Letter: My comments for INDOT
I sent the following comments to INDOT and the Lochmueller Group regarding their Tier II Screening of Alternatives Report. Since they have shown they prefer to bury the public comments deep in the Appendices of their reports where no one can find them, I wanted to share them with the public for all to see.
My name is Tom Bartelt. I do not live within the 2000-foot corridor, but the proposed Mid-States Corridor-US 231 intersection north of the Dubois County Airport would directly affect my property. I am a co-owner of a 175-year-old family business that is directly in the path of both proposed alternatives. Of course, it’s only a farm, which you seem to be dismissing as not important to the future of Dubois County.
To answer the other questions on your form, I believe that every intersection in Dubois County is very important. The people who live in this county use them every day, and they should be who any project should consider their primary stakeholders, not just the 8 largest businesses in the county. I personally use both Phoenix Drive and 1100S frequently and believe that it is important that they stay open.
Now for my comments on the report.
I would like to make the following comments regarding the Tier II Screening of Alternatives Report. It seems that this report is a lesson in creative writing designed to check boxes off on the checklist that must be followed to obtain approval and not what is best for the area allegedly being studied.
There are several areas of creative statistics used to create the Mid-States Corridor Screening of Alternatives Report that, in my opinion, make the entire report unacceptable as a true evaluation of the effects of this project. This entire report should be scrapped and redone using the actual, provable numbers, not numbers that have been artificially enhanced to make this project seem more desirable.
The first of these major flaws is shown in Table 6 on Page 28, Access to Major Business Markets. Several business markets are listed, the time saved from downtown Jasper to each location is listed. The same markets are listed with the time saved from northeast Jasper. These numbers are added up and labeled as total time saved. By this logic, you could have saved thousands more minutes by adding other major business markets. There are only two numbers that matter: the time saved from the starting point to the northern end of the corridor, and the time saved from the starting point to the southern end of the corridor. Any other number is there to artificially pad the numbers. Since all destinations reached using the northern end of the corridor save three minutes and all destinations reached using the south end of the corridor save one minute, it is apparent that the corridor saves three minutes going north and one minute going south for a total of four minutes. This is the number that should be used in all calculations of time savings.
The same faulty logic is used in Table 10: Improved Access to Major Intermodal Locations on Page 30. Again, the total time saved is 4 minutes.
Table 8: Annual Forecast Year (2050) Truck Hour Savings on Page 29 is also unreflective of the true savings. There are several questionable assumptions used in calculating this. On Page 9 of the Purpose and Needs Appendix, you state “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.” This sounds like, since Monroe County is included in the 12-county study area, you are claiming that a truck traveling from Bloomington to Indianapolis will see savings from the Mid-States Corridor. Also on Page 9, you state “The Tier 2 traffic assignment for expressway version 1 was 63.6 miles per hour.” Yet on Page 17 or the Mid-States Corridor Screening of Alternatives Report, you state “The mainline horizontal and vertical alignments were designed assuming a design speed limit of 60 mph.” Your calculations are based on the assumption that all the trucks on the Mid-States Corridor will exceed the speed limit.
As far as the overall design of the road, it seems that you have decided that the needs of your so-called “Primary Stakeholders” are of tantamount importance, and the needs of the majority of people in Dubois County are not worth consideration. I do not see any calculations of the cost to the workers of the county who will have to cross the Corridor twice a day, traveling to and from work. I do not see any calculations of how much it will cost in response time of emergency vehicles trying to cross the road and go miles out of the way to reach someone on a road y the corridor would cut off. I see no reference to the cost of maintaining the additional roadway that the county and cities would be burdened with, especially with the loss of property tax revenue forced upon them this year. It is clear that this road is chosen to be a major benefit for a select few while the rest of us must suffer with the negative consequences of cutting through the center of our county with an eyesore of a road.
I am especially dismayed that, as of yet, I have seen no evidence of you attempting to work with the businesses being the most negatively affected by this road, the hard-working farmers. On Page 35 of the Mid-States Corridor Screening of Alternatives Report, you state, “Agricultural Lands are one of the highest acreage land use categories in Dubois County. Agricultural lands provide food for both humans and livestock. All alternatives will impact agricultural lands. The development of alternatives has been evaluated to reduce the impact on agricultural lands”. Apparently, your engineers think they understand farming well enough to determine how to reduce the impact better than the people who have lived and worked on the land for generations. It seems that you are paying lip service to satisfy the bureaucrats who you expect to rubber-stamp this report while not actually doing what you claim.
On our 175-year-old, seven-generation family farm, you are possibly bulldozing the house that my father built for my mother over 50 years ago, every usable outbuilding, and possibly ¼ of my land. You would be putting an eyesore of an expressway right outside my house, reminding me of what was lost every time I look outside. You will be cutting off access to parts of the farm and to my neighbor’s house, which would require access roads on each side of the corridor to restore, taking even more land. You will be cutting across drainage fields that cost thousands of dollars to install. You will leave some of the fields cut into smal,l unfarmable triangles as you divide the farm in half. You will force us to go over a mile just to cross the road. It does not seem to me that you are making any effort to reduce the impact on our farm. This entire process is also putting a tremendous emotional and psychological strain on my family and my friends being tortured by this unwanted and unneeded project you are shoving down our throats.
Clearly, the Lochmueller Group has a thorough understanding how to manipulate the data to get this report approved. Personally, if I were an engineer, I would be embarrassed to put my name on it.
Tom Bartelt
LC Bar LLC
TTC Farms
Huntingburg, IN
