Plans for I-71 Boston Road exit look ‘rigged’ to favor Strongsville at Brunswick’s expense: Commentary

STRONGSVILLE, Ohio — Ohio Governor Mike DeWine positioned himself as a peacemaker last March when he signed a state budget bill requiring the construction of a new highway interchange at Interstate 71 and Boston Road, which divides the Cleveland suburbs of Strongsville and Brunswick.

DeWine’s action was unusual because the state budget isn’t used routinely to mandate the solution of a highway planning problem. When he signed the bill, the governor said he was “very concerned” about circumventing normal highway planning procedures.

But he said he wanted to help broker an agreement between Strongsville, which has long sought the exit as a way to reduce rush-hour congestion, and Brunswick, which is bitterly opposed to the idea.

But elected officials in Brunswick, in northern Medina County, doubt the proposed exit will do anything to alleviate congestion in Strongsville, which lies in southwestern Cuyahoga County. Instead, they think the goal is to turn Boston Road, now a two-lane residential corridor, into a truck route leading to an industrial park in Strongsville about 3 miles west of I-71.

Early study raises questions

DeWine said in March that he expected negotiations over the issue to kick off this summer after the completion of an early planning study led by Strongsville and paid for with $100,000 allocated by state legislation in 2022.

But if anything, a new “Preliminary Feasibility Study’' of options for a Boston Road interchange, released in June, has raised suspicions in Brunswick that the entire exercise is intended to produce a predetermined result. Brunswick City Council has passed two resolutions and an ordinance opposing the project over the past year.

“This is designed to be rigged,’’ Nicholas Hanek, Brunswick’s vice mayor and City Council president, said Tuesday in an interview with cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer. “There’s no justification for what they’re trying to do.”

The feasibility study, prepared by Euthenics, an engineering firm based in Strongsville, and by the Cleveland office of Trans Systems, a national firm, outlines five possibilities for an I-71 connection at Boston Road, with estimated costs ranging from $28.6 million to $51 million for construction costs and right-of-way acquisition.

The options include four variations on partial interchanges, plus a full interchange. The study also considers a “do nothing’' option. The alternatives could affect numerous properties through takings by the state, and alterations to local streets that would affect the look and feel of the neighborhood, and in all likelihood, property values.

The construction cost estimates in the study “do not include the [cost of] improvements to Boston Road beyond the limits shown in the Interchange Layout Exhibit,’’ the document says. Hanek worries that additional costs, which could include those of relocating buried jet fuel and natural gas and pipelines on the Brunswick side of Boston Road, will have to be borne by Brunswick.

The study used traffic modeling software to predict that a new Boston Road interchange would produce modest reductions in traffic congestion at eight key intersections in a narrowly defined geography in Brunswick and Strongsville.

Despite those predictions, the study indicates that a new interchange at Boston Road wouldn’t improve conditions 2.5 miles to the north at the intersection of Howe Road and State Route 82 in Strongsville, ostensibly one of the big reasons for a new I-71 interchange.

According to the study, “the SR 82 Howe Road intersection typically resulted in poor/failing level of service throughout each scenario, including No Build conditions.’’ The study goes on to say that “Attaining acceptable operational performance at this [SR 82 Howe Road] intersection is outside the study scope.”

No input from Brunswick

Despite such caveats, the study recommends going ahead with further exploration of a Boston Road interchange, and development of a “preferred alternative,’' in a process that will now include public comment.

From Hanek’s point of view, it was ridiculous to reach this point without any public engagement with Brunswick officials or residents.

“It puts the endgame before the formal process,’’ he said. “Why would you say, ‘these are the five options’ instead of working on it concurrently?’’

Dan Tierney, DeWine’s press secretary, said the governor’s goal in signing the legislation in March was to resolve a longstanding feud between two Cleveland suburbs at loggerheads over traffic congestion.

It’s a tough problem to solve because both communities developed over the past 60 years with clusters of cul-de-sac residential subdivisions framed by a grid of collector roads that become clogged with traffic during rush hours. It’s a typical pattern for sprawl development in Northeast Ohio.

The budget bill provided a way to bring the warring parties to the table after decades of conflict, Tierney said. But he said the governor hasn’t made up his mind about exactly how to solve the problem.

“We’re not wedded’' to the idea of the Boston Road exit, Tierney said. “There’s still a lot of work to do to find a solution.”

Hanek, however, is unconvinced. He said the message of the budget bill, and the new feasibility study is: “We want the one thing that we want, and there’s nothing else we’re going to look at.’’

Wider implications

The conflict may seem like a strictly local matter. But it involves questions of regional transportation planning and due process with statewide if not national implications if it becomes a template for using a state’s budget bill to force highway interchanges on other unwilling communities.

The legislative language requiring the new exit was inserted in the budget bill by Republican State Rep. Tom Patton, who represents Strongsville.

In interviews earlier this year, Patton said he has been frustrated after decades of inaction over congestion along the I-71 corridor in Strongsville, particularly at Howe Road and SR 82.

The sprawling SouthPark Mall and the Cleveland Clinic’s Strongsville Family Health and Surgery Center are among the major generators of traffic in that area. But Patton said he believes much of the rush-hour traffic on Howe Road, which parallels the west side of I-71 between Boston Road and SR 82, is caused by cars coming to and from Brunswick. Hence his interest in a new exit at Boston Road.

The question remains, however, whether a new highway exit at Boston Road would reduce rush-hour congestion or worsen the problem through a widely documented phenomenon known as “induced demand,’’ in which adding capacity to a roadway system eventually generates more traffic.

Federal rules

As for the planning process, Patton’s legislative language has raised questions over whether Ohio is using the state budget to subvert standard procedures used to design new interchanges along federal interstates.

Tierney, DeWine’s spokesman, said that isn’t the intention. Any plans that come from the discussion brokered by the governor would be reviewed as required by federal law, by NOACA, the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency.

NOACA is an MPO, a Metropolitan Planning Organization, that oversees transportation planning in Cuyahoga, Medina, Lake, Lorain and Geauga counties.

MPOs were created by the federal government in the 1960s to give localities a stronger voice in planning highways after the government initially rammed interstates through low-income city neighborhoods with little oversight. The irony now is that Brunswick and Strongsville are two middle-class, majority-white suburbs, unlike the urban communities harmed by highway construction in the past.

Tierney and Grace Gallucci, NOACA’s executive director, both said in interviews last week that they don’t see the state’s mandate for an exit at Boston Road as fundamentally at odds with federal policy. Regardless of its origins, the project would still have to go through review processes required by the Federal Highway Administration.

Gallucci, however, was opposed to the insertion of Patton’s amendment in the state budget and testified against it earlier this year. She said it was wrong to use a formula based on population figures and mileage between exits – which Patton’s language did – to determine the location of an interchange. She lost that argument.

Responding to pressure from Strongsville in the past, NOACA has reviewed the proposed exit at Boston Road numerous times and declined to pursue it because it was opposed by Brunswick.

The agency’s most recent analysis showed that the interchange could increase traffic through a measurement known as “vehicle miles traveled.” The Boston Road interchange was one of several that NOACA’s staff recommended against pursuing. Nonetheless, the budget bill signed by DeWine forces the conversation to move ahead.

Circular logic

Hanek said that the upshot is an opaque process that has left Brunswick sidelined. For example, participants in the feasibility study offered conflicting accounts about why Brunswick was not consulted.

The traffic engineers, in their report, said they were not authorized by NOACA to gather any public comments at this stage. Gallucci, NOACA’s executive director, said the study was led by Strongsville, and that her agency had no role in it other than providing customary traffic data.

Tom Perciak, the mayor of Strongsville, said ODOT determined the scope of the feasibility study. “We’re following their guidelines in this whole process,’’ he said.

But ODOT’s District 12 office said it was Strongsville that determined the scope.

“This is Strongsville’s study, so you’ll need to confirm with them what scope and direction they provided the consultant who performed the study,’’ District 12 spokesman Brent Kovacs wrote in an email.

“This is circular,’’ Hanek said. “You can point people to different places. It’s complicated. And you can obscure what you’re actually trying to do if you work through it like this.”

High anxiety

For now, anxiety is riding high on both sides of Boston Road, where residents have posted blue and white yard signs emblazoned with the message “Say No to the Boston Road Interchange.” Some 1,500 have signed a petition opposing the project, Hanek said.

“It’s devastating to homeowners who know that their houses are going to be gone, and there are going to be trucks in their front yard,’’ he said. “It reshapes the entire community.’’

If DeWine wants to play a truly constructive role in resolving the conflict over the Boston Road exit, a better way forward would be to have the state fund a broad study of how to retrofit traffic patterns in Brunswick and Strongsville. Such a study should involve the full participation of both cities from the beginning — not just the winner in a contest of power determined by the legislature and the governor.

Before proceeding with a solution that could make things worse, the governor and everyone else involved should follow the traffic engineering equivalent of a physician’s Hippocratic Oath, which could be summarized as “do no harm.”