Aurora Beacon-News: More money comes in to help with improvements at Montgomery Road and Hill Avenue in Aurora

Almost everyone who drives through Aurora’s East Side has been stuck in delays at the Montgomery Road, Hill Avenue intersection.

That includes U.S. Rep. Bill Foster.

“I’m sure most of us have been stuck in a jam at that intersection,” Foster, D-Naperville, said recently. “I know I have.”

So it was personal for Foster recently when he brought $1 million to the city of Aurora from the Community Funding Project to put toward the long-planned work to improve that intersection.

Foster came to an Aurora City Council meeting recently to present the money to the city. The money is in addition to about $7.5 million the city has been promised for the project from Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality, or CMAQ, funds toward the estimated overall $9.6 million cost of the project.

“When you hear we’re having these fights in Washington about budgets … we’re not fighting over nothing,” Foster said. “We’re fighting to make sure projects like this happen to help the people we represent.”

The intersection at the southeast corner of Phillips Park was once a confluence of two country roads, but with growth through the years, has become a major urban intersection.

The project is designed to catch up with that. It includes intersection improvement, modernizing traffic signals, reconstructing and widening the roadway to include additional channelization on Montgomery Road and an additional through lane in each direction on Hill Avenue.

It also includes a bike path, sidewalk, ramps, warning signs, striping and other work.

Ken Schroth, Aurora’s Public Works director, said because of the additional $1 million – which will go toward Aurora’s local match for the project – the city can extend the project to include the Montgomery Road, Farnsworth Avenue intersection to the east, which he called “another problem” intersection.

“I know everyone in the 3rd Ward is going to be excited” about this project, said Ald. Ted Mesiacos, 3rd Ward.

At the same City Council meeting, aldermen voted to appropriate another $228,109 from the city’s REBUILD Illinois bond money from the state toward the project.

That supplemental appropriation will specifically go toward wetland and special waste services, a plat of highways and appraisals.

The long-standing project has been in the works at least since Aug. 28, 2020, when the city first entered into the local agency agreement for federal participation and Phase 2 engineering with HR Green, Inc.

Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin, in thanking Foster, mentioned that he recently had a chance to visit Foster in his Washington, D.C. office.

“This was a great visit,” he said. “When we came back, we brought back $1 million.”