A road runs through it Dalton residents weigh in on Fourth

COEUR d’ALENE — There’s a street in Dalton Gardens, a remnant really, named after a family whose roots go back more than a century.

The last bit of Baillie Street is a quarter-mile chunk that parallels the wider, more grand and paved Fourth Street at the community’s northern border with Hayden.

“My grandmother was a Baillie,” Dalton Mayor Steve Roberge said.

And the entirety of Fourth Street from East Prairie Avenue to Dalton Avenue, a distance of 1 ½ miles, was at one time, when the road was dirt, called Baillie Street.

Roberge’s family, in one form or another, has lived nearby for 110 years. Like most of their neighbors, many of them don’t remember the dirt road days. They regard Fourth Street as a major route through the residential part of town that now sees as many as 7,000 cars pass through on a daily basis.

The wear and tear on the road surface has left the street patched and lumpy in places. A new plan to rebuild the road resulted in a packed house this week of almost 100 people at a meeting at Dalton Gardens City Hall.

Thursday’s meeting was in response to a $4 million federal grant awarded to the city to refurbish Fourth Street. The work likely won’t be shovel ready for a few years.

Welch Comer Engineers gathered input at the 4 to 7 p.m. meeting, the first in a series of meetings to reach out to residents and glean their thoughts on the project, said Matt Gillis, project engineer.

“We got a lot of input. We need to go through it,” Gillis said. “We got good information to start with.”

Roberge, who lives on Fourth Street, said the idea is to make sure the once slow-moving thoroughfare — the speed limit remains at 25 mph — will stay safe for pedestrians, cyclists and motorists into the future.

In addition, the pavement has required annual patching for years, work that the city contracts.

Roberge said the city began making plans for street work beginning in 2012 before applying for the grant, which will pay for the work to be done probably around 2024.

“That’s a big project,” Roberge said.

Once Welch Comer compiles the comments from residents, another meeting — which hasn’t been scheduled — will allow for the exchange of more information, comments and more input.

Gillis said Thursday’s crowd showed that people are interested, and that’s good.

“We asked for public input,” Gillis said. “And Dalton showed up.”

When the project is done in five years or so, it should be a smooth and safe thoroughfare, and a far cry from almost a century ago, when the road was used for commerce and a light gauge railroad followed it, transporting passengers between Hayden Lake and the city of Coeur d’Alene.