Daviess County residents voiced their opinions and concerns in response to a potential outer loop being built during Tuesday’s virtual meeting held by the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet.
The meeting — which reached more than 170 attendees — was called to discuss the needs, help gauge public opinion and answer questions about the feasibility of an outer loop.
Deneatra Henderson, chief district engineer for KYTC, said the outer loop has been something that community leaders have talked about historically, a conversation of which Mayor Tom Watson was a part.
“I talked about this three years ago in one of our Metropolitan Planning Organization meetings, just from the thought of ‘How do we grow land-based inside a city that’s basically landlocked?’ The idea [of an outer loop] came forward, and I said we ought to look at it,” Watson said prior to the meeting.
He was surprised KYTC picked the idea up. It then stemmed into a feasibility study to see if it would be something beneficial for the city.
“The goal here is to not take any farmland, to take any property,” Henderson said. “The goal is to talk about, where do we have needs for roadway or for roadway connections in the community.”
While the project is in the early stages of planning and programming, the study and thoughts behind the loop began in April 2020, according to a graph from their presentation.
The intention is to keep commercial and other traffic away from the downtown area allowing the city to grow outward, but also ease traffic from the bypass. This could come from building the entire loop or just partial points.
“If this project were to come to fruition, it would be [done] in chunks, and it wouldn’t have to be starting at the west end or starting at the east end, it would be most logically where the need was the most,” Henderson said.
One example Henderson used was if there needed to be a connection between U.S. 231 and U.S. 431 as an alternative to driving to U.S. 60.
Henderson said this project is nothing that happens quickly and is a 10- to 15-year project.
Lindsay Walker, with the consulting firm hired by KYTC, emphasized that this is a feasibility project to garner if it’s even possible to implement. Walker spoke on the criteria that went into choosing the different areas and needs.
When looking at the crash rates, Walker acknowledged there is a higher concentration of crash rates going into Owensboro near the entrances to the bypass — some of which were incapacitating and fatal — and how to alleviate some of the pressure on those areas.
A frequent question raised during the presentation included expanding the current bypass to six lanes with the innermost lane acting as a thru lane. Henderson and Walker said they have not yet considered that option, but if they learn that is more feasible than the outer loop, they may consider it in the future.
Another concern was if this would annex any property within the loop. Henderson said that annexation is a separate issue and hasn’t been part of the discussion.
Watson said the loop doesn’t necessarily mean city limits would expand and that annexations would have to be agreed upon and there could be contested annexation through the courts.
Another primary concern raised was if the new corridor would overtake some existing property. Henderson wrote in the chat, “No matter where a new road would go, it would take someone’s property, and that’s never easy. Things are too preliminary to assume the new route would go through any specific property. The example maps are only for demonstration of the potential connections.”
Senator Matt Castlen told Owensboro Times prior to the meeting he is against the loop breaking up the local farms to divert traffic around “our already struggling retail and restaurant industry.”
“I do believe in investing into infrastructure for future growth for our area of the state; but I do not support this outer loop,” Castlen said.
While a decision was not made on whether the outer loop would be implemented, Henderson wants residents to know that any new roadway characteristics would be determined as part of the design of each section. Should the plan move forward, there will be more communication from the Cabinet to the public and more events to gauge opinions.
Watson said one of his favorite sayings is, “You never stay the same. You either get better or you get worse.”
“That’s what we’re trying to do is get better,” Watson said.
