Letter: Getting past the Mid-States Corridor propaganda

Did you see a recent post on the Mid-States Corridor Project Facebook page? They want us to mark our calendars for early 2025 for a “Purpose and Need” meeting, but yet they don’t provide a specific date to actually mark on our calendar. This seems rather strange they would post this so soon after the public meeting debacle held on Sept 26, 2024 where they played a four-and-a-half-minute video and tried to get out of answering questions in a group setting. The MSC project office claims these meetings are to gather public input. The Draft and Final EIS are insanely long, and if public input was so important, why did they refuse to publish individual public comments in the FEIS?

Just in case you aren’t already aware, this is what’s called propaganda. You see, they did this to us in 2019 with the first “Purpose and Need” meeting at Jasper High School. They told us then that the road was about safety and relieving congestion. In fact, safety was a core goal at the beginning of all this. By the time the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) was published, the purpose and need had changed.

After hoodwinking the public making them think this road was somehow going to improve any “perceived” congestion or safety issues, the purpose and need conveniently changed to provide us with “regional connectivity” and “reduction in travel time to Indianapolis” by about five minutes. Notice how I say perceived because if you’ve ever lived in a larger city, you will agree that Dubois County and other surrounding areas do not have a congestion problem. However, what’s interesting is that IF this road attracts all this economic development and people relocating to the area like they promise it will, then we really will have a problem with congestion at that time because residents would still have to travel into the cities for school, work, and other reasons.

In another propaganda manipulation tactic, recall also the survey they encouraged us to submit at one of these public meetings where we were instructed to rank our preferred route. The survey deliberately left out the preferred choice of the majority at the meeting, NO BUILD. When I asked the MSC project office for the number of respondents who submitted surveys with “no build” in the narrative box, I was told they couldn’t provide this information as it would be speculative. Additionally, they informed me that this process was not up for a vote.

That’s right, there was no vote on this project because of the new law authored and then supported by two Dubois County policitians allows taxpayer money to be combined with private industry business money whose pockets run deep through a Regional Development Authority (RDA).

https://www.indianasenaterepublicans.com/road-funding-legislation-leads-to-indot-mid-state-regional-
development-authority-partnership.

The majority of the businesses that supposedly support the road declined to have their name released when the Coalition Against the Mid-States Corridor requested a donor list from the RDA. Only a handful were willing to have their business name identified.

The future public meeting they plan to hold in early 2025 is just a way to check the box for public involvement which they are required by law to hold. After the 2019 initial purpose and need meeting a few years ago, they changed their mind about what this project was all about because they realized they couldn’t justify safety or relieving congestion. What they could justify to keep the project moving forward, however, was our so-called need for “connectivity” and “reduced travel time”. I don’t know about you but the ride to Indianapolis has improved significantly already just with I-69, but I guess the state needs to spend over a billion dollars (already outdated figure not adjusted for recent inflation, all using taxpayer’s money) to build another road that will run parallel to an existing road, US 231. Make this make sense!

Those in favor of this road, some who stand to benefit financially from this project, will try their best to convince us it makes sense, but don’t fall for it. As Charles Marohn, Jr states in his book Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town, “what they are doing is what engineers, planners, and project advocates all over the country do when going after state and federal funding for their project. They create propaganda. This is how the system works, and everyone involved knows, understands, and accepts it…this goes beyond a lack of rigor to something rightly thought of as institutional dishonesty, a ubiquitous deception made acceptable only by its broad adoption. It is immoral and it needs to end.” (Bold and underline emphasis mine).

A lengthy but informative read, here is a great article that compares historical dam building to our nation’s more recent incidious drive (no pun intended) to expand or build new roads : https://slate.com/business/2024/08/construction-traffic-cars-driving-transportation-highway.html
“America’s addiction to road construction goes back decades, enabled by naive policymaking, self-serving industry groups, and myopically trained highway engineers. Kicking that addiction is a Herculean task—but not an impossible one. We’ve been on a destruction course with excessive infrastructure before, and it nearly cost America the Grand Canyon. We corrected course then. The moment ahead of us is no less pivotal… After a century of rampant roadbuilding, the U.S. highway network is ubiquitous, dominating the American landscape in bucolic rural settings as well as dense urban ones. Rather than being a tool for mobility, it has become a monument to an auto-centric lifestyle that fouls the air and depletes the public coffers. Neither the country nor the planet can afford to keep expanding it.”

If you are an impacted property owner or care about those who are and want to help kick the road addiction in Indiana, mark your calendars for an event with an actual date to put on your calendar. This will not be a propaganda meeting.

Hope to see you at Klub Haus 61 on Thursday, December 5, 2024, at 6:00 p.m. EST. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. We need YOU. If you’ve ever thought to yourself, I wish there was something that could be done about this, join us. Let’s all use our gifts and talents and tackle this “herculean” task together!

Grateful for your support and wishing you and your family a blessed holiday season.

Marisa Durcholz
Personally impacted property owner