The crash outside Pat Segel’s Gifford Street home in the Elgin Historic District last weekend was so loud that she was certain it was an explosion. A 100-pound chunk of concrete landed just a few feet from her front porch.
But this was no explosion. It was just another driver plowing into the turning circle at the Gifford/Division Street intersection, she said.
Amazingly, the driver was not injured in the 2 a.m. June 9 crash that woke the neighborhood. But that’s not the point, she said. It’s that it happened at all since it’s not the first crash to have occurred there — there were three last summer — and is unlikely to be the last if the city doesn’t do something about the giant impediment in the middle of the road, she said.
She’s sent email and had meetings with city officials but there’s been no solution. This week, she took her case to the Elgin City Council.
“The city has been negligent in responding to the needs of those who live close to the intersection. I find the negligence unacceptable,” Segel told council members.
Segel has lived in the house she purchased with her late husband, David, for 23 years. In the late 1990s, she said, the city put in the turning circle to slow down speeders and to deter truck drivers from using it under the mistaken idea they were on Gifford Road.
With GPS now available, few trucks come down the street these days, Segel said. And the roundabout has done little to control speeding in the residential neighborhood, she said.
In one of the crashes last summer, a van headed westbound on Gifford Street went through the roundabout in the wrong direction, hit a parked car and then landed close to where children were playing, Segel said. The driver was texting at the time, she said.
In another incident, a driver took out nine bushes on Segel’s property and then hit a tree.
“The intersection is too small to support a roundabout,” she said. Larger vehicles, including SUVs, delivery vans, snow plows, garbage trucks and buses “cannot safely circumvent it without hitting the curb or going up on the grass,” she said.
It’s only a matter of time before something more than a fender-bender occurs there, she said.
“I do believe if that circle is not removed, someone will be seriously injured or killed,” Segel told the council.
In 2022, Elgin sent a postcard to residents in the neighborhood asking if they supported removing the turning circle. Neighbors fell on both sides of the issue so the city didn’t take action, City Manager Rick Kozal told the council at its Wednesday meeting.
“We do not believe it is a properly engineered instrument,” Kozel said. “It was created with good intentions, but it hasn’t functioned as it was intended.”
Mayor Dave Kaptain directed staff to research the options and costs associated with removing the structure.
Speaking outside her home Friday, Segel said she remains skeptical that the council will take action but she’s not going down without a fight, even if it means going to court.
“I’ve been promised before,” she said. “I have to do what I have to do. I don’t see that I have a choice.”
Gloria Casas is a freelance reporter for The Courier-News.
