By Mike Rutledge
NKyTribune contributor
Officials from the Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce and the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments re-emphasized their support for a $2.6 billion replacement of the Brent Spence Bridge – almost certainly with the use of tolls – while others spoke against that plan in front of Northern Kentucky state lawmakers on Friday.
“The chamber believes that the Brent Spence Bridge corridor is the single highest priority for infrastructure improvements in our community,” said David Heidrich, chairman of the chamber’s board.
“Secondly, we know of no way that that project can be funded without some form of user fee, or toll.”
“We want to get this bridge built sooner than later,” Robert Koehler of OKI told lawmakers. “Why? Well, of course, safety. Every day that goes by, the risk that you take traveling over this structure is significant. Every day that goes by, the cost goes up.”
“The Brent Spence Bridge really is this region’s connection to the world of freight, the global economy,” Koehler added. “Not only that, our local citizens will benefit.”
Also, “We’d like to see all options on the table, whether they include tolls or not,” Koehler said. “They need to be part of this discussion.”
On the other hand, Joe Meyer of Northern Kentucky United, which opposes use of tolls to build the bridge, pointed out several complaints about the proposed construction of a new bridge to supplement the existing Brent Spence.
“A lot of support for the bridge developed before tolls were a part of the equation,” Meyer said. “Tolling changes the makeup and the impact of this project significantly.”
Also, “This corridor project does not solve the congestion problem,” Meyer said. “On the Kentucky side, we (will) have eight lanes of bridge traffic downsizing into the existing four lanes. You know what it’s like when you go from four lanes to two, or three and one. All this does is relocate the congestion to the Kentucky side of the river.”
Meyer said traffic experts he has spoken with have said, “at the very least, you need to add one more lane to I-75 south from Dixie Highway all the way down to the I-71 split. So that is another $1.2 billion worth of cost that will be required to address the traffic volumes on the Kentucky side.”
“This is going to shape our Northern Kentucky future for the next 50 years,” Meyer said.
Hoping to find common ground on the contentious issue of building a replacement for the Brent Spence Bridge, the Northern Kentucky Legislative Caucus convened the meeting with the various groups that have taken positions on the bridge replacement and on tolls.
The bridge, which carries Interstates 71 and 75 over the Ohio River between Cincinnati and Covington, originally was designed to carry 80,000 vehicles per day, and now carries 160,000, Koehler said. It also was intended to carry 3,000-4,000 trucks per day, but now carries 23,000, and as high as 30,000 some days.
“It’s the fourth most congested truck point in America,” Koehler said. “Not LA, not New Orleans, not Houston. It’s the Brent Spence Bridge.”
He said delays on the bridge cost motorists “roughly $748 million worth of wasted time and fuel” per year. Roughly $400 billion worth of goods cross the bridge in a year, he added.
“No federal dollars can be expended unless the OKI board approves them,” Koehler said, noting OKI’s transportation Improvement Program contains about $2 billion worth of projects. The newly proposed eastern bypass is not on that list.
The toll issue
Meyer said OKI has estimated that if there is a $2 toll, of the 160,000 vehicles that cross the bridge daily, “77,000 of those vehicles will get off the bridge to avoid paying the toll. That’s OKI’s study.”
With a dollar toll, 50,000 vehicles daily would use other bridges, he said, and: “There are five free bridges (including the I-275 bridge near Coney Island). There are lots of options to avoid tolls.”
The streets of Covington and Newport don’t have the capacity to handle that extra traffic, Meyer said.
Opponents argued the bridge’s safety and congestion issues have been overblown by the project’s proponents.
“There is not a crisis,” Meyer argued. “The bridge is not going to fall into the river. We have time to do it right.”
Proponents of the project, on the other hand, argue that with each year that passes, inflation will raise the bridge’s cost by $75 million.
Matt Davis, representing the Build Our New Bridge Now Coalition, told lawmakers that while nobody relishes the idea of a toll to finance a bridge addition, their constituents would be forgiving.
“We did polling at the beginning of the (legislative) session last year – in fact, we used the Kentucky Senate Caucus’s own pollsters – and polled Northern Kentucky voters,” Davis said. “And 59 percent of the folks that we polled said they would support a plan that local, state, federal money, and tolling. That’s the pollsters that you use, are saying. That’s scientific polling.”
Davis the poll also asked if people learned their legislator voted for a Brent Spence Bridge plan that included federal, state, local and tolling, would they be more or less likely to vote for them.
“And 70 percent of the people that we surveyed said it would either make no difference or they would be much more likely to support you for doing it,” Davis said.
Proposed eastern bypass
Homebuilder Henry Fischer, representing Citizens for the Cincy Eastern Bypass, told lawmakers whether or not a replacement is built for the Brent Spent Bridge, officials in the region should do what’s necessary to build a new bypass through Warren and Clermont counties, as well as southern Campbell, Kenton and Boone Counties.
The proposed 68-mile highway would depart from I-75 near Franklin, Ohio, and would intersect with I-71 near Lebanon, Ohio. Its route would take it west of Lebanon and east of Amelia, Batavia, Owensville and Goshen before crossing the Ohio River south of New Richmond. In Northern Kentucky, it would travel south of Walton and Visalia.
Proponents say the new corridor could be built for $1.1 billion. Kentucky transportation officials and OKI contend the cost would be more like $5 billion.
Heidrich commended Fischer for dreaming big dreams and spending so much time developing the idea and detailed plans for the proposed eastern bypass.
“That said, we still carry skepticism that the idea of an eastern bypass is a current alternate for improving the Brent Spence corridor,” Heidrich said. “That’s where we think we need to focus.”
Heidrich added that even if everybody agreed the eastern corridor were the thing to do, “that would still take a hell of a long time to get that done,” he added.
Koehler noted the eastern corridor plan took a hit on Tuesday when the Warren County commissioners took a stand against the proposal.
“We don’t, in my opinion, want to build a 67-mile highway east of Cincinnati,” Koehler said. He said the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet recently estimated a highway of that nature would cost “more than $5 billion.”
Furthermore, it could take decades to buy all the property and get the necessary approvals needed for the eastern corridor, Koehler said.
State Rep. Addia Wuchner afterward said she was pleased with the content and the cordiality of the meeting.
Not showing up at the meeting was the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, which Wuchner said took the position that “the project is on the books and nothing more needed to be said” about it. “Also, they asked if it could be put off until after the elections. I said, ‘this isn’t political.’”
The next step for the caucus? “I think we need to visit in conversations with ourselves to kind of look at what we collectively heard today,” Wuchner said. “Often, people are shouting at us from the corners of the room, and it was important to have everyone in one room. We were listening, they were listening, and now it’s time for us to look as we move into the (2016) session.”
