By Leslie Bonilla Muñiz
Indiana Capital Chronicle
The nation’s newest interstate highway will open in Indianapolis on Tuesday — decades after Hoosiers first dreamed up a direct route from Evansville to Indianapolis.
The 142-mile Interstate 69 extension took 16 years and $4 billion to build out, as well as years of politicking. And it faced fierce opposition from an unlikely coalition of environmentalists, farmers, budget hawks and others.
Now, the orange construction barrels are soon to go.
The project’s backers marvel at its completion, celebrate speedier commutes and envision economic development for communities along the corridor.
But its opponents mourn what was lost along the way: land, and a way of life.
“There were many who thought we would never get to this point,” Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) spokeswoman Natalie Garrett wrote, in response to Capital Chronicle questions.
“Building I-69 has been a generational effort, with thousands of people involved along the way, devoting countless hours to delivering a safer, more direct connection between southwest Indiana, the state capital, and points beyond,” Garrett continued.
Tuesday’s interchange opening will allow nonstop vehicle travel between I-69’s northernmost point — Michigan’s border with Canada — and Indiana’s border with Kentucky.
“We are always pleased to see the successful conclusion of an Interstate extension project, one of numerous segments designed to extend the Interstate System to meet the country’s evolving needs,” a Federal Highway Administration spokesperson wrote to the Capital Chronicle. “Each completed project is an accomplishment by State, local, and Federal agencies … and many such segments are greeted, deservedly, with local ceremonies.”
Grander plans for the interstate to stretch to Mexico haven’t yet been realized.
Idea takes shape
Evansville, Indiana’s third-largest city, is tucked in the state’s southwest corner.
Following the passage of the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act, the nation embarked on an interstate-building boom. That included I-69’s original span from Michigan to Indianapolis, according to the Federal Highway Administration.
But the rush largely bypassed Evansville, author Matt Dellinger wrote in his 2010 book, “Interstate 69: The unfinished history of the last great American highway.” For decades, the city’s residents traveled to central Indiana along U.S. Route 41 and Interstate 70.
The Southwestern Indiana Regional Highway Coalition and others pushed for more, but to little avail, per Dellinger.
INDOT and its predecessor agencies have had an “improved highway” from Evansville to Indianapolis in mind since at least the 1940s, according to a 2011 draft long-range transportation plan appendix.
But a 1990 feasibility study of potential routes recommended against construction, finding poor cost-benefit ratios for each. That meant little chance Congress would earmark federal money for the project.
That year, economist David Reed was sitting around a breakfast table with several influential Daviess County residents when the topic turned to the interstate, Dellinger wrote. He was in town conducting research for a report on rural southern Indiana’s future when he suggested a national take on the highway: a route to Mexico.
“You’ll never get to first base unless you can get other people interested — other states interested. Because nobody gives a damn about Indiana,” he said, according to Dellinger’s book.
Businessman David Graham took the idea and drove with it.
“He and his wife, Stuart, drove to Shreveport, Memphis, Houston, and all these small towns around there, and they just knocked on the doors and met with the mayors and the chambers of commerce and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this interstate idea,” Dellinger said. “It was like this one roadshow.”
Highway hits roadblocks
As Graham was on the road, the nation was negotiating an end to dedicated federal funding for interstate projects.
But slipped into the 1991 legislation eliminating the federal government’s 90% responsibility for new interstates was a list of “high-priority” projects. Among them was Indiana’s share of I-69.
Subsequent legislation extended the route to the southern border in Texas, according to the Federal Highway Administration.
A revamped Environmental Impact Statement for the corridor began in 1999, according to INDOT, three years after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency nixed a first draft.
Route recommendations came out in 2003, and the Federal Highway Administration finalized its pick in 2004.
But how would Indiana financially kick-start the undertaking?
Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, a Republican, commenced a tempestuous 2006 legislative session when he introduced his plan: a 75-year lease of the Indiana Toll Road to a foreign operator.
“We aim to … uplift our southwest quadrant and unite our state by extending I-69 from corner to corner,” Daniels said in a news release. The move would also pay for other projects.
The prospect of privatization split lawmakers.
“Major Moves is now the kaleidoscope at the Statehouse, the situation shifting almost by the hour,” reporter Brian Howey wrote in his weekly political briefing.
Democrats decried the proposed funding mechanism.
“There is a way to build I-69 in Southern Indiana, and it can be done without turning it into a toll road or auctioning off our assets,” former Rep. Dave Crooks, then a southwest Indiana Democrat, told Howey.
Other area leaders pushed for Major Moves’ success.
“Politicians are dragging their feet up in Indianapolis, arguing about funding,” then-Evansville Mayor Jonathan Weinzapfel, also a Democrat, said in a 2006 speech.
“… It’s time for them to stop fighting. I don’t care if it is a Democratic plan or a Republican plan. I don’t care if it comes from the governor, the Legislature or even my fairy godmother. We need I-69. We need it today and we need it now,” he said, per Howey.
Lawmakers narrowly approved House Bill 1008. The negotiated compromise legislation passed the House 51-48 and the Senate 31-19, according to an archived action list.
A second tier of federal environmental studies began, one for each of the six sections of the interstate project. The assessments are required under the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act.
Opponents grieve
Some living along I-69’s proposed route organized to fight it.
“I think people are happy that they can … drive from Bloomington to Indianapolis without worrying about stoplights,” longtime Rep. Matt Pierce said.
“But it’s been so long, I think that people have forgotten about … the real life impact it had on the lives of people along the route,” said Pierce, a Democrat who has represented Bloomington in the House since 2002.
Among those impacted are Sandra and Thomas Tokarski, who in 1990 formed Citizens for Appropriate Rural Roads (CARR) with neighbors over a dinner table.
The couple lived on about 35 acres of land in rural Monroe County. In an interview, Sandra Tokarski described land lush with trees, a large vegetable garden, and an old, small house and barn.
“We were lucky, and we worked really hard as well,” she said. “When we bought our place (in 1975), it was not nearly as expensive to purchase land, and that’s why, on our very modest income, we were able to have this lovely piece of property.”
The couple spoke at public meetings for the project, hosted their own meetings with CARR, wrote letters to public officials and more. They rooted through documents and requested others. And they plotted the project’s path on a map for all to see, Tokarski recalled.
The coalition — environmentalists, farmers, fiscal conservatives and more — pushed INDOT to upgrade U.S. 41 to interstate standards rather than carve a new terrain interstate from the land.
But, Tokarski said, “We lost.” Interstate construction took about 5 acres of mature forest off the Tokarskis’ property.
“They were beautiful,” she said of the trees. “And if you’ve ever seen that kind of horrendous clear-cutting, it just — for me, it rips my heart out.”
INDOT made hundreds of commitments to mitigate the project’s impacts, as recorded in documentation for the six sections.
It installed 40,000 linear feet of noise barriers between Martinsville and Indianapolis, built new local road connections, relocated thousands of linear feet of streams and more, according to INDOT spokeswoman Garrett and the documents. And, it planted three trees for each one felled in construction.
Tokarski, however, was skeptical.
“‘Oh, we’re going to mitigate the forest three to one.’ So that means they’re going to take a little plot of land and they’re going to plant some little sticks,” she said. “… You call that mitigation? Maybe in 50 years.”
Within a few years of the interstate section’s opening, she and her husband moved to Bloomington. The noise, Tokarski said, was “constant,” and the deforestation “too heartbreaking.”
But, she added, “Our personal loss isn’t what matters here. What … has always mattered to us and to many, many people, is the long-term loss to the people of Indiana.”
Supporters celebrate
Others see victory in I-69’s pavement.
The first three sections of the Evansville-to-Indianapolis I-69 route opened in 2012, with the next pair opening in 2015 and 2018, according to INDOT.
The sixth section, dubbed “Finish Line,” has been under construction since 2019. Its $2 billion price tag ran about half the cost of the entire $4 billion project, according to INDOT.
“I always wondered if I would actually live long enough to see it built,” longtime Sen. Vaneta Becker, a Republican from Evansville, said of the I-69 extension. She served in the House from 1981 to 2005 and has been a state senator since.
She called the new route “so much faster and safer.”
Even unfinished, Becker said I-69 regularly saves her time on the commute to Indianapolis during the legislative session and beyond.
“All those naysayers that said it would save 10 minutes — well, it’s more like an hour,” she said, speaking while driving to Fort Wayne.
And it’s easier to drive because there’s less traffic, she said, a benefit that local parents of Indiana University students have professed to her.
Becker also described the interstate as an economic development boon, and key to supporting the area’s naval base.
“It just is so meaningful and so important for a lot of the small communities that back up to I-69,” she said.
Tuesday marks the beginning of the end of construction.
“The southern leg of I-69 between Evansville and Indianapolis has been decades in the making,” INDOT spokeswoman Garrett wrote. “There have been very few years since 2009 that did not have thousands of workers along the corridor during the height of construction season.”
Garrett called the project a “large undertaking” for her agency, the state and the industry.
But it’s not over yet.
The area near the interchange will remain an “active construction zone” through the end of 2024, per Garrett.
INDOT is working to add an additional lane to each direction of I-465 between I-65 and I-70, on the southwest side of Indianapolis.
Indiana is separately collaborating with Kentucky on an I-69 bridge over the Ohio River. Kentucky began construction on its approach in 2022; Indiana is working on designs, Garrett wrote. Construction of the river crossing is expected to start in 2027 and finish in 2031.
Author Dellinger said communities along I-69 have their work cut out for them — upgrading their water, sewers, electricity, connecting roads and more — to attract the development that advocates hope to see.
“The road itself is the beginning of an enormous process of investment and vision,” Dellinger said.
“If the wonderful things are going to happen that those boosters promised, it’s going to take … decades of investment to make the promises of I-69 come true.”
