The Chapel Hill Town Council unanimously approved the beginning of the next phase in a plan to improve roads in the Ephesus-Fordham district of Chapel Hill in its meeting Monday night.

The plan includes intersection improvements at Ephesus Church Road and Fordham Boulevard.

“There were other improvements in the network that include extension of some streets, Elliott Road, Legion Road,” said Earl Lewellyn, a traffic engineer at Kimley-Horn and Associates. “There were internal improvements within Eastgate Shopping Center.”

The initial estimates for the plan were around $4.3 million, but that number does not include the cost of land acquisition or right of way acquisition, something mayor Pam Hemminger said she wanted to learn.

“We just need to know what kind of money we’re looking at,” she said. “That’s a huge chunk of land through somebody’s property. It’s an estimate, I get that, but that needs to be part of this process as well.”

The updates to the roads are part of a larger plan for the Ephesus-Fordham area to make it more attractive for development.

An improvement to the surrounding infrastructure would make it better suited to handle higher-density traffic that could come from a potential development.

“This is us continuing a process that we’d already started with the projects that we have going on at Ephesus Church and Fordham,” she said. “What we need to know is that if this is not the final piece in the holistic picture, we need to know what is.”

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