Jill Schramm/MDN
Jerick Hedges of Burlington and Lisa Olson of Minot, both members of the Central Dakota MPO Policy Board, and MPO Executive Director John Van Dyke, from left to right, take part in a meeting in Minot City Hall on Thursday, Oct. 23.
About 1,000 residents have weighed in during the development of a transportation plan for the Minot region. Public input closes Monday, Oct. 27, leaving the Central Dakota Metropolitan Planning Organization to review comments and adopt a final plan.
No additional public comment was offered during a hearing before the Central Dakota MPO Policy Board Thursday, Oct. 23, in Minot.
Joel Mann, senior transportation planner with the consulting firm Bolton & Menk, remotely presented the proposed plan for the Minot region, which includes an area from Burlington to Surrey.
“We had a pretty robust survey with over 150 responses. Just based on our work with MPOs in regions of a similar size, we feel like that’s pretty good,” Mann said. “The survey got into some kind of advanced topics and asked questions at a deeper level, so to get 160 responses was good.”
With the additional people who engaged with the website, attended meetings or interacted personally or through email, about 1,000 individuals were touched in the process, he said.
“I would say that the survey might have been the most helpful part of that because we did frame out a way of looking at project candidates, letting people score them,” Mann said.
He said the input indicated people wanted a balance between building new and maintaining existing infrastructure.
“That’s a pretty powerful message, and we wouldn’t have gotten that without the robust outreach and input that we had,” he said.
The transportation plan addresses a variety of modes of transportation, including bicycles, pedestrians and transit. Another public input meeting specifically for transit will be held Monday, Nov. 3, at Minot Public Library.
Surrey’s priority projects in the plan are sidewalk additions on Pleasant Avenue from First Street Southwest to Surrey Avenue on the north side and from U.S. Highway 2 to Fifth Street Southwest on the south side, as well as intersection alignment at U.S. 2 and Second Street Southeast.
Burlington’s priority projects include an Old Settler’s Park multimodal trail, improvements to the U.S. Highway 2 & 52 and Johnson Street intersection, a pedestrian bridge crossing U.S. 2 & 52 and an extension of a portion of Johnson Street.
Ward County is looking at intersection improvements at County Roads 17 and 14 and at U.S. 2 & 52 and CR 17 as well as a reconstruction on CR 17 to accommodate freight traffic as part of the Southeast/Southwest corridor proposal.
Minot has a number of items on its project list. They largely center on corridor traffic, keying in on Broadway and looking at ways to take pressure off Broadway with improvements on Third Street East and Sixth Street West, Mann said.
The plan includes future studies. Among them are corridor studies for 21st Avenue Northwest and Fourth Avenue Northwest in Minot, development of a new master plan for Minot city streets and an investigation into transportation impacts of events at the North Dakota State Fair and Minot State University.
The MPO’s Technical Advisory Committee will meet Nov. 18 to consider comments to potentially incorporate into the plan, and the MPO’s policy board will meet Dec. 18 to act on plan approval. Final approval could be pushed back to January if the Technical Advisory Committee in November finds a need for another 15 days of comment.