukee has to use necessarily. You could have fewer.”
“Yes, you could have fewer,” Kass said, “depending on how the property develops.” He said most of the property along Hickman’s north side is currently zoned for light-industrial or business-office use, “however, that’s not to say that some of it couldn’t be commercial. The thing about commercial properties, commercial properties want access, and if the DOT says you can have access there, they’re not really allowed to — I don’t think the city can say we won’t let you have access there.”
Wes Mayberry, assistant engineer in the Iowa DOT district four office, which produced the draft corridor agreement for Hickman Road, said predetermining right-of-way access is not meant as a way to steer development.
“The DOT cannot tell somebody how to develop their land,” Mayberry said. “The cities and county are going to need to determine how they want to develop the parcels of land as they change. The only thing the DOT is doing is going through and saying these are locations where an access could go.”
Mayberry said the state’s interest is more or less limited to optimizing vehicular mobility through the Hickman Road corridor, and managing right-of-way access is part of that effort toward efficient mobility.
“The department is also in favor of limiting the number of accesses because we want to provide mobility along corridors, and the more access points you have, the less mobility you have,” he said. “We just want to make sure people can get through here efficiently. Beyond the road, to the north and south of Hickman where you have available land, that’s up to the developers, the cities and the counties on how they want to develop that. All’s we’re saying is these are locations where access could be located.”
Powell said minimizing bike-car conflicts is the key to trail safety, and no better cautionary tale can be found than Hickman Road east of the Waukee trailhead.
“Right now,” he said, “when you cross 10th Street or U Avenue and ride east on Hickman, it’s very dangerous as a cyclist to be on there even with all the stops and everything. You get to Hy-Vee, and it’s basically say a quick prayer and hope that nobody runs over you.”
Addressing the likelihood that the proposed Sunrise Drive will eventually extend southward to Hickman Road and attract residential and high-school traffic, Powell said he does not “want to see this turn into Hickman Road junior, where this is the cut through, and all of a sudden we’ve got — we’re just destroying this trail.”
Miller expressed his concern equally graphically about the numerous conflict points between bicycle and vehicle traffic — and not only at the full-access or signalized crossings.
“Well, those right-in-right-outs, you’re making it sound like those are no big deal,” Miller said, “but people are coming off of Hickman at 60 mph, and they’re not looking. So if you happen to be going across there, you’re road paste.”
Kass assured the board that maintaining safety on the RRVT and preserving the trail’s value as an amenity were important to the city of Waukee.
“Obviously, we understand you want to minimize any sort of conflicts with the trail,” he said. “We understand safety is a top priority of the conservation board, and safety is a top priority of the city as well. However, we recognize that there are some instances where we do need to have some transportation corridors that make sense and that provide a good traffic flow north-south and also east-west.”
Kass tried to direct the board’s discussion back to Waukee’s narrower request — for a single easement across Sunrise Drive in the Stratford Crossing development — but the board seemed unwilling to make piecemeal arrangements without first seeing the city’s larger plan for Hickman Road.
“I don’t know how we can grant an access without knowing what it’s going to do because once we give the access, we don’t have any control,” Miller said. “We need to have some kind of commitment from the city on what’s going to happen down here (along Hickman Road). I don’t think I’m comfortable saying, ‘Yeah, go ahead and do this,’ until we know what the bigger plan is and we can come to some kind of agreement. We need to have some bigger view.”
Seeing the pushback that met Kass and Halfhill at the conservation board’s April session, Brad Deets, director of the Waukee Development Services Department, joined them at the May 8 board, where the question of trail access was again inconclusively rehearsed.
Rudy Koester, assistant director of the Waukee Public Works Department, came along with Kass and Halfhill to the June 4 board meeting, held at the Kuehn Conservation Area south of Redfield. By this time, the patience of some conservation board members seemed threadbare.
“This is the third time we’ve had this discussion with you guys,” Miller said. “It’s been the same issue every time. It’s Hickman Road that we’re most concerned with.” He said he could not “understand why we can’t get any kind of a response on Highway 6. We’ve asked you multiple times to limit or restrict the access on Highway 6. We’re not hearing anything from the city as to a willingness to do that.”
Kass could only repeat what he had been saying since April: “Unfortunately, the city has no control over DOT right of way,” he said. “The state has all the control over that. We can only encourage them to do that. We can’t say, ‘You can’t have that access point,’ because it’s not ours to say that.”
Koester said restricting a property owner’s access to the highway would open the door to legal challenges.
“If that plan’s put out by the DOT saying that we will allow these access points,” Koester said, “and we’re not going to allow that property owner that access across your property or the city’s not going to allow that, I think that’s a lawsuit, from our standpoint, of diminishing of property value.”
Powell took the opportunity to gently remind the Waukee economic-development facilitators that the county has the legal authority to grant or deny easements across the RRVT, which threads Hickman Road between the DOT’s right of way and the private property of the developers.
“We can tell you the number of easements we’re willing to give you to cross the trail along Hickman,” Powell said.
“We understand,” Koester said, “that the concern is trying to maintain that corridor of the trail that has zero conflict points, that has zero concern of somebody having a T-bone accident.”
Miller said the board was “not naive enough to expect it to be zero. We know there’s development coming. You’re saying the DOT is giving you the okay for seven crossings per mile. We’re saying we don’t like that. There ought to be a middle ground that we can reach, and there ought to be some way that the city can understand that and work with us on it.”
Koester asked what middle ground would satisfy the conservation board — three crossings between T Avenue and U Avenue? four?
“We haven’t gotten to a point where we’re going to give you a number,” Miller said, “because you haven’t said you can make it work. We’ve asked you multiple times: Can you reduce the number of access points? And the answer’s always, No, it’s the DOT that says how many there can be, which I don’t think any of us believe that that’s hard and fast the case. We’ve all dealt with cities enough to know that the city does have some teeth to it.”
Kass again proposed that the board narrow its focus and consider granting the single easement for the Straford Crossing development on Sunrise Drive.
“I understand the DOT issue is a very big sticking point for this board,” he said, asking whether the RRVT stewards would nevertheless “make a motion or whatever for recommending approval for an easement for this crossing until we have Hickman Road figured out.”
Miller patiently repeated himself.
“Three months ago,” he said, “we told you we were concerned about Highway 6. You’re wanting to separate the two issues, and we’ve told you from the get-go that we aren’t comfortable separating them. We think they’re interrelated, and we see the bigger issue being Highway 6.”
Powell was equally unwilling to grant an easement on the RRVT north loop for the Stratford Crossing project before the larger question of Hickman Road access was settled.
“We’ve got development that’s going to go on down here,” he said, indicating the area south of Hickman Road, “that’s going to connect to our quiet little Sunset Boulevard or whatever the hell it is. It’s going to increase traffic. It’s going to be problematic if we don’t address this correctly, and that’s going back to Jim’s point why it’s important that we address Highway 6.”
Dallas County Conservation Board Director Mike Wallace urged the board to action — on both the single Stratford Crossing easement and the larger question of Highway 6 — but without recommending what action to take.
“It’s something the board needs to decide sooner rather than later,” Wallace said. “You’ve got developers knocking on the door right now looking to buy ground, and they’re not going to buy it if they don’t have access to their parcel the way they envisioned it. So that needs to be not delayed as well.”
Dallas County Conservation Board Chair Glenn Vondra asked whether anyone wished to make a motion. Silence was his answer. Powell again stated the board’s determination to protect its asset.
“We’ve invested several million dollars in developing this trail as an amenity so that communities like Waukee can develop around it,” Powell said. “I think if we don’t approach this prudently and if we don’t approach this with some foresight, we’re going to ruin the treasure that we have.”
Explaining the Hickman Road corridor agreement, the DOT’s Mayberry said the agreement is at present still in draft form. In order to become final, the state, county and city will need to sign off on it.
“This corridor agreement is between the state, county and city,” he said, “where the three of us agree this is where an access could be located. It’s not just the DOT making this decision. If it’s in the county portion, the county also agreed that, hey, we would allow one here. That’s what the purpose of this agreement is so we’re all on the same page moving forward as to how this road is going to operate.”
Mayberry said concerns about crossing the RRVT were raised at the last meeting of the corridor agreement group in April.
“At our last meeting there was concerns about the number of crossings across the Raccoon River Trail and limiting those,” he said. “That was a discussion point that was brought up by the city. The city had a concern at that time. The city and county were working through that.”
Working through the “concern” appears to be taking the city and the county some time, but the stakes make care desirable, Mayberry said.
“Once that’s signed off by the city and county, it’s pretty tough to say you can’t put one in there if we all have an agreement that there could be one.”
The consevation board is being very responsible for the trail asset.