Letter: Commissioner’s meeting leaves more questions than answers
I was at the March 20 Mid-States Corridor meeting of the Dubois County Commissioners and came home with more questions and far more unease with the future than when I left home. However, I was under the mistaken illusion that the county commissioners were there to represent the entire county when I discovered that they had ears only for the unelected Bill Kaiser, a paid proponent for the RDA’ s Mid-States Corridor project who could only sputter about his limited involvement as a consultant. After he rambled for over an hour about his “limited—but necessary” role as a consultant, he and his sidekick, Mark Schroeder, departed the meeting while those of us who still have plenty of questions were, as usual, left out of the discussion.
The resulting outcry at this meeting was met with a sullen response by one of the commissioners to let us speak, but limited comments to three minutes, and once again, the people who have the most to lose were not heard. There are many unanswered questions about this current study, as well as the heavy-handed push to get it off the ground, and some of these questions undoubtedly remain unanswerable.
I don’t risk losing my property or my immediate neighborhood like so many people do, but like all of us who live and work here, we ALL risk losing our thriving community. We have still been given no answer to the question of how this truck route would improve our lives and benefit ALL of us who live and work here. Sadly, the small handful of people who want this highway, along with those conducting the study, continue to refuse to acknowledge even our questions and our well-studied observations.
As someone who commuted from the Northeast part of Dubois County for nearly 30 years until I retired and moved to Jasper, I am well aware that there is no one highway to make this easier. It’s the county roads, the state roads and the maintenance of them that makes this possible. The people who commute daily from outside the path of this proposed highway are numerous, and come from all the townships and from surrounding counties as well. In addition, the workplaces, the businesses we depend on are also spread over the county in all directions–far beyond a specious need for a single use trucking corridor designed to bypass the towns and destroy the farmlands it passes through. No matter what, the current US 231 highway, and all our state and county roads, will continue to be widely used simply because of where they are.
Our existing secondary roads are what take precedence to all of us in Dubois County, both in the towns and beyond, and from personal experience and years of research have come to see that a major reason Dubois County along with the towns inside it is thriving is most likely due to a relatively slow growth because it has no big highway running through it. Our forests and farmland are far more necessary to our future than any industry could be and our committed and hard-working people are what make the county prosper. The County Council has been elected to represent the people who live and work here, not those who are trying to sell us a proverbial “pig in a poke”.
The last forty years have shown us that trickle-down economics doesn’t work, that the earth is fragile–requiring us to clean up our mistakes by taking better care of the land that feeds us, and that our democracy is in jeopardy and needs immediate attention. We live in trying times, in a country that is at war with half the world in which the climate is increasingly unpredictable, the citizens are at odds with each other, and there are no easy solutions to any of the major problems that face us.
Despite our many differences, the vast majority of the people in this community as well as the surrounding region are working together to keep our small part of the planet not only functional, but admirable. This is why Dubois County is a good place to live and work. The proposed highway is simply a major distraction which has nothing of any genuine value to offer us. We need to fix those things which are broken, and maintain the many things we do right as we work together for a positive future for all of rural Southern Indiana. I can only hope that our elected officials will act on behalf of the many good people who live and work here, and vote to remove the wildly destructive, outrageously expensive, and completely unnecessary Mid-States Corridor from consideration.
Jeanne Melchior
Jasper
