Early last year, Brookfield stopped work on the Des Plaines River Trail South, an engineering project looking to study gaps in the Des Plaines River Trail and eventually fill them in. Last week, the village officially restarted work on the project.
At its Jan. 22 meeting, the village board entered into an intergovernmental agreement with Cook County’s Department of Transportation and Highways, which will pay up to $300,000 to restart the project and see it through its first phase.
The Des Plaines River Trail runs for 55 miles through Lake and Cook counties, from its northern terminus near the Illinois-Wisconsin border to its southern terminus in the Jerome Huppert Woods, a forest preserve in River Grove. There is a 6.5-mile gap in the trail from that point to where the trail picks up on Ogden Avenue in Lyons. From there, it runs south for another mile and a half until it stops at the Chicago Portage National Historic Site.
According to the project’s planning study, published in 2018 by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, its goal is to first study the gaps in the trail and identify potential routes the trail could take, specifically in the area between West 26th Street, which marks the northern bounds of Brookfield and Riverside, and Ogden Avenue. Later phases of the project should see the trail extended within that area. Ideally, filling in the trail there would allow for similar extension projects further north, with the eventual goal of connecting Lyons’ segment of the trail to the contiguous 55-mile stretch.
Work on the project first began in 2020. Brookfield took charge, working with the villages of Riverside, Lyons and La Grange Park as well as the Forest Preserves of Cook County, which manages and preserves nearly 70,000 acres of forest across the county. They originally agreed that the project would cost nearly $600,000, of which 80% was paid through federal grant funding. The four villages and the FPCC paid for the rest of the project’s estimated costs.
However, over the three years that the project was active, project leaders identified additional necessary tasks — wetland delineations, tree surveys and more — that would incur additional costs to complete the project’s first phase. At the village board’s Jan. 22 meeting, Brookfield President Michael Garvey said the village had “exhausted the existing funding” in 2023, leading to its decision to stop work on the project.
Still, Garvey and members of the village board seemed enthused about the project’s future at that meeting.
“We all know that this trail is such an important, kind of no-brainer issue that should be done, but we also have come to know that there’s nothing that’s easy,” Garvey said at the meeting. “We got to just keep working our way through it.”
