By JUDITH O. ETZEL
Contributing writer
Local residents offering comments at Thursday’s PennDOT session were emphatic and unanimous in their insistence that the four-lane stretch on Route 8 south of Franklin remain intact.
About 30 individuals gave their views on the ongoing Route 8 study during the two-hour meeting. Elected officials met with PennDOT and Michael Baker Engineering representatives earlier in the day. In December, the Venango County commissioners held a similar meeting with area businesses giving their take on the study.
What they said
– “$42 million? For safety, go ahead and do it (keep the four-lanes),” said Michael Haney of Oil City.
– Rick Burchfield of Cornplanter Township said, “Are those people in Pittsburgh more important than us? Give us a break. Don’t take us back to the stone age.”
– “This corridor is different. That highway is busy with hunters, Applefest, campers and more. That needs to be included in your study,” said Pete Lindey of Oil City.
– A Barkeyville businessman suggested that insufficient maintenance may have contributed to the cost of the project and said that the 40-year highway had not been included in PennDOT’s standard maintenance updates. Bill Petit, executive of the PennDOT District 1 office in Oil City, acknowledged, “It hasn’t been ignored but it hasn’t been on the top of the heap, either. Now it is.”
– Ryan Bell of Rockland said PennDOT should instead turn its attention to “not just maintaining the four-lanes but extending it to I-80.”
– A representative of the National Bowhunters Organization said his group is holding an event this summer at the county park with up to 1,000 competitors attending from several states. “One of the selling points was access off I-80. It is an annual event and this road is a big part of having it here,” he said.
– James Runninger, associated with the fire police said, “The accident rate will go sky-high if you run two lanes.”
– A Georgetown Road resident said she travels the stretch frequently in getting her three children to schools and special events. “Time for me is of the essence,” she said. “Those four-lanes save my life every day because I travel them three or four times a day.”
– One local man said, “I’ve seen the old Route 8 and the new Route 8. I’m an old truck driver. No one knows the future but we know going backwards is not the way to the future.”
– Another area resident offered, “Look at the costs – the alternatives are close to the full-blown figure. I say we move forward and go for it.” He also noted that the reconstruction work could involve local contractors, something that could translate into “looking at it as an income, not an expense.”
– A member of the Franklin Ministerium said, “I don’t think we should go backwards. The future holds a lot of things we don’t know yet. Keeping it as a four-lanes would make our area more viable and able to grow.”
– Mike Stevenson of Rouseville said, “If you cut the access into our area, the traffic volume will fall. Once you reduce it down, you don’t know what will happen. You turn it into two lanes, we’ve got nothing.”
– A former Joy employee noted, “Will businesses leave? That means families leave.”
– Barbara Pierce of Oil City said she moved her business to the area from Oregon and that decision was based in part on access to Pittsburgh and Cleveland. “There’s a lot of recruitment going on in getting people to relocate here and highway access is a selling point,” she said.
– Deb Sobina of Venango College in Oil City said recruiting students and faculty to the campus requires partnerships with collaborators and that means traveling. “I wanted you to have the educational part of this,” she said.
– A Franklin shop owner said, “I have shoppers come from all over and access here is vital for our community.”
– Veronica Santee, a family physician, said some patients require care in Pittsburgh. “Our families travel and I want them to stay safe. We need to keep the four lanes,” she said.
– A traffic manager for a plastics company in Titusville said the cracker plant’s potential to stimulate the plastics industry could mean “we get three to four truckloads of plastic pellets coming in every day. “If we don’t get the materials, we can’t do our jobs,” he said.
Jim Carroll, a PennDOT spokesman, said the office will have a comment form online today. The form is available by clicking on District 1 office at PennDOT.gov.
For more on the forum, visit TheDerrick.com.
