Residents object to I-69 plan

Bill Boyd owns a family farm that belonged to his wife’s grandparents, who purchased the property in 1919 and lived on it their entire lives. Boyd was one community member in attendance at an Anti-I-69 Community Picnic on Sunday at the Reverend Ernest D. Butler Park.

Boyd said he challenges anyone to find another piece of property just like his, with history and emotional attachment connected to it.

Boyd’s farm would be acquired and developed by the Indiana Department of Transportation’s “I-69 Evansville to Indianapolis” plan to extend the interstate highway through Monroe County. The proposed plan could, according to a study conducted by the Federal Highway Administration and the INDOT, “increase accessibility for southwest Indiana businesses to labor, suppliers and consumer markets.”

“To see what they are doing to the family farm, not just us, but all the farms in Daviess County, Gibson County, Pike County, is just a tragedy,” Boyd said. “We are finding out that a landowner, a citizen of this country of ours, does not have any rights to protect their property. You think you do, but when it comes down to it, if the state wants to put a highway through it, you’re just out of luck.”

Boyd said he and his family have been fighting, along with Citizens for Appropriate Rural Roads, for about 15 years against a proposal to build a new interstate. He said he has submitted about 100 Freedom of Information Act requests to INDOT, but the department has responded about half of the time with the requested information.

“They hide the things they don’t want the public to know,” Boyd said.

Other attendees of the Anti-I-69 Community Picnic brought up environmental concerns regarding the development of the road, including possible damage to farmland, forest and wetland, as well as potential damage to caves, quality of groundwater and wildlife habitats.

“I know (the highway’s development) would affect the areas where the Indiana bat lives,” resident Corinne Sereni said.
 
Sereni said she hopes community discussions like Sunday’s picnic will form an infrastructure for more support to fight against projects she views as detrimental to the community. She said most supporters of the project have been promised safer highways and more jobs, but similar projects elsewhere have not always had these results
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“I think these are things that need to be explored more as far as what has happened in other communities where it’s actually been the opposite,” Sereni said. “The promises of development ... have actually done the opposite, taking money out of the community and bringing in big corporations, and that money doesn’t go back into the local economy.”