A decades-old road project that’s long divided three Cincinnati communities is another small step closer to being resolved. About 100 voting members of the Northside Community Council approved a list of tentative improvements to the community’s network of streets at a May 15 meeting at the McKie Recreation Center in Northside.
This band of Northsiders — organized through the Coalition Against the Colerain Connector — is the latest to oppose the long-planned road linking I-74 and Hamilton Avenue. College Hill residents first took up the fight in the early 1970s.
Originally intended as a modified expressway linking I-75 and northern Hamilton County, the project was reworked and scaled back over the years until Cincinnati City Council voted to kill it a year ago, which isn’t the first time the city has voted it down. But the fate of the project’s land — about 90 acres in Northside cleared of dozens of homes decades ago — still is undecided. The Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) owns the land and won’t hand it over to city control until there’s a publicly supported plan for it, which was the point of the May 15 meeting.
At the meeting, Rich Schupp, principal engineer for the city, presented a dozen traffic improvement ideas from a list of 36 suggestions brainstormed by Northsiders and, to a lesser degree, by the College Hill Forum. Also, Cincinnati Senior Planner Tommie Thompson presented a few land-use plans for the strip.
Starting with the most congested area — the intersection of Colerain and Virginia avenues — Schupp detailed the possible street modifications that would take the place of the connector, including:
· Creating a right turn lane from northbound Colerain to Virginia Avenues by using some of the land now occupied by a large support mound, plus straightening the Colerain Avenue access to I-74;
· Adding another lane to reach I-74 from southbound Colerain Avenue;
· Providing an exclusive right turn lane heading south from Kirby to Virginia Avenue.
The remaining 24 ideas didn’t involve changing the roads — such as park and ride lots, pedestrian bridges, turn restrictions and other ideas.
After the meeting, Schupp was optimistic that many of the dozen suggestions would be built — if there’s money for them.
“The whole thing could be finished in a couple of years,” he said later, adding that the other main obstacle is whether the state will hand the land over and how much it will want in return.
The land-use issues are more complex, Schupp said.
Thompson was optimistic, however, that some sort of consensus would be reached on that issue as well, even if it’s not unanimous.
“We haven’t yet come up with a plan everyone likes, and I’m not sure we’re ever going to,” she said.
Thompson sensed at the meeting the majority of Northsiders don’t want the land overdeveloped, but they want to make sure there’s more than a park there so that a road can’t be built later. ODOT officials, on the other hand, haven’t been eager to allow any permanent structures to be built on the property in case the land is needed later for roads or something else.
The city’s presentation then headed to community meetings in Mount Airy and North College Hill — two communities that have generally supported the connector — on May 23 and 24, respectively, which were too late to be included in this story. In the meantime, Thompson is asking city architects to draw a few conceptual sketches of what kind of housing might work on ODOT’s land.
But, despite the city’s vote to abandon the connector project, Hamilton County engineers still are supporting just such a project — a ground-level parkway connecting I-74 to Hamilton Avenue.
Deputy Hamilton County Engineer Ted Hubbard said County Engineer Bill Brayshaw prepared an opinion on the issue one or two years ago in anticipation of a discussion by the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments (OKI).
Earlier this year, Brayshaw and Hubbard asked the county commission to endorse the last version of the connector after the two discovered a drawing of it at an ODOT office; they later withdrew the request before a vote was taken. Hubbard said their intention was merely to express their position on the issue — that a limited-access parkway to remove through traffic from Northside’s surface streets would benefit the entire region.
“We do believe the reasons are valid,” Hubbard said, adding that he knows the county doesn’t have the final say.
So do city staffers feel as if the county is stepping on their toes?
“I do, personally,” Thompson said.
Schupp was more diplomatic on the subject, saying that the county is just concerned about this project because it will affect traffic patterns outside the city.
“We in no way are trying to hurt the city’s feelings … but we do feel that it’s a good idea to give our opinion,” Hubbard said.
Speaking of traffic, Hubbard said he expected the connector and other issues affecting Cincinnati’s arterial streets to be discussed during the two-year I-75 corridor study started last fall by OKI, ODOT and the Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission. The study is an attempt to comprehensively analyze transportation and traffic along the I-75 corridor from Northern Kentucky to Dayton.
The county’s posturing has some Northsiders fearful that the county is trying to sabotage their effort to reach a consensus on what to do with ODOT’s land. Brayshaw has also said he doesn’t feel the city’s public meetings have included enough College Hill and Mount Airy residents and that he wants to meet with leaders in all three communities to get his own sampling of public opinion. Thompson, for one, said she won’t believe the connector issue is over until she sees a letter from ODOT deeding the land to the city or a developer.
Hubbard, who referred to Coalition Against the Colerain Connector as a “special interest group,” warned that the opportunity to significantly improve traffic will end with the ODOT’s land being used for other purposes.
“Once that corridor swells shut, it’s gone forever,” he said.
To many Northside residents who have lived under the possibility of the connector for decades, that would be just fine.
This article appears in May 24-30, 2000.