NORTH MANKATO — Take heart New Ulm. Many of us may yet live to see U.S. Highway 14 expanded to four lanes into town, but there are still a lot of “t’s” to be crossed and “i’s” to be dotted before it happens.
Best news is that the Highway 14 Partnership lobbying group is trying to pry loose enough federal dollars to make it happen.
In fact, the Partnership’s chairman, Gary Zellmer, North Mankato’s mayor, just returned from taking a financing plan to Washington that he hopes Congress can’t refuse.
He met with First District Congressman Tim Walz, a member of the House Transportation Committee and a transportation aide to the committee’s chairman, Minnesota Congressman Jim Oberstar. He put a dollar figure on building an interchange at the intersection of Highway 14 and Nicollet County Road 41, between $22 million and $25 million, and from $125 million to $225 million to expand the highway to four lanes from North Mankato to New Ulm.
Zellmer had Minnesota Department of Transportation District 7 help in putting together the dollar estimates, as well as MnDOT’s pessimistic assessment of its chances of coming up with state money to fund the project.
Zellmer is quick to admit that his city has a large stake in seeing the continued expansion get started.
“The first three-mile stretch there was supposed to be the first phase of the extension. A long time ago, it was projected to be started on by 2006, and it just keeps getting delayed. We’re working on that now with MnDOT and Nicollet County, trying to at least get started with the purchase of the right-of-way, using county dollars and city dollars to get it going,” Zellmer said.
“We’re trying to get an agreement with [MnDOT] that if we put that money toward right-of-way that then they’ll reimburse us. Once they have that project on their schedule, it comes due and the money is available, But we’re really pushing hard because right now, on the current [schedule], that’s stretched out somewhere around 2015 — which we can’t wait for in North Mankato. We’re already that far out with our industrial park. We’re going to have do something there,” he said.
“On the New Ulm stretch, there’s no date on that one. Now, they’re talking, I think, on the last planning [schedule] something like 2020, but we’re pushing to get that [Final] EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) completed which they just had the public hearing on earlier this year with three different routes. We’re trying to get them to get that done, hopefully, we thought we would have it done yet this year,. But now there’s some problems, I guess, with the DNR around the Swan Lake area.”
(MnDOT’s Highway 14 EIS project manager, Peter Harff, expects to have the remaining issues resolved sometime this summer. Because finalizing the EIS takes an additional 15 months, the Final EIS should be released in late 2009, according to Rebecca Arndt, District 7’s public affairs coordinator.)
“So, if we can get that done, at least, then we’ve got a project that is viable and ready to go. They’ll have the route selected, and we can have the maps drawn. Hopefully, we can find some funding to get that thing going,” Zellmer said.
“That’s what I went to Washington for ... to basically say, there is no state money, and we need that done. And, to ask them, if you can come up with the whole amount, it would be great. If you can come up with half of it, we’ll have to figure out where to get the rest of the money from somewhere.”
Ron Larsen can be reached at rlarsen@nujournal.com
