This story originally appeared in the July 14 edition of the Weekly LINK Reader. To see these stories first, subscribe here. Listen here | Watch here
On Nov. 11, 2020, a semi truck heading northbound on the bottom deck of the Brent Spence Bridge jackknifed across the road at about 2:45 a.m. Another truck not far behind carrying industrial potassium hydroxide and diesel fuel collided with it and ignited an hours-long blaze, leading to the evacuation of both decks of the bridge.
Emergency crews managed to extinguish the fires without injury. Over a month and $3.5 million later, the bridge was completely repaired and back in operation.
“You take Main Street, right through Mainstrasse here, and it was just wall-to-wall traffic and semi trucks,” said Covington resident John Saxton.
The bridge fire and the subsequent repair efforts captured a lot of attention, but the added pressure on local communities due to the bridge’s closure didn’t generate the same kind of headlines.
If you go down to Main Street today, you’ll likely see delivery trucks parked on the street, bringing in food and other supplies for the businesses in the area. Most of the delivery trucks are smaller than tractor-trailers, but their presence crowds the roadways and sidewalks just the same.
“The city’s experience with the closure of that bridge showed the impact of diversion in a very real way,” said Covington Mayor Joe Meyer in an interview with LINK nky. “It moved from the theoretical to being on the ground as thousands and thousands of cars a day got off the street, got off to the interstate and drove all over our city, creating a devastating impact on the quality of residential life and even the quality of commercial life.”
Bil Spencer, the president of the Residents of Mainstrasse Association, said the neighborhood would be unable to handle another influx of truck traffic. He pointed to sites in the borough recently damaged by trucks passing through.
Mainstrasse wasn’t the only area affected.
“Virtually every section of the city was impacted,” Meyer added, naming historical neighborhoods like Mutter Gottes, Seminary Square, Lewisburg and Licking Riverside.
“We had a famous incident where a semi trailer following its GPS device went all the way down Greenup Street to the Ohio River,” Meyer said. “And then in his turnaround part he drove across the plaza there, knocked over a fire hydrant, knocked down a pole; a pole fell on a car. Just devastating.”
Residents are concerned that the start of the construction of the Brent Spence companion bridge will bring similar problems downtown. Predicted to begin at the end of the year, the project is estimated to take seven years to complete. Issues arising from the construction, such as traffic diversions as well as other issues like pollution, noise and residential displacement, has people on both sides of the river worried about the future.
The original bridge went into operation in 1963, and ideas for the new companion bridge and corridor project date back to the mid-2000s. A joint project between the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet and the Ohio Department of Transportation, the corridor has gone through multiple stages of development, redevelopment, public input and environmental study in the years since its inception.
Late last year, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Ohio Gov. Mike Dewine announced an injection of $1.6 billion in federal funds into the project, a move commemorated in January when President Joe Biden, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, former Ohio Sen. Rob Portman and Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown visited Covington to publicly endorse the project.
As LINK nky’s Business Reporter Kenton Hornbeck reported, the president’s visit cemented the inevitability of not only the construction of the new corridor but also its importance to the regional and national economy. The total price tag for the corridor is $3.6 billion, split between the two states, according to the project’s website.
Its initial design was settled on in 2012 after the first round of public input and an environmental study were completed.
After a series of revisions, the project has pitched two possible designs for the replacement bridge – a cable bridge design and an arch bridge design. Categorized as a progressive design-build project, the plans for the corridor are open-ended, allowing the designs to be augmented and changed based on public comment and environmental assessment as the construction proceeds.
Although the companion bridge and its accompanying infrastructure have gone through numerous changes, many residents still have concerns they feel haven’t been addressed.
Not by a long shot.
Some are concerned with how the seven-year (or longer, depending on how smoothly everything goes) construction of the corridor will affect people’s lives. What’s more, some are skeptical if the project as whole is even necessary.
“It’s a gamble,” said Covington City Commissioner Nolan Nicaise. “Is it worth it?”
Nicaise is one of the project’s most strident critics.
“I am openly against the expansion of I-71/I-75, the Brent Spence corridor expansion project,” he said, “and I have many reasons for that.”
Nicaise has a background in environmental science and has consulted with cities throughout the country on environmental and zoning policy. As such, he’s particularly worried about the short and long-term impacts the project could have on the environment and public health.
“As we know, pollution from vehicles is caused by the combustion of fossil fuels, but it’s also caused by the erosion of brake pads,” Nicaise said. “It’s also caused by the erosion of tires themselves, all creating particulates that are damaging to people in the vicinity, and also people further away as the wind blows.”
He’s also said he’s concerned about the cost of the project and questions whether the investment will pay off in the long run. He wonders if the money would be better spent elsewhere.
“Do we really want to be investing that money in a new highway, or do we want to be investing that money in something that is really a pride for this region?” Nicaise asks. “So I think, how could we otherwise invest $3.6 billion? Could we create the most robust school system in America? Could we create a park that rivals Central Park? Could we create a transit system that is sustainable and equitable and people really enjoy taking and feel safe on?”
The funding for the bridge is a combination of federal and state money, most of which is earmarked specifically for infrastructure and similar measures. Although much of the funding for the project couldn’t be swapped outright for the projects Nicaise mentions, critics say it illustrates what they characterize as the lopsided priorities of federal and state projects.
“There’s so many things that we could do with that money,” he adds, “but we’re going to create a place for trucks and people to drive; it’s not inspiring and, in fact, just bad for our health. So to me, it’s a waste of public resources.”
Others share Nicaise’s concerns, even if they aren’t outright against the project.
Following the president’s visit in January, the Devou Good Foundation, a Northern Kentucky nonprofit dedicated to community infrastructure improvement, among other things, wrote an open letter to the Federal Highway Administration, titled “Concerns over Brent Spence Corridor Project’s Compliance with Civil Rights and Environmental Regulations,” which affirmed many of Nicaise’s concerns; the commissioner is one of the letter’s signatories.
The letter, penned by Dr. Ryan Crane, a Cincinnati-based physician who consulted with activists and professionals around the country, draws attention to both environmental and civil rights concerns by citing court cases and public statements from political leaders.
In addition to the pollution concerns that Nicaise mentioned, the letter talks about how federal highway projects have displaced and even destroyed majority Black and Latino communities throughout the twentieth century.
Devou Good isn’t the only group worried about displacement.
One such group is the Bridge Forward Coalition, a Cincinnati nonprofit that, while not opposed to the project, is advocating for its own vision of the corridor. The group contends their version of the build would avoid many of the problems the region has experienced with the highway expansions of yesteryear. At a coalition event at the Cincinnati Museum Center in June, a panel of experts, several local leaders and members of the public discussed the gutting of Cincinnati’s West End neighborhood in the 1950s and 60s.
The construction of I-75 and the subsequent urban renewal campaign eventually led to the displacement of about 27,000 people, almost all of whom were Black, according to the late Cincinnati historian John W. Harshaw, Sr., who wrote a book on the neighborhood’s history. To this day, the neighborhood’s population levels have not returned to the levels they were before the construction, and the highway has left the area carved up into smaller land parcels.
“We have an opportunity to work with our local form of government, with the federal government to do the right thing,” said West End resident and Director of Special Initiatives for the Greater Cincinnati Foundation Robert Killins Jr., adding that the community ought to focus “not on the cost but on the value” of the project.
In other words, how can government leaders go about the project in such a way to benefit the local community, rather than narrowly focusing on controlling construction costs?
On the Kentucky side, Covington’s Lewisburg neighborhood went through a similar ordeal, although on a smaller scale.
Meyer furnished a map a 1936 Holmes High School drafting class created , which shows the geography of the city prior to the interstate’s incursion. He pointed to the areas in historical Lewisburg where the interstate now runs.
“It’s all gone,” he said.
The transportation cabinet has been making efforts to reduce both the number of properties the construction will affect as well as the bridge’s overall footprint.
“We heard comments from the City of Covington, from various website comments through feedback that we’re getting from the public,” said Stacee Hans, the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet’s project manager for the corridor project. “Are there opportunities to reduce the footprint? They wanted us to go back and take another look and see if there’s that opportunity, which, fortunately, we were able to.”
In February, Hans and Kentucky Transportation Secretary Jim Gray made a presentation to the Kentucky House Budget Review Subcommittee on Transportation, where they announced that they had successfully reduced the number of residential relocations from over 40 to just 4. In an interview with LINK nky, Hans also talked about how the addition of retaining walls and other alternative construction methods allowed the cabinet to reduce the width of the bridge from 172 feet to 107 feet.
Still, that doesn’t mean residents aren’t feeling the pressure.
John Saxton, the Covington resident who witnessed the traffic on Main Street after the bridge fire, lives near Goebel Park, which runs right along where the construction is slated to take place. He won’t have to move, but it’s hard for him not to think that his property won’t be affected.
“Compared to where the highway is now, in relation to my property and where the new roadways are going to be in relation to my property, the distance is being cut by about 60% to 70%,” Saxton said. “So, it’s going to be significantly closer to my house than it is now.”
He’s thought about selling his property, but said he is hesitant to do it before final plans have been released.
What’s more, even though the number of residential properties being affected has gone down, other structures, including several schools, will abut the new corridor.
With all of this in mind, the question becomes, what are communities to do in the face of these realities?
Nicaise and the Devou Good Foundation have suggested tolls and other congestion mitigation measures, similar to those tried in Louisville, Washington D.C. and parts of California, as a way of offsetting expense and managing traffic, rather than relying on a new bridge.
These proposals have proven unpopular among the rest of Covington’s leadership, however, for fear of reliving the traffic overflows that followed the fire. What’s more, both leaders and residents worried that tolls could lead to drivers taking detours across the Clay Wade Bailey and Roebling bridges, which could put more stress on local infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Fort Mitchell and Fort Wright have already expressed support for cabinet design plans of new overpasses that will run through their cities. Overall, much of the region seems to have accepted the reality of the project, in spite of any trepidations rumbling in the background.
“When I look at the Brent Spence Bridge, I realize that there’s going to be some disruption for our communities, especially the Mainstrasse village area,” said Covington Commissioner Ron Washington. “It’s a trade off of some heartache right away for, hopefully, a good for the overall community.”
Meyer readily admits to the likelihood of short-term difficulties, as well.
“It’s going to be very difficult,” Meyer said, but he said the project is so far along at this point that completely eliminating it would be unrealistic.
A better way to think about it, he said, would be to ask how the city can best mitigate the disruptions the community will experience.
“How do we lessen the frustration and anxiety and displacement that’s going to be accomplished,” Meyer asked. “How can we offer some greater good for our community that will make putting up with all of this worthwhile?”
Last year Meyer and other city officials managed to secure some concessions in negotiations with the state. These included the aforementioned reduction of the companion bridge width, which Meyer argued would mitigate any further damage to Lewisburg. The negotiations also yielded the complete elimination of tolls, a measure Meyer contended would prevent the kinds of stresses to local infrastructure that occurred after the bridge fire.
Finally, the city succeeded in acquiring a new storm sewer system for the Willow Run watershed, the largest watershed in the region, which currently relies on an outdated combined sewer overflow and storm water system that’s prone to flooding. The new storm water system would run north from 16th Street to the Ohio River and is designed to mitigate flooding problems along Highland Avenue and Euclid Avenue in the Peaselburg neighborhood. The state and federal governments will bankroll the sewer improvements.
“This fight is not over.” Meyer said. “This is a lot of ongoing work to make sure that as decisions are made,… [they’re] as favorable for our people as possible.”
Construction on the new corridor is slated to begin in November. To view current design plans, timelines and studies or to leave a comment on the project, visit brentspencebridgecorridor.com.