About 20 residents attended Monday’s Baldwin City Council meeting despite an agenda that had nothing requiring council members to vote.

The draw was Baldwin City Public Works Director Bill Winegar’s report on the status of negotiations with the Kansas Department of Transportation about proposed improvements to the U.S. Highway 56 corridor from First to Eisenhower streets. City staff last week went door-to-door to notify residents in northeast Baldwin City that discussion of the proposed improvements would be on the agenda.

In July 2015, the City Council hired BG Consultants to make application for Kansas Department of Transportation corridor management access construction funds to improve safety on that section of U.S. 56.

The section — and the Eisenhower Street intersection with the highway in particular — were among a number of proposed safety improvements in Baldwin City identified in a 2010 U.S. 56 Corridor Management Group report. The group, which included Baldwin City, Edgerton, Gardner, Douglas County and the Mid-America Regional Council representatives, completed the report after a multiyear effort that included public input. It is the same program and funding source that made possible last summer’s improvements to the High Street/U.S. 56 intersection on the city’s eastern gateway.

Early plans shared with the council last year indicated the proposed project would widen the highway to three lanes from First Street to the current Eisenhower Street alignment. It would reroute Eisenhower Street so that it aligns with Third Street to the south of the highway and move the U.S. 56 access to Washington Street to the east so it is halfway between Second and Third streets.

The proposal of most concern to neighborhood residents after last summer’s discussion, however, was the proposed closure of through traffic on Washington Street from the highway to Ames Street. Residents said the closure would funnel too much traffic on First and Eisenhower streets and increase emergency response times in the neighborhood.

The partial Washington Street closure remained part of a conceptual plan Winegar shared Monday with the City Council, as was the addition of a middle turn lane on the highway, construction of sidewalks on both sides of U.S. 56 along the section and rerouting of Eisenhower and Washington to the east. Winegar noted, however, the city and KDOT were still in negotiations and no funding had been approved for the project.

New in the plans shared Monday was the replacement of the current highway crosswalk signal west of Third Street with the installation of an over-the-roadway signal at that location. Three years ago, a petition drive asking KDOT to upgrade the signal at the crosswalk three blocks south of Baldwin school district’s east campus garnered 400 signatures.

A final improvement would be the installation of a block of sidewalk on the west side of Eisenhower north of the highway.

Based on the U.S. 56/High Street intersection project, it would probably be at least two years before work started on the proposed improvements, Winegar said. KDOT provided up to $775,000 for the High Street project with the city paying 60 percent of the $137,000 cost of engineering, design and right of way acquisition. Douglas County paid the remaining 40 percent of those costs.

In other business, the City Council:

• Scheduled a special meeting for 6 p.m. Monday to discuss capital improvement projects before serious work starts on the city’s 2017 budget. The city’s CIP plan includes a number of significant projects, including a new public works building, police station, upgrades to City Hall and building a theater in the Lumberyard Arts Center. A community center is also under consideration.

• Learned from City Administrator Glenn Rodden that interviews were being conducted with candidates for the community development director position. Rodden said he expected to have someone named to the position in two weeks.