CINCINNATI — Peter Merone wasn’t a huge fan of the Brent Spence Bridge. That was before he was rear-ended while driving on it during rush hour traffic.
"Everything stopped," he said. "I got out of the car, and the shaking on the bridge — just looking at it I said 'Well, this is horrendous.'"
"I try to avoid it. One year, I gave it up for lent," Merone said.
But he hasn’t given up on trying to make it better. Merone was one of dozens who showed up at the Radisson Hotel in Covington for a public hearing on the project.
The purpose was for an opportunity to review and comment on the project's supplemental environmental assessment, a massive document that supplements the 2012 environmental report.
Keeping communities connected was the main reason Merone showed up. He wanted to learn more about how a widened highway would impact the connectivity of Covington neighborhoods, including the design of pedestrian walkways.
Brian Boland with Bridge Forward Cincinnati has similar concerns across the river. He wants to see the design be adjusted so that downtown’s street grid can be extended beyond the current highway.
"You may look at Queensgate and say, 'Gosh, will that ever be anything?'" Poland said. "You have to remember that our riverfront didn't look like it does today, 20 years ago, it was a mess."
Bridge Forward has met with ODOT several times. Boland said recent designs in the fall made progress.
"They’ve come a little bit, we want them to come a lot," he said.
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Stefan Spinosa, ODOT’s Brent Spence Bridge project manager, said efforts to better the project have been ongoing over the past several months, and that in another couple of months, they’ll be able to provide an update.
"We have a lot of the same overarching goals," Spinosa said. "We want to reconnect neighborhoods and communities, how we minimize footprint to get to [the West End]. But we got to be able to build it safely. We got to be able to pay for it, we got to be able to manage it. So all those technical side of things are part of the evaluation. That's what's ongoing right now."
An environmental justice report laid out concerns around air quality, traffic volume and noise pollution. The project team said the supplemental environmental report said all of those factors will be mitigated.
“I don't want to say that we're just putting this out there and then we're defending it. We want to make sure that what we have is accurate, said Stacee Hans, KYTC’s Brent Spence Bridge project manager.
One tactic to reduce noise pollution is by installing barriers. Some residents at Tuesday’s hearing asked whether they will be enough and whether they can be installed in more places.
The noise barriers will be installed on Crescent Avenue in Covington later this year.
"Instead of just looking at a noise wall on a picture, this gives them an opportunity to see where it’s actually put into the ground and see some of the pros and cons of it," Hans said.
For Merone, who's been attending public hearings like this for the last 12 years, he’s excited for the moment he can feel safe driving over the bridge again.
"(I'm) not excited about starting next year eight years of construction, but I am looking forward to this whole chapter finally," he said.
Every comment will be addressed by the project team. Then the Federal Highway Administration will determine whether each comment has been sufficiently addressed and the project can move forward.
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