I-69 Litigation Fund-Raiser and Rally

Download a copy of the flyer:

I-69 LITIGATION FUND-RAISER AND RALLY

Date: Sunday, October 30, 2011 (Yes, that’s Halloween Sunday ! Family-Friendly!Costumes welcome!)

Time: 3:00 to 5:00 pm

Place: Monroe County History Center / 202 E. 6th St. / Bloomington, IN 47408-3518

Suggested contribution is: $15. All contributions welcome.

Music by: Tom Roznowski, The Breedens, Clinton Burch, Raging Grannies, Richard Torstrick.

Wit and Repartee by: Colonel Mike Kelsey and Arbutus Cunningham.

This inter-active event supports the legal effort by the I-69 Accountability Project, Inc., Citizens for Appropriate Rural Roads, Inc., and eleven citizen plaintiffs. The complaint asks defendants INDOT and FHWA to stop action on I-69 and to prepare a new Tier 1 Draft and Final Environmental Impact Statement using the latest scientific data. It also asks the defendants to prepare a new analysis of alternative routes.

Of further interest: The limestone exhibit at the Monroe County History Center will be open during the event! See the science behind the karsts.

If you are unable to attend, please draft and mail your check to:

I-69 Accountability Project, Inc. / PO Box 2235 / Bloomington, IN 47402

“I-69 Equals Jobs” a Persistent Myth

September 19, 2011
By Linda Greene
lgreene@bloomington.in.us

“Jobs, jobs, jobs” – that’s the recurring refrain by I-69 proponents-claiming that the interstate highway will bring economic development to central and southwest Indiana. But after nearly 21 years of opposing I-69, Thomas Tokarski says about that claim: “It’s bogus.”

“The myth of highways as economic saviors and bringers of jobs is very engrained in people’s minds. People don’t even question it anymore; they just assume that’s the case,” Tokarski says.

The reality is very different from the myth.

In “It’s the Regional Economy Stupid! Misinterpreting the Benefits of Highway Construction” (www2.istea.org/progress/febr99/region.htm), Don Chen cites Professor Marlon Boarnet, at the University of California–Irvine, who has reviewed the literature on the economic benefits of new highways, and contends “that while new roads are likely to create new economic activity for a limited area, they also tend to shift economic growth from one place to another within a metropolitan region.”

Even the Corridor 18 Feasibility Study: Final Report, by Wilbur Smith Associates (Nov. 1995), which favors the highway, stated that “the business gained along the route is lost business elsewhere.” (Corridor 18 is the Mexico-to-Canada highway, of which I-69 is one part.)

One also has to ask what types of jobs the highway would bring. According to the Corridor 18 study, 60 percent of them would be in the service, retail and wholesale trade industries. That means low-paying, dead-end jobs -- cleaning motel rooms, serving fast food meals and working the cash registers at convenience stores/gas stations.

The Final Environmental Impact Statement by the Indiana Department of Transportation (July 2011), the state agency in charge of the highway project, acknowledges that the highway will bring only 771 permanent jobs to Monroe and Greene counties. The cost of that section of the highway, Section 4, is estimated to be $700 million. Divide that by the number of jobs in Greene and Monroe counties (771), and you get almost $908,000 spent to bring each job to the area. Again, these jobs are transfers.

Many studies have shown that public transit creates more jobs than highways do. “Every billion dollars spent on public transportation produced 16,419 job-months, while the same amount spent on highway infrastructure projects produced 8,781” (Keith Barry, “To Create Jobs, Build Public Transit, Not Highways,” Wired, Jan. 21, 2010) (http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/01/jobs-for-main-street-act/).

According to the article's author, Keith Barry, figures from Smart Growth America show public transportation produces more jobs because it requires less acquisition of land; buses, trains and subways “need people to operate them and maintain the infrastructure”; and the workforce for public transit has more-diverse skills than does the workforce needed for highway construction.

The bottom line, Barry says, “Investing heavily in public transportation puts more people to work while creating or improving infrastructure we need more of. It’s a win-win.”

“The path to prosperity isn’t paved with asphalt” by Kenny Elkomous in the Spring 2011 Friends of the Earth Newsmagazine, states, “Investments in public transportation create 31 percent more jobs per dollar than new roads, and road repair and maintenance creates 16 percent more jobs per dollar than new roads.”

It’s well-documented that roads and bridges in Indiana are in poor shape. New jobs can come from their maintenance and repair instead of construction of a new interstate.

Indianapolis has more interstate connections that any other city in the nation, and Indiana ranks the 10^th state in the number of rural interstate miles. If interstates bring jobs, why, then, is unemployment so high in the Hoosier state?

Karst Topography Complicates I-69, Adds Costs

By Linda Greene

South-central and southwestern Indiana has buildings, roads and bridges built on apparently solid ground. Yet below the surface is a complex system of limestone caves, sinkholes, bedrock springs, conduits (caves human can’t fit into) and swallow holes (that take in water). This collection of surface and underground features is known as “karst.” It has a kind of Swiss-cheese physiography.

Indiana’s Monroe, Lawrence, Greene, Orange, Crawford, Harrison, Jennings, Jefferson, Owen and Putnam counties all contain karst. It’s a distinctive characteristic of this area and worthy of our interest and care.

Karst areas have springs that issue from caves and conduits and are environmentally sensitive because of their effects on drinking water. Constructing buildings, roads and bridges over karst requires special procedures. Collapse of the surface into underground voids may jeopardize buildings and other structures.

Karst contains open conduits for contaminants to enter. Those contaminants – for example, from run-off from agricultural pesticides, herbicides and feedlots – taint the groundwater, which provides drinking water to people with wells.

When groundwater is contaminated, surface water is contaminated, also. Preventing the contaminated water from entering swallow holes and sinkholes can require the use of peat filters, which have a limited lifespan. The filters have to be replaced periodically, causing added expense.

In land with solid rock beneath, karst water filters through the soil and into sinkholes down to where the water enters the fractures or other voids in the bedrock.

Numerous sinkholes and springs are present in the I-69 highway corridor.

The public tends to regard karst as a nuisance, even though it is so important ecologically. People use sinkholes to dispose of trash without regard to contaminating their neighbors’ wells or springs.

Building on karst, as the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) is doing with the new-terrain I-69 highway, is tricky because karst isn’t solid rock. Sinkholes have to be plugged up before the highway is built over them. In the worst-case scenario, parts of the highway could collapse over sinkholes and other karst features.

INDOT, however, is ignoring the sensitive karst area that the highway is supposed to traverse. According to Sam Frushour, a retired head of the Field Services Section of the Indiana Geological Survey, who evaluated karst in that capacity for 20 years, it makes little sense to install a highway over karst. The cost of remediating the karst features is many times higher than the cost of building a road on solid ground, without so much karst, such as U.S. 41 and I-70. Many Indiana citizens have advocated this route since INDOT made the highway plans public, over 20 years ago. Changing the highway’s route would nearly eliminate karst problems and decrease costs.

It’s impossible to know where all the karst features lie, and it’s very expensive to identify and build a highway over them. If contractors find water on the highway to be draining into a sinkhole, they have to install drains, and there’s no guarantee they’ll work. Plugging a small sinkhole properly, to federal highway standards, costs up to a million dollars. A large one can cost several million dollars

Very large sinkholes, which are unavoidable with I-69’s new-terrain construction plans, are “enormously expensive” to remediate, according to Frushour.

Road construction crews are encountering many karst problems, costing more than what INDOT estimated, because until crews drill and dig, no one knows what’s under the ground. “When you move soil,” Frushour said, “you find things you didn’t know about.” Currently, earth drilling has been cheapened so problems that would have been forecast will be missed until actual road construction.

Sometimes highway designs have to be redone.

We know from landowners whose property INDOT contractors are testing that the contractors are finding voids as they prepare to construct the highway.

Governor Daniels told INDOT to “throw out the rulebook” when building I-69 – that is, to build it on the cheap. However, as an interstate, the highway has to meet federal standards. That isn’t being done. Either the Federal Highway Administration is looking the other way, or it’s lowered its standards. None of this bodes well for the highway’s costs or public safety or for the ancient terrain in south-central and southwestern Indiana.

The new-terrain highway I-69 extension threatens the existence of the Indiana Bat. Why should anyone care?

By Linda Greene, Sandra Tokarski, and Mary Ann Williams

This tiny creature, the size of a small mouse and weighing the same as a door key, has an amazing wingspan of 10.5 inches. It normally lives 14 years, summers in the woodlands and hibernates in the caves of southern Indiana, as well as in the forests of 20 other states.

Since 1967 the Indiana Bat has been on the federal list of endangered species.

Called “Indiana Bats” because they were identified in 1928 in the Hoosier state, they have one of their largest hibernacula (caves where they hibernate in winter) in Ray’s Cave in Greene County, located four miles northwest of Cincinnati, IN, within the “action area” of I-69 Section 4.

Ray’s Cave is designated as a critical habitat of the Indiana Bat. The 2005 census of Indiana Bats showed 54,325 Indiana Bats hibernating in Ray’s Cave. The 2005 winter census showed the total world’s population of Indiana Bats as 457,374. Thus, approximately 12% of the world’s known population of Indiana Bats hibernates in this single critical habitat located within the I-69 action area.

“This little species is at such a critical point in its evolution on this planet,” says Sandra Tokarski, Board Member of Citizens for Appropriate Rural Roads, Inc. “We’re having a tremendous impact on the flora and fauna in our environment. Without thinking, the activities we do to feed, clothe, and house ourselves contribute to the demise and extinction of other creatures. The added stress of the I-69 extension, along with the White Nose Syndrome (WNS), a fungal infection that is lethal to bats, could push the bat into extinction.”

On the east coast, over 1 million bats have died of WNS since 2007. In some hibernacula, the entire bat population has been lost to the disease. The last thing the Indiana Bat needs is a new-terrain highway to add to its stress as a species.

Like every other plant and animal, the Indiana Bat performs a function. The bat is vital to agriculture. It eats insects harmful to human food crops. It eats mosquitoes and thus is a friend to humans. A recent study estimates that the loss of bats in North America could lead to agricultural losses of $3.7 billion per year (Science, April 2011).

According to scientists, bats are “bio-indicators.” Their ill health and endangerment are indicators of the threats to humans from the environmental disruptions from burning fossil fuels and deforestation. In that way, the bat is similar to the proverbial canary in the coal mine (Endangered Species Research, Gareth Jones, et al. July 2009).

Another endangered species is the symbol of America, the bald eagle. Much time, effort and funding have succeeded in de-classifying the bald eagle from “endangered” to “threatened.” The Indiana Bat needs the same protection given the bald eagle.

But the Indiana Department of Transportation stance towards the Indiana Bat violates the Endangered Species Act, which prohibits the “taking” of endangered species. Anticipated, and actual, I-69 project actions and effects include the alteration and destruction of karst features, increased toxic air pollution, timber-cutting, destruction and alteration of streams and riparian habitat, and noise disturbances of bat hibernacula and maternity colonies.

In its environmental study process, INDOT expended great quantities of taxpayer money to study impacts on the Indiana Bat. But the agency failed to choose the route/alternative that, according to their own studies, would have little or no impact on this endangered mammal.

“We cannot continue to indiscriminately wipe out species, like the Indiana Bat. By doing so, we gravely damage ourselves and future generations,” says Sandra Tokarski.