Local Residents Learn More About U.S. 30 Study Process At Public Event
December 7, 2022 at 2:47 a.m.
Local Residents Learn More About U.S. 30 Study Process At Public Event
By David [email protected]
“I think it’s just the beginning of educating the community as to what we think, to help ProPEL listen to our comments, our methodology about our community,” said Liz Surface.
Jeremy Kuhn, of Warsaw, said, “I feel better informed about the process. I understand that they’re at the beginning steps of the analysis to gather and prepare the purpose and vision, so there’s no details as to what recommendations are being made. So they just better exposed the process of how important it is for input from the community.”
Ryan Martin, who lives on a farm in the southern part of the county near Silver Lake and Claypool, said it was good to see the timeline laid out.
“Other than that, I think this is a very, very early stage in the process and we’ll just have to see how the process moves forward from here before we can draw any conclusions as to what’s going on,” he said.
The timeline has the PEL studies completed by fall 2024.
There was a half-hour presentation Tuesday on the U.S. 30 PEL study at 6 p.m. at Lincoln Elementary School, preceded and followed by one-on-one discussions with members of the WSP team that is leading the U.S. 30 East study. There was not a question-and-answer session during the presentation as the WSP team members met with the public individually.
The four study areas include U.S. 30 East and West and U.S. 31 North and South. U.S. 30 East includes Allen, Whitley and Kosciusko counties and about a mile into Marshall County.
Surface said her specific concern with U.S. 30 is safety. “I just feel like U.S. 30 and Center Street is just a bomb that goes off too often, and we just had that happen recently, and somewhere we need to - we need truck drivers, don’t get me wrong - but somehow we need to make that area safer for the community and people traveling through our community.”
Kuhn’s biggest concern that drew him to the event was “just being aware of what will be the plan to try to still leverage the businesses, restaurants, shopping, everything of our community and not be exceedingly hampered by limited access, whether it’s through the new U.S. 30 or other access roads that run in parallel in order to get to the different places we get to today.”
Martin said he made some input on the interactive poster boards before the presentation and he was interested in what the rest of the community was commenting on, too.
“I, personally, am looking to make sure we protect agriculture in every way, shape and form in this county. It is the second biggest industry and economic driver in this county and we have to protect that, 110%, so I was coming at it from an agriculture standpoint, but we’ll just have to wait and see how everything goes from here,” Martin said.
The poster boards and maps set up at the event gave the public a chance to put stickers on areas that were of highest concern to them, or write and post their concerns on sticky notes.
One poster board focused on corridor issues, asking questions such as: Where are your biggest safety concerns along the corridor? Where are your biggest traffic concerns along the corridor? Are new intersections or turns needed? How should they function?
Another poster board asked how people use the corridor, one asked how U.S. 30 should reflect the local area; and another asked what would improve travel along U.S. 30, i.e. improved safety, better traffic flow, fewer turns and crossing conflicts, options for biking and walking, etc.
Before the presentation, Shane Peck, WSP public involvement lead for the U.S. 30 East PEL study, explained how the event was set up.
“Initially, folks can come in, they can learn what a PEL study is, they can learn the limits of what this particular corridor study is. We have three other corridor studies going on, on U.S. 30 West and also on U.S. 31 North and South, so they can get a little bit of information on about how this fits into all of that and all of those studies we’re doing at the same time,” he said.
The interactive boards on both sides of the Lincoln gym allowed people to use Post-It notes or sticker dots to say what their priorities are, whether it’s safety or economic development or whatever they see as most important regarding the future of U.S. 30.
“There’s also lots of opportunity to provide general comments, either written or verbal, and we have a website, which is propelus30.com, and you can do all the same stuff there - submit comments, sign up for email updates and find out about future meetings. In fact, you can even request a meeting if you’d like to speak with us directly,” Peck said.
Tuesday’s event was part of what’s called the “visioning and scoping” phase of the study, he said, which will go through the end of December.
The study started back in October with getting into the community and having community office hours. There will be more community office hours coming up: Dec. 15 in New Haven and Dec. 16 in Columbia City.
Starting spring/summer next year, Peck said they’ll go into the “purpose and need” phase where they’ll have another meeting similar to Tuesday’s. “We’ll start narrowing in a little bit more on what we’ve heard so far and hear more from people about what do you see is the purpose of U.S. 30 and why does it exist and what’s important, and then what are the needs that are out there right now that need to be addressed?” he said.
During the presentation, WSP Project Manager Rusty Holt went into more detail about the timeline of the study and what they’re looking and hope to arrive at in the end. Jamie Bents, WSP director of environmental planning, talked more about what a PEL study is, why it’s important and why there’s a requirement to do it, as well as why it’s so important for the public to speak up about U.S. 30.
Peck said the focus was more on the one-on-one Tuesday because, “We feel like we can address people better because we have a lot of staff here so we can talk directly about people’s concerns and we can address that better in the open house format than if we did a Q&A.”
If anyone could not attend Tuesday’s meeting, he emphasized that people could go to the website at propelus30.com. On that website, starting today, there will be a virtual version of the same presentation that was given Tuesday.
“So you can watch the presentation and then you can go through a lot of the same activities that people here tonight are going through and provide your input,” Peck said.
A lot of this particular study is about getting public input and involvement and “clearing the way for future progress down the road and trying to accelerate things a little bit, but a big part of this is hearing from members of the community,” he said.
Nothing about U.S. 30 has been decided at this point and he encouraged everyone to provide input by year’s end.
“In fact, it’s very open. It’s basically a clean slate. A lot of folks would probably like for us to have more details at this point, but it’s not decided at all. There’s been previous studies, and those will be taken into account. There’s other information, we’ll look at all of that, and then we’ll look at what we hear from the public as well, so it hasn’t been decided and certainly people here tonight could affect ultimately what is done with U.S. 30 in a few years,” Peck stated.
“I think it’s just the beginning of educating the community as to what we think, to help ProPEL listen to our comments, our methodology about our community,” said Liz Surface.
Jeremy Kuhn, of Warsaw, said, “I feel better informed about the process. I understand that they’re at the beginning steps of the analysis to gather and prepare the purpose and vision, so there’s no details as to what recommendations are being made. So they just better exposed the process of how important it is for input from the community.”
Ryan Martin, who lives on a farm in the southern part of the county near Silver Lake and Claypool, said it was good to see the timeline laid out.
“Other than that, I think this is a very, very early stage in the process and we’ll just have to see how the process moves forward from here before we can draw any conclusions as to what’s going on,” he said.
The timeline has the PEL studies completed by fall 2024.
There was a half-hour presentation Tuesday on the U.S. 30 PEL study at 6 p.m. at Lincoln Elementary School, preceded and followed by one-on-one discussions with members of the WSP team that is leading the U.S. 30 East study. There was not a question-and-answer session during the presentation as the WSP team members met with the public individually.
The four study areas include U.S. 30 East and West and U.S. 31 North and South. U.S. 30 East includes Allen, Whitley and Kosciusko counties and about a mile into Marshall County.
Surface said her specific concern with U.S. 30 is safety. “I just feel like U.S. 30 and Center Street is just a bomb that goes off too often, and we just had that happen recently, and somewhere we need to - we need truck drivers, don’t get me wrong - but somehow we need to make that area safer for the community and people traveling through our community.”
Kuhn’s biggest concern that drew him to the event was “just being aware of what will be the plan to try to still leverage the businesses, restaurants, shopping, everything of our community and not be exceedingly hampered by limited access, whether it’s through the new U.S. 30 or other access roads that run in parallel in order to get to the different places we get to today.”
Martin said he made some input on the interactive poster boards before the presentation and he was interested in what the rest of the community was commenting on, too.
“I, personally, am looking to make sure we protect agriculture in every way, shape and form in this county. It is the second biggest industry and economic driver in this county and we have to protect that, 110%, so I was coming at it from an agriculture standpoint, but we’ll just have to wait and see how everything goes from here,” Martin said.
The poster boards and maps set up at the event gave the public a chance to put stickers on areas that were of highest concern to them, or write and post their concerns on sticky notes.
One poster board focused on corridor issues, asking questions such as: Where are your biggest safety concerns along the corridor? Where are your biggest traffic concerns along the corridor? Are new intersections or turns needed? How should they function?
Another poster board asked how people use the corridor, one asked how U.S. 30 should reflect the local area; and another asked what would improve travel along U.S. 30, i.e. improved safety, better traffic flow, fewer turns and crossing conflicts, options for biking and walking, etc.
Before the presentation, Shane Peck, WSP public involvement lead for the U.S. 30 East PEL study, explained how the event was set up.
“Initially, folks can come in, they can learn what a PEL study is, they can learn the limits of what this particular corridor study is. We have three other corridor studies going on, on U.S. 30 West and also on U.S. 31 North and South, so they can get a little bit of information on about how this fits into all of that and all of those studies we’re doing at the same time,” he said.
The interactive boards on both sides of the Lincoln gym allowed people to use Post-It notes or sticker dots to say what their priorities are, whether it’s safety or economic development or whatever they see as most important regarding the future of U.S. 30.
“There’s also lots of opportunity to provide general comments, either written or verbal, and we have a website, which is propelus30.com, and you can do all the same stuff there - submit comments, sign up for email updates and find out about future meetings. In fact, you can even request a meeting if you’d like to speak with us directly,” Peck said.
Tuesday’s event was part of what’s called the “visioning and scoping” phase of the study, he said, which will go through the end of December.
The study started back in October with getting into the community and having community office hours. There will be more community office hours coming up: Dec. 15 in New Haven and Dec. 16 in Columbia City.
Starting spring/summer next year, Peck said they’ll go into the “purpose and need” phase where they’ll have another meeting similar to Tuesday’s. “We’ll start narrowing in a little bit more on what we’ve heard so far and hear more from people about what do you see is the purpose of U.S. 30 and why does it exist and what’s important, and then what are the needs that are out there right now that need to be addressed?” he said.
During the presentation, WSP Project Manager Rusty Holt went into more detail about the timeline of the study and what they’re looking and hope to arrive at in the end. Jamie Bents, WSP director of environmental planning, talked more about what a PEL study is, why it’s important and why there’s a requirement to do it, as well as why it’s so important for the public to speak up about U.S. 30.
Peck said the focus was more on the one-on-one Tuesday because, “We feel like we can address people better because we have a lot of staff here so we can talk directly about people’s concerns and we can address that better in the open house format than if we did a Q&A.”
If anyone could not attend Tuesday’s meeting, he emphasized that people could go to the website at propelus30.com. On that website, starting today, there will be a virtual version of the same presentation that was given Tuesday.
“So you can watch the presentation and then you can go through a lot of the same activities that people here tonight are going through and provide your input,” Peck said.
A lot of this particular study is about getting public input and involvement and “clearing the way for future progress down the road and trying to accelerate things a little bit, but a big part of this is hearing from members of the community,” he said.
Nothing about U.S. 30 has been decided at this point and he encouraged everyone to provide input by year’s end.
“In fact, it’s very open. It’s basically a clean slate. A lot of folks would probably like for us to have more details at this point, but it’s not decided at all. There’s been previous studies, and those will be taken into account. There’s other information, we’ll look at all of that, and then we’ll look at what we hear from the public as well, so it hasn’t been decided and certainly people here tonight could affect ultimately what is done with U.S. 30 in a few years,” Peck stated.
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