- Boone County Fiscal Court selected Cincinnati-based Gresham Smith to design safety, capacity, and multimodal improvements along 4.11 miles of Camp Ernst Road, from the Pleasant Valley roundabout on KY 237 to KY 536.
- The corridor was identified as the county’s highest safety priority through a local road safety plan that evaluated roadway hazards such as traffic volume, speed, curves, and roadway width.
- Design work will include studies, cost estimates, public engagement, and environmental and utility analysis, with construction potentially four to five years away.
Boone County has selected a firm to design safety and capacity improvements along approximately four miles of Camp Ernst Road.
On Jan. 14, the Boone County Fiscal Court officially selected Gresham Smith, a Cincinnati-based design and consulting firm, to design safety features along a section of Camp Ernst Road that has seen increased traffic due to ongoing residential development, which created the need for multimodal roadway improvements to support vehicles, cyclists, and pedestrians.
Specifically, the project aims to improve 4.11 miles of Camp Ernst Road from the Pleasant Valley roundabout on KY 237 to KY 536, locally known as Hathaway Road.
Gresham Smith has worked on a number of high-profile projects in Northern Kentucky, including the redesign of the aging baggage-handling facilities at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, the KY-9 roundabout in Newport, and the new parking garage at the Kenton County Government Center in Covington.
Based on the RFP posting, Gresham Smith will now oversee the initial roadway design for the project, along with related studies, cost estimates, public engagement, and the identification of utility and environmental impacts.
Boone County Engineer Rob Franxman stated that because of the project’s size, the county issued an additional request for proposals in November. In the end, four firms submitted bids, which were assessed by a committee of public works and administration staff, with Gresham Smith earning the top score.
“Due to the scale of the project, the amount of funding required for the design phase will be more than the approved funding limits allowed by the general service contracts we normally use through the county’s list of approved consultants,” he said.
Franxman said that in 2021, Boone County began developing a local road safety plan to identify roadway deficiencies in the county roadway system. Throughout the process, all countywide collector roads were evaluated for roadway hazards. Six risk factors were considered throughout the evaluation, including horizontal curves, operating speed, average daily traffic, vertical curvature, recovery areas and roadway width.
The assessment revealed that Camp Ernst Road has the highest hazard score amongst all county roads.
This led the fiscal court to approve an agreement with the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet on Sept. 30 for the design of Camp Ernst Road.
“However, during the process of completing the local road safety plan, it became evident that reconstruction of Camp Ernst Road to meet the proper safety guidelines would be the most transformational safety solution,” Franxman said at the Sept. 30 meeting.
At the time, Franxman said he hoped the KYTC would include the Camp Ernst Road reconstruction in its six-year road plan, thereby making outside funding available for the project.
On Sept. 19, 2025, KYTC issued a memorandum of agreement to allocate $1 million to Boone County for design activities along the Camp Ernst Road corridor. In addition, the agreement allowed Boone County to coordinate the project.
The resolution approved by the fiscal court on the 13th builds on the progress achieved last September.
Regarding a timeline, Franxman said it could be four to five years before ground is broken for the project.
Boone County Judge/Executive Gary Moore noted that this is the ideal time to start the project.
“While we talk about how long that is, obviously, if we don’t start, it’s going to get longer because you can’t really begin the process any sooner, and the process is not going to get shorter if we wait,” Moore said. “Now is the time to begin this work to get a common sense design to the project.”