Letter: How to justify the unjustifiable
On Wednesday evening at 5:30 p.m., INDOT and the Lochmueller Group will be having an Open House at Jasper Middle School to present the Screening of Alternatives Report. Note that it is an Open House, not a Public Meeting, where they would be required to allow the public to ask questions. They are trying to keep the general public in the dark as much as possible because some of the data they use in the report has been manipulated in a way that any reasonable person would find ridiculous. Unfortunately, the people who rubber-stamp their reports are government bureaucrats, not always known for being reasonable.
Let’s start with the total time saved.
Section 2.5 Preferred Facility Type states on Page 16 that the total time saved for Business Center Access is 28 minutes. Sounds impressive until you look at their methodology in Table 6 on Page 26. It shows that the maximum time saved is 3 minutes to any one destination north of Jasper and 1 minute to any destination south of Jasper.
They just keep adding additional destinations until they can add all the destinations together and come up with an impressive savings number, which, since no one is going to all the destinations simultaneously, is completely impossible to achieve. You can add a second starting point and double the time saved. The two starting points they picked are downtown Jasper and the northeast side of Jasper, coincidentally the location of the Governor Braun-owned Meyer Trucking. The true time saved is 3 minutes from the starting points to I-69 and 1 minute to I-64. Total time saved, 4 minutes. Period. Any destination past those points is included to pad the total. That is over a quarter of a billion dollars of taxpayer money for each minute saved.
Next, let’s look at the Truck Hours Saved.
Section 2.5 Preferred Facility Type, on Page 16, states that the Annual Truck Hours saved is 97,005. Again, impressive sounding until you look at the methodology. On Page 9 of the Purpose and Needs Appendix, the report states “Table 5 compares the annual truck-hour savings for the Super-2 and expressway facility types. These savings are realized for all truck trips forecasted in the 12-county Mid-States Corridor Study Area.” That is all truck trips for Crawford, Daviess, Dubois, Greene, Lawrence, Martin, Monroe, Orange, Perry, Pike, Spencer and Warrick Counties. Many of the trucks included will not travel one mile on the Mid-States Corridor, but they are included to inflate the Truck Hours Saved total. This bogus number is then multiplied by the equally bogus Total Time Saved to arrive at the Total Truck Hours Saved. Of far more interest to the citizens of Dubois County would be Annual Commuter Hours Lost by cutting across the county with a limited-access expressway, but this report isn’t for you. It’s for the bureaucrats.
Now let’s look at the Workforce Increase of 5,280 workers.
One item of interest is that the Tier 1 report looked at the potential increase in the workforce within 30 minutes of Jasper. In Tier 2, they increased this to 40 minutes so they could get a bigger number. Far more important than the travel time to and from work is the quality of the job. Are workers willing to travel to Jasper for a factory or retail job when higher-paying jobs are located within 40 minutes in the other direction? Again, a number to satisfy the bureaucrats, but unlikely to be realized locally.
The other item of note on Page 16 is the time savings to Intermodal Facilities of 17 minutes.
It again uses the same technique of listing multiple destinations to pad the numbers, when the time saved to any one facility is no more than 3 minutes. Also of note is that although this is listed as one of the core goals of the project, in the Tier 1 interviews with local businessmen, it was not a priority for them. Most of the local businesses do not use air or rail freight, so why is it a priority to build a road for better access to it? Because the other goals they originally wanted to use to prove the corridor is needed are even harder to justify.
I could go on for many pages about how the data is being manipulated to overstate the benefits and minimize the disadvantages of the Mid-States Corridor. The decision to build this road was made before the Lochmueller Group was hired. Their job is to check off all the boxes the bureaucrats want to see before building the road gets the green light, and they have shown that they are very good at their job. They show impressive numbers in the summary and hide their questionable methodology deep in the appendices.
As concerned citizens, it is our job to hold the Lochmueller Group, the Mid-States Corridor Regional Development Authority, and INDOT accountable for this blatant attempt to bulldoze through the citizens of our county and build this unwanted and unneeded road. Write to your local, state, and federal officials and let them know what you think. Let your voice be heard. Come to the INDOT Open House on October 22nd and demand answers from those who are trying to keep you in the dark. Together, we can make a difference.
Tom Bartelt
Huntingburg
