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John “Jack” Helin
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TAB 5
The Chieftain (Bonner Springs, KS)
October 12, 2012
Bonner to Ask State for Changes in K-7 Plan
Author: Caroline Boyer
The Bonner Springs City Council has decided completely abandoning support of the state’s
freeway plans for Kansas Highway 7 may not be the best option after all. But the council agreed
that it would ask for several conditions to be met before the Kansas Department of
Transportation moves forward with construction of an interchange at Kansas Avenue or 130th
Street.
Since the city of Olathe last spring terminated its memorandum of understanding with the state
concerning K-7, stating some of the same concerns the city of Bonner Springs has long had,
Bonner officials have questioned what they should do regarding the highway’s future. In a
workshop prior to its regular meeting Monday, the council and John “Jack” Helin, city
manager, covered a proposed resolution to amend the city’s K-7 memorandum of understanding.
“I think it would be best to approach them this way… Rather than be Olathe and just pull out,
that we stay at the table with them, that we identify some key things that are important to us, and
pass a resolution that says that,” Helin said. Helin said the city should try to work with KDOT
by establishing dates and other triggers that would require the construction of interchanges,
because stating that K-7 should maintain at-grade intersections may prove shortsighted in 30
years or more. He didn’t want the city to get in trouble if it attracted a development that
supported the need for an interchange. “It may get to the point where all the sudden, people are
sitting here in this room 10 years out and going, ‘We really need this,’” he said.
However, Helin said city officials don’t believe traffic will increase at the rate the state is
predicting, with traffic counts based on full build-out projections provided by each city along the
highway. In fact, he said, the state’s traffic counts have shown a reduction in daily traffic on the
highway in recent years. “Don’t use these wildly optimistic figures and stick them in your
computer program,” Helin said. “ … That’s great, but that’s assuming total build-out in the area,
and that’s not going to happen.”
So, the resolution restates the city’s numerous concerns, chiefly that the freeway option could
hurt the city’s economy because all of its major sales-tax-generating businesses are located on
the highway, and the uncertainty surrounding the state’s plans hurts the city’s ability to attract
other developments.
It suggests that the city work with the state to:
• determine a “no earlier than” date before work would begin on interchanges beyond the I-70
interchange,
• determine actual traffic counts that would be reached before any interchange is constructed,
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