By JAN LARSON McLAUGHLIN
BG Independent News
City leaders may donate about nine acres of land to Bowling Green City School District to ease traffic at the proposed elementary school planned off Fairview Avenue.
City Council will hear the first reading of an ordinance Tuesday evening, allowing the municipal administrator to transfer the acreage located northwest of the existing middle and high schools.
“The city really doesn’t have a use for the land,” Assistant Municipal Administrator Joe Fawcett said on Friday.
There are two parcels that may be transferred:
- Nearly six acres (shaded pink) that were part of a land acquisition by the city in 1993, presumably for economic development purposes. That acreage sits just east of the Ashbury Hills housing development, and has a strip about 60 feet wide that stretches north to Van Camp Road, just east of the Wood County Humane Society.
- Three acres (shaded yellow) purchased by the city’s Board of Public Utilities in 2002, just to the east of the other city parcel. This land was bought in connection with a study and proposal on the Toussaint Creek Story Water Detention Basin. The board did not pursue the project, and the acreage has been rented out for farming since then.
City officials have decided that neither parcel is needed, and are recommending that the acreage be transferred to the school board “in the event that a new elementary school is built on its West Poe Road campus.”
It is proposed that the land be given to the district at no cost.
“The citizens have already paid for this land,” during the initial purchases, Fawcett said.
The acreage can be used for parking and to improve traffic flow in the area, by giving additional access from Van Camp Road. The proposed elementary would already have access from Fairview Avenue.
“This would just give us more flexibility to make drop-offs and pick-ups easier,” Bowling Green Superintendent Francis Scruci said on Friday. “It will just make the logistics of traffic flow much better.”
Currently, the high school parking lot is accessed from West Poe Road, and the middle school from Fairview Avenue. The proposed elementary school acreage also has access to Fairview – but additional access to Van Camp would be helpful, Scruci said – especially since approximately 90 percent of Bowling Green students are dropped off at school by buses, daycare transportation, or parents’ vehicles.
If the bond issue for the new elementary school is approved by voters on the November ballot, the school district will have a traffic study conducted to see if a turn lane, similar to the lane at the middle school, is warranted for the elementary.
It is not yet known if the traffic to and from Fairview and Van Camp will be restricted to one-way, Scruci said.
“The final logistics of the traffic flow we wouldn’t decide until later,” he said.
Scruci had high praise for city officials being willing to transfer the land to the school district.
“You don’t have that in a lot of communities,” he said.
