The State of Iowa City Development Board meeting tomorrow includes an annexation by the city of Johnston. Based on a notice from earlier this year, Johnston is making plans to bring a portion of the IA 141 corridor under its control. (Many links in this blog post are to PDFs.)
Currently, Johnston’s west edge is about NW 107th Street. This will take the city out to IA 141 in two places: Around the IA 415 interchange, and a mile-long segment north of but not touching Grimes. This is kind of atypical, because many city annexations of the past two decades or so have explicitly excluded/stopped at highway right-of-ways. Bondurant, at this same CDB meeting, is doing a mini-annexation beside the intersection of US 65 where NE 80th Street angles away, but not including the bit of 65 that’s right beside it.
This will give Johnston an even weirder city limits outline. Only part of Camp Dodge is officially inside Johnston. Much of the square mile northeast of the intersection of NW 86th Street and NW 70th Avenue isn’t included, for reasons that escape me. There’s also a railroad right-of-way notch. This annexation goes after the part of Camp Dodge west of 100th Street, because it is necessary to make the desired areas contiguous with the city. (There’s also a parcel owned by the … Department of the Navy?)
There’s one other super quirk here. With this annexation specifically pulling in the IA 415 interchange, part of the state highway system will be inside Johnston city limits for the first time since IA 401 was decommissioned. IA 401 kept Johnston connected after IA 141 was moved west from Beaver Drive and Merle Hay Road onto the four-lane that ends at Rider Corner.* The only state-maintained road inside the city limits until approval of this annexation is part of the ramp system in the northeast corner of the NW 86th Street interchange, which was built after the lines were set. Officially, Johnston does not touch the I-35/80 mainline.
*Urbandale doesn’t want us to call it that anymore. Good luck with that.