A years-long saga took a step toward a conclusion earlier this month with Wright City’s annexation of Indian Head Lodge Road.
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A years-long saga took a step toward a conclusion earlier this month with Wright City’s annexation of Indian Head Lodge Road. Mayor Michelle Heiliger said this week, though, that obstacles still remain in the way of improvements to the road that many would like to see.
Until the Wright City Board of Aldermen’s July 9 annexation vote, Indian Head Lodge Road, which serves as the only access to the Spring Lakes, Villas at Spring Lakes and Greenfield Estates subdivisions, was a private road.
“Some of the ownership of the road has gone back generations and this road had been managed by different entities over the years,” Heiliger said.
“So there was a good period of time where trying to figure out who actually owns the road had to happen. There was a lot of research done, time, energy, money expended to go through that whole process.”
Spring Lakes and the Villas at Springs Lakes are located within Wright City limits, while Greenfield Estates is in unincorporated Warren County.
Although residents of the three subdivisions originally asked Wright City to cover half the $68,310 cost of improvements to Indian Head Lodge Road, aldermen were reluctant to commit the funding. Wright City eventually agreed to pay $6,139, or 8.9% of the cost of the overlay project.
“We were able to work with the citizens that live off of Indian Head Lodge Road, they raised the majority of the funds to bring the road up to the state that it’s in today, and then once that happened, the city could move forward with annexing the road into the city,” Heiliger said.
Indian Head Lodge Road is now a city street, and Wright City will maintain and plow the road going forward, she said.
As for additional improvements to the road that some would like to see such as widening it or adding sidewalks, though, Heiliger said these projects can’t happen immediately.
“It’s still a two-lane rural road, right, and until we can obtain right-of-way access from the people that live along Indian Head Lodge Road — which some of them have been willing to give us, others have not — until we can obtain that, we can’t move forward with doing anything else with the road at this time,” she said.
While the future of further improvements to Indian Head Lodge Road may be uncertain, getting the road annexed into the city marks a major step toward closing the book on a long-running controversy, Heiliger said.
“We’re glad that it’s been resolved,” she said.
