Chambana Sun

The city of Champaign discusses the progress and future of the Garden Hills neighborhood improvement plan.

“So even though we're doing this sort of iterative, human-centered design approach, we're still approaching the Strategic Neighborhood Action Plan through a lens of data,” Eric VanBuskirk, associate planner for the city, said during the meeting. “And this can include lots of boring things that planners love, like land use and the built environment. But we also talk a lot of reality into some census data to sort of understand who in this neighborhood we're going to be engaging with the most. As you well know, Garden Hills is a very diverse neighborhood.”

The board uploaded a live stream of its public meeting to the city’s website.

At their May 2nd council meeting, city officials from Champaign welcomed their Planning and Development Director Lacey Rains to discuss the Garden Hills neighborhood. Garden Hills is a residential district in the northwest area of Champaign. The neighborhood was built in the post-WWII era, and because of the time and the rapid population growth that was occurring, the neighborhood does not have sidewalks, streetlights, or stormwater infrastructure to handle proper drainage. The city has been working on improvement projects for the area for several years, with a big lighting project happening earlier this year. They adopted a multi-year improvement plan to address infrastructure needs like sidewalks and stormwater, and received an update on these efforts from Rains.

The board also discussed paying approximately $27 million in bills from paying vendors, payroll and investments.

The city has been working on the Strategic Neighborhood Action Plan (SNAP) to try and address all the major infrastructure concerns and the neighborhood's ongoing culture and climate. There is a large population of young people in the area, and concerns about gun violence, disconnection from each other and Champaign, and safety in their streets. One of their recent successes in addressing these concerns was the Hedge POP park that was completed in July of 2022. This gave people a space to gather and a safe park for children to play with each other. The city is working on having full programming for students in the summer as well as a meal. This will allow for greater safety and community engagement.

The U.S. Census Bureau reported Champaign is home to approximately 89 thousand people.

The city’s plans for the future center around the neighborhood’s high proportion of kids, much higher than the general Champaign population, their high level of dependence on public transportation and sidewalks to access the city and community, and their low proportion of parks and services to that young population. Rains explained that “The city has a long tradition at this point of including these kinds of recreation amenities in our stormwater retrofit projects.” Their goal is to make Hedge Park a permanent park that gives the programs and amenities to the residents, but they can also utilize the 8-acre parcel to vastly improve the area’s stormwater systems.

The board will meet again at 7 p.m. on Tuesday at the Council Chambers at 102 North Neil Street.

The plan for Hedge Park has “the location of the parking space is proposed to be in the middle where that north-south crossing location would be with two pedestrian bridges, so one over each basin. And then at each of those bridges would there be a raised crosswalk and a raised intersection at Hedge and Garden Hills Drive to address some speeding concerns.” After coordinating with the park district, they estimate construction could begin in September or October of this year, allowing them to still have full access to the park this summer.