Sunday, February 07, 1999
No slowing road work sometimes
Citizens must speak up early
BY KAREN SAMPLES
The Cincinnati Enquirer
COVINGTON — It happened again the other night: Warner Moore and his associates found themselves surrounded by road warriors.
That's my term for them, anyway. Filled with passion for a particular place, they fix on Mr. Moore or some other hapless highway official with desperation in their eyes.
“Who decided this?” they ask. “What are the alternatives? How can you take historic buildings to widen a road?”
At last Wednesday's meeting, the subject was 12th Street in Covington. Next week, it'll be some other project, and the week after that, another again.
“It never gets controversial until the ox gets gored,” Mr. Moore told me last week as the 12th Street opponents milled around John G. Carlisle Elementary School.
This is what Mr. Moore meant: Despite several opportunities, people don't get involved with road planning until it's too late.
Oh, sure, governments hold hearings until the first load of dirt is turned. But the reality is that public feedback carries less and less weight as the planning progresses.
Advice to residents of Boone County: If you want to have some say in the possible widening of Ky. 18 in Florence, the potential closing of roads around the airport, improvements to North Bend Road and the like, start paying attention to the Northeast Boone County Transportation Study.
This is a mouthful, I know, and it doesn't sound very exciting. But it's just the sort of thing that eventually leads to projects like 12th Street.
Mr. Moore is in charge of the Boone County plan for the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments.
OKI decides which road projects in the Tristate should get federal funding, and in what order. In Boone County, a committee of citizens and government officials is working with OKI on its transportation study.
The committee's meetings are open to the public. And in January, OKI held two community sessions just so Boone Countians could give feedback on transportation problems.
Sixteen people showed up, says Mr. Moore. Not much of a turnout, especially considering how controversial some of these projects eventually will become.
OKI tried to get people interested, Mr. Moore says. The effort included mailing out 100 fliers, contacting 26 media outlets and posting information on the OKI Web site. (Now there's an exciting time on the Net. “Look, Ma, I found the service area geography for OKI!”)
Truth be told, the Web site is nifty. It includes not only meeting schedules but also the complete minutes of meetings past.
Of course, OKI isn't going to wow the populace with announcements about a “Northeast Boone County Transportation Study,” no matter how widely the fliers are distributed. Transportation officials tend to get mired in jargon.
But residents also ought to be paying more attention. They don't because they're busy and because some of the projects won't begin for years. We all have a hard time looking so far ahead.
John Bales of the Oakbrook subdivision got a notice about the com munity meetings. He stopped by for a few minutes, “picked up some paper” and then went on to other commitments.
He doesn't know much about the Boone County study yet, but he senses its importance.
How to keep up
“We ought to do something before all of northern Boone County is nothing but concrete,” he says.
Here are three ways to keep up with what's going on:
• Attend the committee meet ings, the third Wednesday of every month at the Boone County Extension Office.
• Check the Web at www.oki.org for updates on transportation planning.
• Call OKI community relations director Judi Craig at 621-6300, or Dave Geohegan of the Boone County Planning Commission at 334-2196, for more information.
At OKI, Warner Moore's job is to plan road improvements that solve physical problems with as little disruption as possible.
“I have to know all the concerns folks have,” he says. “There's no better way to find out the hot buttons than for people to come and talk to us. It's not adversarial.”
Not yet, anyway.
Karen Samples is the Enquirer's Kentucky columnist. Her column appears on Sundays and Thursdays in The Kentucky Enquirer. She can be reached at 578-5584 or by e-mail at: ksamples@enquirer.com
Karen Samples is The Enquirer's Kentucky columnist. Her column appears on Sundays and Thursdays in The Kentucky Enquirer. She can be reached at 578-5584 or email
her at ksamples@enquirer.com
SAMPLES ARCHIVE
