Grant award will launch study into linking 21st Street

A newly awarded grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) will launch a study into a potential project that would link the two ends of 21st Street and, in the process, connect the north and south sides of the city.

Through this project the Sundance Economic Development Committee (SEDC) hopes to encourage more housing development within the city. It was given the blessing of the City of Sundance for the sake of both economic opportunity and additional potential benefits.

For example, the project could relieve traffic on Hwy 585 and in front of the schools, provide an alternate route for trucks heading to the Port of Entry and offer another access point for emergency services.

The county commissioners also signaled their backing in the form of a letter of support, which recognized that the city was divided when I-90 was built and that this project could solve the issue.

The “Safe Streets and Roads for All” grant is not for construction of the street itself, but for the exploratory work that will need to be completed beforehand.

“We’re doing the study to decide what we need,” says Dan Fairbanks, SEDC, whose willingness to pursue education on seeking and securing these grants is touted by his fellow committee members as one of the biggest reasons for this project becoming possible.

“We’re committing to [it taking] a year and then next year, at around the same time, the grant will come out again and we can go for the construction portion of it.”

Part of the study process will be to seek input from citizens of Sundance. Community members can expect an invite to participate in at least one survey during the process of creating the study.

“The grant is to create safer streets, so we’re looking for community input on what they would like to see to make our community safer and make it more accessible and user friendly to everybody. Right now, the southern part of town is virtually cut off and about half of our acreage is south of the highway and vacant,” says Fairbanks.

This could change with better access, the committee believes. Much of the land has already been bought for development, says Jeremy Holt, SEDC, but right now it would be difficult to do.

“Imagine if we put a hundred homes there on that side of the highway. Everything would have to come in and out of Highway 585,” says Fairbanks.

School pickups, drives to work, grocery runs – all traffic from all those new houses would need to take the same, longer route, he says. Meanwhile, emergency services would need to take the long way to access a significant portion of the populace.

“Also, the hospital may be looking for some place to relocate to and there’s land there to build, but they can’t get to it right now with their emergency vehicles other than that one access point,” says Fairbanks.

One of the major goals of the project is to solve a problem the SEDC says many Sundance businesses face.

“Everybody is having a hard time getting employees here and the reason is that we’ve got nowhere for them to live,” says Holt.

“We’ve got a lot of folks who decided to move here and retire here and that’s great, we love that – we’re a destination place for retired folks. But at that age, they’re done working, so we don’t have people to fill in at the bank, the hardware store, the Longhorn and so on.”

The city needs housing that’s both available and affordable, says Andy Miller, SEDC, and right now there’s nothing on the horizon at any significant scale.

“We decided about a year ago that our focus had to be housing,” he says.

For it to happen, he says, the SEDC needs to clear the hurdles that get in the way of such development.

“We need to find out: are there avenues for us to help promote that side of things so that if a developer comes in, it’s attractive for them to get into a project?” Miller says.

“They [need to] know they can work through it from a size and scale standpoint and know they can provide a service that’s needed – available housing – and they can also do it at an achievable price so that they can make money at the end of the day as well. We have to make it attractive to them; for a lot of reasons it hasn’t been attractive for developers to come in and take on that housing component we’re sorely in need of.”

When the SEDC began looking for ways to promote development, its members quickly realized that it would need to happen on the east or south ends of town due to the topography in other directions.

“We’re surrounded there by hills,” Holt points out.

The committee thus decided to look at the areas where growth room is available and began to look for ways to help developers take advantage of it.

“There are infill areas right next to the interstate, right south of town. We just need better connectors to get there,” says Miller.

It’s a prime time to start working on this thanks to the newly available federal money, the committee believes.

“This is part of the Infrastructure and Jobs Act, so there’s a lot of money out there right now,” says Fairbanks.

Down the road, the committee intends to expand its focus to other ways that might assist developers and businesses in establishing a comfortable foothold in Sundance. Infrastructure and Jobs Act funding might be of assistance in these goals, too.

“We’ve looked into a few different things and I think one that would help us would be to fill in where the water and sewer system in town hasn’t gone. There’s a lot of places where it only went so far and there were no houses there or they had a septic system at the time, so they stopped instead of building it out completely,” says Fairbanks.

The committee is keen to hear from members of the community who may have development ideas and suggestions, whether on their own property or on city land, anywhere in town.

“This is a catalyst. We think that, if we can do something like this and show that there’s some growth happening here and things changing, people can take the bat and say hey, we want to do this and we want to do that,” says Holt.

“If there are people sitting down having coffee saying, boy I wish they’d do this, then we need to know that.”

The team is looking to start building connections with community members who have an interest in economic development, says Miller, and invites anyone who would like to participate to contact the committee or attend a meeting.