Snow King Avenue and Simon Lane meet Scott Lane at slightly different points, making the four-way feel like two separate three-ways.

Former Town Councilor Bob Lenz said the council wrestled with fixing the intersection several times during his 12 years in office.

“The intersection has to be squared off, period,” Lenz told councilors during public comment. “There’s no alternatives if you’re going to have a safe intersection and comply with good design standards.”

Shifting Simon Lane to the north will be combined with plans to improve the area for pedestrians and cyclists and make it more Americans with Disabilities Act compliant. The project includes plans for protected bike lanes, separated crosswalks for bikes and pedestrians, sidewalks and improved curb ramps.

Reconfiguring the intersection also could make it easier to navigate for school buses, said Brian Schilling, pathways and trails coordinator for the town.

The design work is being paid for through a grant from the Wyoming Department of Transportation.

Schilling said he would come back to the council in the spring with a more solid cost estimate and recommendation about whether to do construction this summer.

“I’d like to know not just how much it’s going to cost but where we might find the money and what else we might be doing with that money,” Councilor Jonathan Schecther said. “If you spend it on this, what will we not be doing with it?”

The realignment is possible because the town owns properties on the southeast and northwest corners of the intersection, Schilling said. The town has leased 915 Simon Lane and 910 Smith Lane to a developer to build workforce housing in a three-story building, dubbed the S4 Flats. The intersection realignment potentially could coincide with construction of the housing this summer.

The intersection upgrades and realignment would fit within the public right of way and town-owned properties. However, there is one section of sidewalk that runs across private property and would require an easement on the northwest corner, by apartments whose driveways back onto Scott Lane.

Thomas Stanton, a lawyer and property owner on Scott Lane, asked that the easement be taken out of the design.

While he supports snow removal and sidewalks, he said, “this easement that’s going to interfere with our parking is not welcome.”

Stanton said the condo complex where he lives was negatively impacted by the development of The Grove, an affordable housing project next door. The condo owners worked closely with the town and thought their concerns had been addressed, he said, “but then one day you woke up and there’d been built a zero-setback building on the boundary that negatively impacts two units.”

Stanton and Schilling both said the project could proceed without the easement. Stanton asked that the easement be removed from future drawings “because leaving it in there is a little too dangerous.”

Snow King Avenue to Scott Lane to Maple Way is the primary east-west connector for cyclists through town, with an average of 900 trips a day in the summer, according to a town staff report.

Remaining unresolved, however, is the larger question of the jig-jog where Maple Way hits Scott Lane — an engineering problem that has vexed the town for 30 years. The town bought three lots on Maple Way and Simon Lane decades ago, with an eye on further straightening the entire intersection. Councilor Arne Jorgensen asked staff to bring back a look at the big picture for the next discussion on the Simon Lane redesign.