Illiana Expressway study reaching finish line

By Keith Benman, Times of Northwest Indiana
keith.benman@nwi.com

A long-awaited study mapping out options for building and operating the proposed Illiana Expressway will be delivered to Indiana legislators by July 1 as promised, according to Keith Bucklew, director of INDOT's freight mobility office.

"Hopefully, this will move things on down the road where this project can happen, because it's a very needed project," Bucklew told a meeting of a Northwestern Indiana Regional Planning Commission committee on Tuesday.

The study will include possible routes for the expressway, which would run from Interstate 65 in Lake County to Interstate 57 in Illinois. Consulting firm Cambridge Systematics was hired by INDOT to conduct the study under a bistate agreement negotiated with Illinois.

On Tuesday, Bucklew showed NIRPC transportation policy committee members at NIRPC's Portage headquarters an outline of a recently completed Indiana freight mobility study. That study listed the Illiana as one of the state's top six "highway infrastructure gaps and needs."

The NIRPC committee also passed a resolution Tuesday supporting the construction of three high-speed rail routes in Indiana. The resolution requires NIRPC to include the high-speed rail routes in all future planning. It must now be acted on by the full NIRPC board.

The three routes are part of a proposed nine-state Midwest high-speed rail network that has been given new steam by the inclusion of $8 billion in high-speed rail funds in President Barack Obama's stimulus plan.

Two-and-half years ago, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels' go-fast plan for building the expressway from I-57 to Interstate 94 in Michigan City met with fierce opposition from some citizen groups, and the plan was scaled back and put into low gear by state legislators.

The Cambridge Systematics report will examine a number of options for building and paying for the road, Bucklew said. Those include paying for the road with tolls and building it through a public-private partnership.

Roads built as public-private partnerships generally have private companies paying for much of the construction in exchange for the right to a long-term revenue stream such as tolls.

"As far as this study, it wasn't 'Don't do this' or 'Don't do that,' " Bucklew said. "Everything is on the table. Then it's up to the decision-makers."

Under legislation passed in 2007, the report will be delivered to an Illiana proposal review committee made up of four members from the Indiana Senate and another four from the House.

Public-private financing is the route Daniels wanted to take when he outlined his plans to the Hammond Rotary in December 2006. At the time, the governor was fresh off his successful lease of the Indiana Toll Road to a Spanish-Australian consortium. The $3.8 billion in lease proceeds were used to fund the governor's Major Moves road construction plan.