Palisade receives $1 million grant for safety improvements

Palisade will be seeing some additional remodeling after the town has now received another grant to update Highway 6.

The first grant, The Multimodal Options Fund, gave Palisade $765,000 to cut down traffic lanes and add bike and pedestrian lanes to the strip between Main St. and Iowa Ave.

Just this past week the city has now earned $1,000,000 to build another sidewalk and bike lane stretch.

“This recent TAP grant is going to allow us to continue pedestrian and bicycle paths on the south side of the highway to Palisade High School,” says Palisade Mayor Pro Tem, Greg Mikolai, “With the combination of all of these grants were going to be able to build up some really nice multi-mode transportations,”

The sidewalk and bike lane going from Iowa to Palisade High will only be along south Frontage Road.

The grant is a collaboration with CDOT.

“With certain grant types, some are fully funded and some are matching and they could be anywhere from 50/50, or in this particular case it’s 80/20. So with that $1 million we have to match with $200,000,” says Mikolai.

With the higher volume of cars passing by, Mayor Roger Granat says the current roadway is a safety hazard for crossing children.

“Just this last year we had three pedestrian car incidents on this same section of highway,” says Granat.

But the board of trustees hopes new improvements can make this area biker and pedestrian friendly.

“It’s meetings, it’s research, it’s going in and trying to figure out the best possible means to present the information to get these grants. I think our staff here in Palisade has done a great job in doing that,”says Mikolai.

The board says construction is going to take some time. The board will soon be heading into the design phase and will be meeting with CDOT.

They hope the construction will start to take off in either the fall or winter months of this year.