Board is united in opposition

With Nebraska Department of Roads officials sitting in front of them, members of the Dodge County Board of Supervisors remained unified in their opposition to being handed more than 17 miles of U.S. Highway 30.

At Wednesday morning’s Dodge County board meeting, supervisors expressed their distrust in the DOR, citing an earlier agreement on U.S. 30 and issues with Old Highway 275 that was relinquished to Dodge County a few years ago. Monty Fredrickson, DOR deputy director, and Tim Weander, district engineer, attended the meeting.

DOR staff members were there to discuss issues related to turning U.S. 30 over to the county road system if a new, expanded U.S. 30 expressway is built along a different route. A special panel has recommended moving U.S. 30 north along County Road S, which ranges from one mile to 1 1/2 miles north of U.S. 30.

But a vote of the panel’s 16 members was not unanimous. The recommended route received nine votes from the 16-member panel.

Supervisor Dean Lux, who had served as county board chairman for 16 years and sat on that special panel, said the county signed an agreement with DOR in January 1999 that basically said the county’s road department would get about six miles of U.S. 30, two miles by North Bend and four miles by the Fremont Lakes State Recreation Area.

Fredrickson pointed out that the agreement was never complete even though county officials and Fremont officials signed it because North Bend officials did not. That disagreement caused DOR to develop the special panel.

“We were at an impasse with North Bend,” Weander said. “We’ve been trying to work out that impasse to determine a new alignment from the Dodge County line to Fremont.”

And when U.S. Highway 275 was built east of Fremont, DOR relinquished about 2.8 miles of Old Highway 275 to the county road system, Lux continued.

“We argued that that highway needed overlaid, but we didn’t get that. In the last two years we’ve had to spend $400,000 of the county’s money and $400,000 of federal funds to overlay that stretch. But the Department of Roads overlaid the highway for Douglas County all the way through Valley,” he said.

Supervisor Paul Marsh said the added miles of U.S. 30 isn’t a gift they want.

“It’s a tune to someone coming in and saying that they’re going to paint the house and clean the gutters before giving us a house,” Marsh said. “We’ve made it clear all along that we don’t want your house.”

Fredrickson said they want to assure Dodge County officials that if U.S. 30 is moved that the roadway turned over to the county’s road system will be in excellent condition.

“That’s our message today,” he said.

The next step in the process is to conduct an environmental study for an expanded expressway detailing three options: The recommended route, using the existing U.S. 30 corridor or making no changes to the highway at all, Fredrickson said.

The recommended route would take the expanded U.S. 30 west from an interchange with U.S. Highway 275 north of Fremont before connecting it with County Road S about four miles west. The route then would connect with the existing U.S. 30 corridor about three miles west of North Bend.

Marsh called the project “a political football,” saying that the DOR was set to expand U.S. 30 mostly along the current corridor until other political pressures came about.

“You need to go back to what the initial proposal was before Dodge County or any other factors got involved in this,” Marsh told the DOR staff members there. “You need to see what went into that earlier decision.”