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The final phase of the Interstate 75 reconstruction project through Dayton likely will be delayed by a year, starting no earlier than late 2013, according to the Ohio Department of Transportation.
The change in the $237 million project, pushing back the completion date to perhaps 2017, was part of a huge list of roadwork delays presented Tuesday to the state’s Transportation Review Advisory Council, with ODOT citing financial reasons. ODOT proposed some delay for all 34 Tier 1 TRAC projects, and some were pushed back a decade or more.
“Previous administrations put projects on the list without looking at what that meant for the current revenues available,” ODOT spokesman Steve Faulkner said. “We have $2 billion of projects in some phase of construction, but we only have $100 million a year in revenue.”
Any delay is hardly good news, except in comparison? to other projects across the state. The one-year delay locally is the shortest delay of any TRAC project in Ohio.
Twenty-one of the 34 projects face suggested delays of at least a decade, and nine projects that were slated to start around 2015, are now on the calendar for 2031 or later.
No other Miami Valley projects are on the Tier I list, but one of the projects on Tier II — widening of part of I-70 in Clark County — has been delayed two decades.
“We got lucky, no doubt about it,” said Steve Finke,?assistant public works director for the city of Dayton. Finke said the I-75 delay won’t have any domino effect in slowing down other projects.
The project calls for reconstruction of I-75 in downtown Dayton — between Fifth Street, just north of U.S. 35, to Riverview Avenue, just south of the sweeping turn near the Dayton Art Institute. That stretch includes two bridges over the Great Miami River.
The key piece of the project is the plan to replace various left- and right-side ramps with a single, centrally located interchange for downtown Dayton, servicing traffic to First, Second and Third streets, as well as Salem and Monument avenues.
Previous ODOT documents listed the project timeline as late 2012 to 2016.
Faulkner said TRAC officials will meet Jan. 31 to adopt the new project plan, then will take public comments until making a final vote in March or April.
Faulkner conceded it’s possible that certain timelines could change, but he said raising the gas tax that funds these projects is not an option. He called the new timeline “an honest and accurate representation of reality,” given the available funding.
ODOT Director Jerry Wray said gas tax revenue has been flat, while maintenance and construction costs have risen. He acknowledged some local officials will “likely be a little bit shocked” at the changed timelines.
Count Clark County-Springfield Transportation Coordinating Committee Director Scott Schmid among those less than pleased about the delays.
The $73.7 million I-70?construction project in Clark County that was expected to begin in 2015 won’t start now until 2036 at best.
“The need for a third lane will have come and gone,” Schmid said. “We’ll probably need a fourth lane by then.”
In Columbus, reconstruction of the I-70/I-71 interchange is being pushed back from 2014 to 2025. That and other Columbus?projects were planned because daily traffic on the downtown highways is twice what they were built to handle.
In Cleveland, money for a second Inner Belt Bridge on I-90 may not be available for more than a decade. The existing bridge is already three years beyond its designed life span.
“It’s another broken promise from the state of Ohio to northeast Ohio,” said Ohio Rep. Bill Patmon, whose district includes the I-90 bridge. “And it flies in the face of most of the rhetoric that says we’re going to build our infrastructure to a viable condition.”
Montgomery County Engineer Paul Gruner said the new project calendar should be a wake-up call.
“Obviously, there’s not going to be any money for new TRAC projects for a long time,” Gruner said. “It reinforces what we’ve been saying for a long time — there needs to be a long-term solution to transportation funding.”
This story contains information from the Columbus Dispatch and The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer. Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2278 or? jkelley@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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