The city of Galion held a ribbon cutting ceremony to celebrate the opening of new road Hesby Drive on Monday, Aug. 19. Hesby Drive connects Bucyrus Road and the Galion City Schools campus, and also extends to Portland Way North via Heise Park Lane and the temporary one-way road leading into Galion West Shopping Center.
The new road is opening just in time to serve dual purposes. First and foremost, Hesby Drive is expected to greatly relieve traffic to the school campus. Secondly, until the section of the current Portland Way North construction that affects the bridge is completed, the entire road will remain open during the school day.
However when it is completed, projected for November, the portion that connects to the schools will be gated as are other roads leading into the schools. Mayor Tom O’Leary said that Hesby Drive was definitely a needed project. “There has been a feeling that this access to the school has been missing, and we knew we would have to have new routes due to the bridge closure. This accomplishes both things,” he noted.
The road construction was entirely funded by the city of Galion. School board President Dennis Long maintains “Better accessibility was really needed.This is one of those situations where without the city we would not have been able to do the project. There is no way the school district could have funded this on its own.”
The land the road is on, however, was donated by Mr. and Mrs. Philip Hesby. According to Roy Benson, co-executor of the Jean B. Hesby estate, when the schools were being planned the district needed to provide 15 percent of the budget that it could not afford. To remedy this the Hesbys donated 28 acres of land.
When it came time to build the road the school district then gave over some of the donated land on its campus to go towards the road. In exchange, the city took on the full cost of the road including the connection to the school parking lot; and the schools gained guaranteed bus access during the construction and their need for another entry point to the campus was filled.
