Most days, children in the Westlawn neighborhood walk or bike to school without incident. The neighborhood was designed to support it. Sidewalks connect homes to paths, paths connect to streets, and the overall layout reflects the kind of walkable design that appears in the Village’s comprehensive, bicycle, and pedestrian plans.

But two streets in the neighborhood, Pheasant Run and Mourning Dove, stop short of connecting to each other. A narrow strip of land owned by the Town of Cottage Grove sits between them. The gap is approximately 100 feet.

Because Westlawn currently has only one vehicle inlet and outlet at Damascus Road, that gap has consequences beyond inconvenience. Drivers must route through surrounding streets and onto County Road BB (Cottage Grove Road), a road already under significant pressure during school arrival and dismissal hours. Emergency responders face the same detour. And the families who already use an informal footpath through that strip, because the connection is the obvious and direct route, are doing so without an ADA-accessible surface.

One Town board member visited the site during the morning school commute and counted seven children using the informal paths between 7:15 and 8:00 a.m. on a single morning.

The Village has not been inactive on this. The connection has been formally approved, with the Village agreeing to pay for and maintain it. Joint-use sidewalks were included in the most recent iteration of the plan. The proposal has gone to the Town twice. Both times, the Town board declined to move forward.

The public record from the Town board’s last discussion of this issue was on September 25, 2025 (link to meeting minutes). The primary concern raised was neighbor preference. Several adjacent residents contacted their board member to say they chose the neighborhood because of the dead-end, and three residents spoke in opposition at the meeting. A board member also raised questions about stormwater infrastructure and road widening costs, though those concerns applied most directly to a full road connection rather than the pedestrian path the Village was proposing. The board voted 4-1 to take no action. The dissenting member had attempted to broker a middle ground: approve one of the two path connections in exchange for the Village addressing a separate stormwater issue on Nightingale Lane. That motion did not receive a second.

That framing is worth noting. The choice before the board was not whether to fund or build anything. The Village had already agreed to cover costs and maintenance. The question was whether to allow a pedestrian connection on Town land, at no expense to Town taxpayers, in an area children are already crossing on foot every day.

Municipal boards weigh many factors, including jurisdiction, precedent, and long-term land use considerations. Those are legitimate areas of deliberation. But the current result is that a 100-foot strip of land is producing longer emergency response routes, additional traffic load on a county highway, and an informal path that no one designed and no one maintains. In the meantime, the gap remains. So do the children walking through it.