Local leaders celebrate start of Highway 100 project after long haul

CEDAR RAPIDS - Perseverance was the theme as local leaders and the director of the Iowa Transportation Department met on Tuesday to celebrate the start of the long-in-coming, eight-mile-long, $200-million Highway 100 extension project, construction on which is now underway.

The ceremony took place in a parking lot at Transamerica, near the spot where the highway extension begins at Edgewood Road NE and from where it will travel west and south to connect to Highway 30.

The first half of the project, between Edgewood Road NE and Covington Road, should open in 2018. The second half, which reaches south to Highway 30, will be ready in 2020.

The connection at Edgewood Road will link to a segment of Highway 100 built between Interstate 380 and Edgewood Road NE that opened in 1983 - 31 years ago.

Paul Trombino, IDOT director, said big projects such as the Highway 100 extension don't get built without community support and community partnerships that stay in place over many years. He said he is a believer in projects like Highway 100.

'Urban areas need expressways,” Trombino said. 'It's very important to have that connectivity in and around the community. …

It adds to the quality of life.

'Projects like this open up economic opportunity.”

Mayor Ron Corbett said the new highway connection will bring growth to the community, adding homes, businesses, schools and jobs.

Local leaders, he said, must take care of the problems of the day while trying to keep an eye on the future. A changing cast of city, county and businesses leaders over many years stayed committed to Highway 100, he said.

'...

(T)he goal of building Highway 100 never changed. It never changed because people knew the importance of this project and what it would mean to Cedar Rapids and the region,” Corbett said.

Linn County Supervisor Lu Barron called the coming highway extension 'transformational” and 'a long-awaited transportation milestone.” She said it was important not to forget that the new highway extension gives the metro area a new, higher bridge over the Cedar River should a 2008-like-flood once again close the others.

Amy Reasner, a Cedar Rapids lawyer and a member of the Iowa Transportation Commission, said many highway projects across the state vie to make it into the commission's five-year construction plan. 'Timing,” she said, played a role in the Highway 100 project as it found its place in the plan while she has been a commission member.

She called the project a 'game changer” for residents and for economic development.

Tom Aller, who recently retired as president of Alliant Energy's Iowa and Minnesota operations, remembered back to 1972 when he was executive assistant to then-Mayor Don Canney, when Canney and city officials first talked seriously about a Highway 100-like 'beltway” around the metro area. This was before Interstate 380 ran through the metro area, he said.

Aller, too, served on the Iowa Transportation Commission, and he said the Highway 100 extension was fully funded in the commission's five-year plan when he left the commission in 2003. He said he wasn't sure why the $85 million project now had become a $200 million one.

Concerns from backers of the Rock Island Botanical Preserve near the highway alignment helped to delay the project until now.

Aller said the commission studied other options to move the highway's alignment only to settle on the general plan first conceived many years ago.

'Sometimes good ideas are good ideas, and you need to stick with them,” he said.

Aller said local officials and the IDOT should not permit more than the four entrances now planned for the highway extension to make sure it remains an efficient highway. In addition, the highway construction will allow the DOT to spend less on maintenance on Highways 30 and 151 and Interstate 380, he said.