A path to connect Aurora’s far East Side to a park in Naperville is currently in the early stages of planning.
The three-quarter-mile trail is set to one day run alongside Wolf’s Crossing Road from Hoffman Boulevard at the Lakewood Valley neighborhood, cross the nearby railroad track and connect to Normantown Road, which runs along the western edge of Wolf’s Crossing Community Park in Naperville.
The project runs across jurisdictions, but it is being spearheaded by the Will County Forest Preserve District.
Aurora Ald. Edward Bugg, 9th Ward, called the project “very exciting” when he briefly presented it at a meeting of the Aurora City Council last month. The path will help residents to get safely into “a very nice park,” he said.
There are many people living to the north and west of the area, plus many subdivisions on the Naperville side, but it is “pretty dangerous” traveling east to west along Wolf’s Crossing Road right now, according to Matthew Novander, chief landscape architect at the Will County Forest Preserve District.
He called the 10-foot-wide multi-use path, which is planned to be separated from Wolf’s Crossing Road by a curb and a five-foot clearing, a “critical connection.” Currently, the road does not have a sidewalk in the section where the path is planned to go.
The Forest Preserve District is currently estimating the project will cost around $2.7 million in total, though it received a federal grant expected to cover 80% of the cost, Novander said.
Currently the project is at the tail end of phase one engineering, he said, which included an open house on Sept. 11 at the Montgomery Branch of the Oswego Public Library District to get feedback from nearby residents.
Most who came out to that meeting were in full support, according to Novander.
The project has been in the works since at least 2020, which is when he said the Will County Forest Preserve District did a feasibility study then started reaching out to partners about “closing that gap.”
The project is about connecting multiple communities, and the Forest Preserve District is “acting as the glue at the moment,” Novander said.
The second phase of engineering is set to begin near the start of the new year, which is when engineering documents start getting created, he said.
The best case scenario is that phase two engineering does start in January and then takes a year to complete, Novander said, which would put construction in spring of 2027 at the earliest.
He said, though, that the railroad crossing is “a little bit of a wild card,” so that timeline could easily be pushed back months or even a year.
rsmith@chicagotribune.com