BROOKINGS – The Brookings County Commission this week approved spending as much as $2 million on a proposed interchange project for which the Brookings City Council is seeking grant money.
The project seeks to construct an interchange over Interstate 29 at 20th Street South, connecting it to 214th Street and to Aurora.
The commission’s Tuesday action comes after the Brookings City Council unanimously approved during its June 26 meeting spending up to $3.6 million for a 20 percent match of the Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development (BUILD) grant it is seeking. As Brookings Mayor Keith Corbett told the county commissioners, this project, if successfully funded through the grant, would have a substantial economic impact.
The grant application has yet to be submitted, according to Brookings Economic Development Corporation Director Al Heuton. The application is due by July 19, and they are still waiting on some information regarding engineering. When all the remaining information is incorporated into the final draft of the application, it will be submitted electronically.
They will hear which projects have been funded through the grant in the middle of December 2018.
Based on a 2-year-old study Heuton had worked on, he anticipates the total project cost to be between $18 million and $20 million.
There are three main parts to the project, according to Heuton. The first is the overpass over the interstate. Then, there’s connecting 20th Street South to 214th Street. Third, there are the ramps.
“With this particular project, they’re looking to do the ramps inside the state and local right of way so that they don’t have to deal with right of way issues and also minimize some of the environmental impacts with the ponds in that area,” Heuton said.
In Heuton’s review of successfully funded projects, they have been funded at a wide variety of percentages of the total project costs.
“In those applications, there are projects that have been funded 100 percent, but they range from that all the way up to well over 50 percent local match,” Heuton said.
There are a few crucial aspects that the DOT looks at when considering funding these kinds of projects, he added.
Chief among them is safety, particularly in regard to how the project might reduce traffic accidents, injuries and deaths.
“We don’t want deaths and we don’t want to have those as a way to justify the application, but those carry a lot of weight. If there are traffic-related deaths because of the transportation system, that’s a big factor in the evaluation of these,” Heuton said.
As County Commissioner Stephne Miller stated, there’s not much for accidents on 214th, which is a gravel road.
Commissioners mentioned one potential safety benefit from the project could come from busing students from Aurora to their respective Brookings schools with the new interchange.
Traffic impact is another, and “by putting the road or interchange in, there’d be travel time savings for commuters,” Heuton said.
Although there was some worry about how much it could cost to improve 214th Street, which would be an additional expense to the county, the county was on board in supporting the project. All four present commissioners voted to approve.
Contact Eric Sandbulte at esandbulte@brookingsregister.com.
Register photo: If the Brookings City Council is awarded a federal grant to construct a new Interstate 29 interchange, 214th Street, shown above in the foreground, could connect with 20th Street South, shown in the background. The Brookings County Commission has agreed to spend up to $2 million on the project. The photo above was taken on the east side the interstate, looking west into the city.
