Tuesday, September 07, 1999
Ends of Butler Regional Highway ready for traffic soon
BY STEVE KEMME
The Cincinnati Enquirer
HAMILTON — The first stretch of the long-awaited Butler Regional Highway will open in about a month.
The first two sections of the highway that will be completed are the one-mile segment betweenOhio 4 in Fairfield Town ship and Hampshire Drive in Hamilton, and another one-mile portion between Cincinnati-Dayton Road and Interstate 75 in Liberty Township.
The Ohio 4-Hampshire Road segment will open in early October, and the second portion will open in late October, said Monica Menke-Watts, spokeswoman for the Butler County Transportation Improvement District (TID), which is managing the $158 million project.
The rest of the 11-mile Regional Highway — which will link Hamilton and I-75 — will open in mid-December, she said.
Butler County officials ex pect this highway to relieve traffic congestion, create jobs and generate hundreds of millions of dollars of commercial and industrial development.
“It so happened the two ends of the highway got completed earlier than the rest of the highway,” Ms. Menke-Watts said. “We felt there was no sense in leaving them closed for two months when they were ready for traffic.”
Construction began in May 1998.
County officials have planned the highway for years. Plans picked up steam when Mike Fox, then a state representative and now a Butler County commissioner, initiated state legislation that created the Butler County TID.
Opponents of the regional highway filed lawsuits to stop its construction, but the courts eventually cleared the way for construction to begin.
TID is managing several other major road projects in the county in addition to the regional highway.
Other current TID projects include:
• Widening Muhlhauser Road between International Boulevard and Ohio 747 from two to five lanes.
• Extending Union Centre Boulevard to Ohio 747.
• Making improvements at the intersection of Ohio Bypass 4 and Ohio 4 in Fairfield Township.
Future projects include widening Ohio 747 from north of Port Union Road to the Butler Regional Highway, and extending Symmes Road from Seward Road to Ohio 747.
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