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FROM INDYSTAR -
Why Indiana is paying for $255 million dollar tunnel in Kentucky
All that stands between Indiana taxpayers and $200 million in savings is 11 acres of woods in Kentucky.
They are not particularly attractive trees. And their value is widely disputed -- even in Kentucky. But preservationists who wanted to stop an Ohio River bridge project decades ago were able to secure a historic designation for the property; and the bridge project is now moving forward.
So Indiana is paying $255 million to bore a tunnel under the trees. It's a payment some say is necessary to preserve a narrow slice of history, others to preserve interstate harmony, and still others because, well, the rules are the rules. Changing them would take time.
But even as engineers gear up to begin the project, others insist it's an immense taxpayer boondoggle.
"The tunnel is a terrible abuse of taxpayers' money," said Anne Northup, Louisville's congresswoman from 1996 to 2006. "It's an outrage in terms of what it accomplishes versus the cost."
The source of the controversy is the I-265 Ohio River bridge to be built in 2013, part of a $2.6 billion plan to ease traffic congestion around the Louisville metro area, which includes parts of Indiana.
The bridge has been talked about for half a century as a means to complete Louisville's outer interstate loop. After decades of negotiations, the states have a deal.
Indiana will build the I-265 bridge -- including the controversial tunnel. Kentucky will expand the existing I-65 crossing to the southwest. Each state will pay about $1.3 billion.
But highway officials on both sides of the river have heard complaints about the tunnel from local officials and residents alike. They've heard it in public meetings, in written correspondence and in phone calls.
They're still hearing it. At the heart of the complaints is land included on the National Register of Historic Places.
"The people in Southern Indiana see that as a boondoggle to escalate the cost of the project to the point of trying to make it too costly to build," said Clarksville Town Council President John Gilkey. "The property they have identified as being historically significant and necessitated the cost of the tunnel has almost no historical significance as far as people in this community are concerned."
How it landed on the registry is a matter of record.
Looking ahead
About 20 years ago, the preservation office in Jefferson County, Ky., lobbied to protect a plot of land in the bridge's path called the Drumanard property. The county and a Louisville preservation group called River Fields didn't want the bridge to disturb the picturesque setting in the affluent community that includes Drumanard and sits northeast of downtown Louisville.
River Fields officials say the environmental impact of building the bridge would be too great on well water, historical properties, forests, wetlands and flood plains. In the end, they say, it would just lead to suburban sprawl.
And they set their sights on Drumanard.
The Drumanard property's 1929 Revival-style house rises from a hilltop on the quiet, once well-manicured wooded property at the foot of the proposed bridge. Drumanard means "high land" or "hill top."
The home is not in the path of the bridge. The bridge approach is marked for densely wooded and unused land at the north end of the 55-acre property.
But Jefferson County, Ky., officials pushed -- hard, consistently and, ultimately, successfully -- to list the entire Drumanard property as a historical district.
The effort began in 1988, when the Jefferson County Office of Historic Preservation and Archives began asking owner Mary Peabody Fitzhugh to list the property on the National Register of Historic Places.
She died in 1997, but public documents show the determination behind the requests.
A letter by Leslee F. Keys, the county office's administrator, to Fitzhugh's attorney on Oct. 31, 1988, gets straight to the point. The office knew the bridge project could be built through the land, and the historical designation could stop it.
Keys said constructing the I-265 bridge through a historic property would be "more complicated and costly." Consultants, she said, "noted that the costs may preclude the use of these routes and force another location to be considered."
But the question remains: Was the property historical?
The push was based on the fact that the Olmsted firm -- a big name in American landscaping -- prepared a landscape plan for the property at the turn of the 20th century. The Olmsteds had a hand in designing park systems and private properties throughout the country, including New York's Central Park.
It was still not clear how involved they were in Drumanard.
The requests to Fitzhugh, though, kept coming. And four years later, in 1992, she relented, securing a listing on the National Register of Historic Places, an obstacle at least some thought would force officials to put the bridge elsewhere.
Despite concerns, a deal
It didn't have that effect, however.
The bridge projects are deemed essential because they will ease commutes for 35,000 Hoosiers who work in Louisville and 12,500 cross-commuters. They also will route interstate traffic away from downtown Louisville and smooth traffic along I-65 in Louisville, a choke point on a heavily traveled route from the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Michigan.
Despite the historic designation for Drumanard, other sites were considered less advantageous. So, Indiana and Kentucky pushed ahead on a deal.
It didn't take long before questions were raised about the validity of the historic designation. Two experts hired by the states to study the property doubted the extent to which Olmsted's landscape plan ever was implemented.
Robert Rollins, an arborist recommended by the Olmsted Conservancy, found no evidence that trees anywhere on the property had been planted as part of Olmsted's plan. They are "not old enough, not of the species listed, or not in the locations shown in the original documents."
Amos Consulting Group, Woodland Park, Colo., found that some other landscaping in Olmsted's plan had been applied and some had not. It was clear, though, that the naturally occurring wooded area on the northern corner to be affected by the bridge project had no influence from Olmsted.
"Today the area is densely and indiscriminately vegetated with shrubs, vines and deciduous trees," the report says. "While this area is within the National Registry boundary, the north woods were not a part of Olmsted's original plan for Drumanard."
That sounded simple enough to Denis Frankenberger. In December, the Louisville resident and Indiana businessman appealed to remove the land from the National Register of Historic Places. He looked at the Drumanard estate and didn't think taxpayers should have to pay to tunnel underneath it.
"The tunnel is a complete and utter waste of taxpayer dollars," he said, adding, "The property is not historic."
But the Kentucky Heritage Council, a state agency charged with historical protections, denied the request in January. Some Hoosiers grumble about having no say in the matter.
And it gets deeper. The Kentucky Heritage Council's chairman, Robert W. Griffith, also serves as attorney for River Fields. Griffith told The Indianapolis Star he had no part in the decision on whether to keep Drumanard on the registry. It was a staff decision, he said.
Frankenberger, upset by what he saw as a clear conflict, appealed to the National Register of Historic Places.
Former Jefferson County, Ky., Attorney J. Bruce Miller -- who held the elected office from 1970 to 1985 -- tried to help. He agreed that the effort to list the Drumanard property as a historical landmark was part of an ongoing attempt by preservationists to stop the bridge from being built in the affluent area.
"That property is not an historical site and should be delisted, ending the requirement of the ridiculous expenditure of several hundred million dollars of public money to tunnel under a small segment of the Drumanard Estate's land," Miller wrote to the National Register of Historic Places on April 15.
Unmoved, Carol D. Shull, interim keeper of the National Register of Historic Places, wrote in her response that enough of the Olmsted plan's influence remained to justify protecting the property. She agreed with the Kentucky Heritage Council.
"The Drumanard landscape is significant and retains sufficient integrity to reflect the historic design concept," she wrote.
Controversy flared again when Kentucky bought Drumanard in April. Kentuckians wanted to know why the state paid $8.3 million to a group of investors called the Soterion Corp., which paid $2.9 million for the property in 2000.
On the Indiana side, people wanted to know why Kentucky didn't delist the property from the historic register.
Chuck Wolfe of the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet said the state can't simply delist Drumanard without permission from the National Register of Historic Places. And while a request from Kentucky, as the owner, might carry weight, it also would take time.
"We don't have free license to do anything we want," Wolfe said. "It was determined that trying to alter that selected alternative at this stage in the game was going to add years" to the project.
So the tunnel project is moving ahead.
Across the river, officials in Southern Indiana routinely take phone calls from residents asking why they should have to pay for the tunnel.
"I've heard from a number of people, absolutely," said Ed Zastawny, Jeffersonville's City Council president, adding, "I think most people do not believe there is a need to have that tunnel and that it's an unnecessary expense."
River Fields officials say Drumanard is listed on the registry and that's that.
"The controversy of Drumanard has been driven by the tunnel," said Lee Cory, president of the board of trustees. "It was the transportation agencies who chose to put the alignment through Drumanard, knowing that it was a historic property. And by choosing that alignment, they forced themselves to have to build the tunnel."
Transportation officials in both states have conceded the tunnel dispute and are only waiting for federal approval -- a formality expected later this month -- before beginning construction.
"People have used 'those Kentuckians' and 'those Hoosiers' for years, and it hasn't happened," said Steve Schultz, executive director of the Louisville and Southern Indiana Bridges Authority, which is charged with overseeing the project.
"The fact we are going to make this happen is because we've overcome that, and it's because we're thinking regionally.
"It's not their state versus our state."
Jane Jankowski, spokeswoman for Gov. Mitch Daniels, agreed and said the governor's office supports moving forward with the project.
"The bridges are critical to the growth of the Louisville and Southern Indiana region," she said, "and there are huge job and economic development possibilities for southeast Indiana."
Work already under way
Indiana already is seeking contractors to bore a 1,940-foot-long tunnel under the Drumanard property -- the first tunnel the Indiana Department of Transportation has ever built along a highway.
In Shadow Wood, a neighborhood adjacent to Drumanard, 16 houses already have been torn down for the project. What's left is an eerie sight: grass growing where roads and homes once sat, ornamental trees and bushes out of place in land being retaken by nature.
The tunnel will emerge there.
Some homeowners wonder why. They don't think Drumanard stands out. Paulette Breit, 62, has lived there 25 years and "never really heard much about it until all the bridge stuff."
Neighbor Bob Stewart, 54, said that "unless Daniel Boone slept there, I can't understand why (it was listed). I just think somebody did it as an impediment to the project."
Through it all, Indiana and Kentucky are standing firm: The overall cost is split evenly, and the project will move forward.
"We went through a very exhaustive process about the impacts to the area," said Jim Stark, the Indiana Department of Transportation's deputy director for capital projects. "We looked at some of the other alternatives. It's still, in both states' opinions, the alternative that we've chosen to go with."
Indiana and Kentucky already have picked finalists that are competing to build the two bridges. They need only the federal approval and have no reason to expect it will be denied.
Doug Hecox, spokesman for the Federal Highway Administration, said the federal review is to ensure the states follow federal rules throughout the process of putting the plan together. It's not a review on what's in the plan.
The tunnel is a decision for the states.
And so, 20 years after officials in Kentucky decided to protect the Drumanard estate, Hoosiers will pay $255 million to dig a tunnel under it.
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