Highway 30 widening plans encounter resistance

KEYSTONE – Benton County landowners learned why the Iowa Department of Transportation might shift the alignment of Highway 30 south or north in a forthcoming widening project, but many of them didn't like it at a packed meeting here Wednesday night.

More than 150 area residents, most of them landowners, turned out for a meeting at Turner Hall in Keystone organized by State Sen. Tim Kapucian to hear the project.

The DOT has placed$15.6 million in  land acquisition funding for the widening of Highway 30 to four lanes in its current five-year plan. It's an important project for the DOT, in part because of the 101 crashes - eight of them fatal – that took place on the two-lane stretch of Highway 30 in Benton County from 2005 to 2009.

Widening the stretch to four lanes would make the route safer, avoiding head-to-head traffic and making it less dangerous to pass. It  would also require a little more land, but Jim Schnoebelen, the DOT's district engineer  in Cedar Rapids, said it wouldn't be much more. That's because each alternative would still add a roughly 80-foot median and 24-foot driving lane in addition to ten-foot shoulders and additional land to slope ditches to modern standards.

Schnoebelen outlined three alternatives for widening Highway 30, from which a decision is expected in January 2012.

The first alternative would  require about 300 feet of land south beyond the existing south right-of-way line through most of the project. Impacts on the south side of the existing right of way would extend about 400 feet in one spot due to the need to avoid Calvary Cemetery.

A second alternative calls for building four new lanes north of Highway 30 from just west of the intersection with Highway 21 to just west of the 19th Avenue/County Road V-56 intersection. At the intersection, the new alignment would shift south of the existing highway to avoid Calvary Cemetery and continue on the south side to the intersection with Highway 218.

The last alternative would build the westbound lanes generally on the alignment  existing Highway 30. It would require additional right-of-way to be acquired on both the north and south sides of Highway 30 across most of the county.

Some residents asked Schnoebelen why the DOT couldn't simply put a concrete barrier between the eastbound and westbound expressway lanes.

Schnoebelen  said the state will want to maximize the safety benefits of the project because it is such a large public investment. He said the existing Highway 30 base pavement dates back to 1927, and is not worth using for one lane. In addition, He said much of the existing pavement will have to be removed in order to flatten out hills to meet modern sight-distance standards.

Although some thought the DOT commonly reused existing pavement when making four-lane expressways, Schnoebelen said, “it's nothing unique we're doing here.”

Landowners who'd seen Alternative One designated as the DOT's preferred alignment on the agency web site were surprised to learn from Schnoebelen that the agency that it no longer designating any design alternative as its favorite.  Schnoebelen said the DOT withdrew the recommendation to obtain more public input recently.

Schnoebelen said a preferred alternative will likely be announced in January 2012 after the Environmental Impact Statement for the project is completed. He said land acquisition could begin at earliest in July 2013, and construction could begin at earliest in 2016 if construction funding is placed in the state's highway plan by that time.

Fred Schuchmann, who owns land on Highway 30, could lose some of it to alternative one. He came to the meeting looking for the DOT's rationale for possibly taking his land.

“I don't want to give ‘em any more land,” said Schuchmann, who had already lost some prime farmland to an electric substation.

Schuchmann said he realizes he ultimately doesn't have much say in the matter.

“They can go through eminent domain and take it if they want to,” he said.

Newly-confirmed DOT Director Paul Trombino was introduced at the meeting, saying he welcomes vigorous public debate on projects. Another public meeting on the project is expected this fall.