After months of sometimes-heated discussion, public meetings and a resident petition, the Kansas Department of Transportation still seems to prefer a plan to build a new interchange at Kansas Highway 10 and Lone Elm Road.
On Thursday, KDOT officials hosted the last of three scheduled public meetings to gather input on the K-10 corridor improvement project. The meeting took place at the K-State Innovation Campus in Olathe and drew a crowd of roughly 150, many of them Lenexa residents opposed to building an interchange at Lone Elm.
Changes at Lone Elm are part of a broader $1.2 billion improvement project along a 16.5-mile stretch of K-10 that passes through Johnson and Douglas counties and includes De Soto, Lenexa and Olathe.
Growing traffic along the corridor has prompted state officials to consider a variety of changes in the area, including widening the road, rehabbing bridges and — as is the case at Lone Elm — adding new interchanges.
But that idea has garnered stiff opposition from many Lenexa residents who live in the area and also sparked concerns from some Olathe city officials.
KDOT says a Lone Elm interchange is preferred
KDOT officials on Thursday presented two potential scenarios for handling the growing volume of traffic on K-10 around Lone Elm: a new interchange or no interchange.
KDOT officials at the meeting said that if they ultimately choose not to build an interchange, traffic from K-10 would have to be directed through interchanges that already exist at K-10 and Woodland Road and K-7 and Prairie Star Parkway.
Traffic would then have to be funneled through local street networks, according to KDOT.
The increase in traffic would affect approximately 122 residential properties along those routes and require an estimated $60 million of work to expand local city streets in order to be able to handle more vehicles, according to KDOT’s presentation Thursday.
Instead, if KDOT opts for building a new interchange at K-10 and Lone Elm, traffic would increase along Lone Elm Road and 101st Street, with approximately 22 residential properties along the routes affected, according to KDOT.
Building a new interchange, officials said, would also eliminate the need to expand Woodland Road from K-10 to Prairie Star Parkway and 101st Street from Woodland to Lone Elm.
An interchange is the preferred alternative, KDOT officials said Thursday.
“Comparing the two scenarios, the team’s analysis showed that adding an interchange at K-10 and Lone Elm, overall, it improved traffic operations across the network,” Steven Cross, KDOT’s project manager, said during the presentation. “It’ll have a lower construction cost. When considering the impacts to the local street network, it will have fewer impacts on residential properties.”
Interchange idea has drawn opposition
The interchange idea has sparked opposition from both Lenexa residents and Olathe city leaders.
In November, the Olathe City Council drafted a letter to KDOT expressing their concerns about adding an interchange at Lone Elm.
The letter cited potential concerns that increased traffic, especially from commercial trucks, could pose safety risks to pedestrians and other drivers, particularly to students going to and from schools in the area, including Olathe Northwest High and the Prairie Learning Center.
Olathe leaders also cited concerns about stormwater and noise concerns.
“The student safety issue is huge,” Olathe Councilmember LeEtta Felter said at that November meeting.
Meanwhile, at a Lenexa City Council meeting in December, more than a dozen Lenexa residents voiced opposition to an interchange, also expressing worries about students who walk to and from Manchester Park Elementary.
In response at the December meeting, Lenexa Mayor Julie Sayers said the interchange is already included in Lenexa’s Comprehensive Plan.
“The Lone Elm interchange is already a part of the city’s existing, adopted CIP and has been for many years,” Sayers said at the time. “We are happy to hear your feedback, but please understand that this is already an approved project for the city. Nothing in the CIP changes that approval.”
Some residents have pushed for an overpass
A group of Lenexa residents in recent months has been pushing an alternative to a new interchange.
They would like to see KDOT build an overpass at Lone Elm, on which drivers on Lone Elm could cross K-10. Drivers on the highway, however, could not exit onto Lone Elm.
Residents have also started a Change.org petition demanding an overpass rather than an interchange that has garnered more than 500 signatures.
At Thursday’s meeting, Lenexa resident Alexis Guetzlaff, one of the administrators of the Lone Elm overpass Facebook group and author of the petition continued to express her disappointment in KDOT’s plan.
“There are some of us on this who have reviewed hundreds and hundreds of pages of documents. We understand there is no new information or new map or new graph or anything that is going to make this not a very bad plan. And this is a very bad plan,” she said.
“So that’s what I just told (a KDOT representative). I was like, ‘You didn’t show me a plan, a design for a miraculous interchange where an 11 year old is going to be safe to cross at 7 a.m. in the winter, when it’s dark,'” she said.
Lenexa residents Steven and Natalie VanLiew expressed similar disappointment in KDOT not considering an overpass. They also felt like their neighborhood near Manchester Park Elementary was ignored by KDOT in its presentation when listing areas that would be affected by the interchange.
“We’re both engineers, though, so we’re very data-driven,” Natalie said. “That’s why we’re talking to the noise engineer, and we’re going to be talking to the safety engineer. We want them to help us understand that there wasn’t any mention of Manchester Park Elementary in their presentation.”
KDOT, Lenexa representatives were present
After the presentation, KDOT representatives were on-hand to answer questions and take suggestions from residents about their concerns.
Answering questions, Cross, the KDOT project manager, said he understands residents’ expectations residents might differ from what KDOT presented, but they’re trying to do what’s best to address future traffic concerns.
“Whatever improvements we do throughout the state of Kansas, we affect people, and that’s the most difficult part of my job,” he said. “But what we have to do is we have to take the data that we have, we coordinate with the cities, counties, whoever’s in the area. We ask, ‘What are your development plans?’ and we try to come up with the best fit for the solution … We try to balance (it) out the best we can.”
While the meeting was hosted by KDOT, Lenexa officials, including Mayor Sayers, Community Development Director Scott McCullough and several city councilmembers attended to see KDOT’s plans for the area and answer residents’ questions.
“It’s helpful because every person you speak with has their own unique perspective, and so, understanding what that perspective is helps us build the best project we can,” McCullough said.
What’s next
Those not able to make the meeting will be able to view the presentation and submit questions for feedback through Friday, April 18, at KDOT’s website.
Following that, KDOT will submit a final environmental assessment to the Federal Highway Administration to determine whether the project will have significant environmental impacts. If that is approved, the state will then enter into the design phase of the project.
While design of the project is going on, KDOT will continue to coordinate with leaders in Olathe and Lenexa on any future improvements being made to local city streets and their continued concerns, Cross said.
“Part of my job as a project manager is to figure out what the (city leaders’) needs are: What they don’t like, what their concerns are, and again, you got to balance all of that,” he said.
“When it’s like, ‘No, we don’t really think we want the interchange,’ or ‘We don’t want the interchange.’ And then the other ones like, ‘Yeah, we have to have it.’ And it’s like, ‘Okay, where’s the middle ground here, right?’ I don’t know that we necessarily found the middle ground, but we found something that I think both cities can work with and that’s the diamond interchange.”
Go deeper: Lenexa residents add voices to opposition against K-10 interchange at Lone Elm
