Bargersville officials will get a look at the footprint of a future roundabout at County Road 144 and Saddle Club Road.
Although there is no timeline for the roundabout’s completion, planning its foundation will be key in organizing trails for Kephart Park, which is set to open within the next few years. The trails, however, will start taking form this year, said Julie Young, the town’s manager.
“We want to make sure we understand the size of the roundabout, so if we’re putting in trails this year, we leave plenty of space to construct in the next few years,” Young said. “We don’t want to redo trails for roundabout construction. At this stage, we are trying to understand what the footprint is. We’re not ready for a complete design of that roundabout.”
The roundabout is needed because of the traffic in the area. County Road 144 is one of the two main thoroughfares in Bargersville and Saddle Club Road intersects that road at a difficult angle that decreases visibility, said Trent Newport, president of Crossroads Engineers, an Indianapolis-based engineering consultant that will design the footprint of the roundabout.
The roundabout will be funded by road impact fees, taxes on newly constructed homes that total $2,571.64 per homeowner. That fee takes effect Aug. 8.
“The initial prompting of the roundabout, the geometry of the intersection has been difficult from a line-of-sight standpoint,” Newport said. “A new development is adding an entrance right off that, and it’s going from a three-way to basically a four-way intersection.”
The development Newport is referring to is the Lennar at Morningside subdivision, which is actively adding homes. In order to plan the roundabout, Crossroads Engineering will look at traffic patterns in the area, he said.
The town of Bargersville originally bought the land for the Kephart Park in August 2015 for $124,195, but town officials broke the park project into affordable phases, with $418,000 set aside for the initial phase.
Construction of the first phase, which will begin this year, will include two entrances to the park, both from County Road 144. The project will also include a temporary gravel parking lot and the first walking trail, an asphalt pathway around the perimeter of the park which will connect to an existing trail in the Lennar at Morningside subdivision.
