Mt Vernon City Council:
The proposed alteration of Edgewood Road will have major impacts on the residents who live on Edgewood Road and on the streets connecting to it. In fact, there is no possibility it will not have major impacts on the entire R-1 neighborhood.
The information provided by the city administration so far on the proposed alteration of Edgewood Road is insufficient. No part of it is sufficient to allow residents to even understand how much property will be tal<en, much less the impact on the quality of life of the entire
neighborhood. The pitiful information released so far seems designed to hide more than to explain or convince. This is a guaranteed way to inflame the public.
As a Capital Planning/Facilities Engineer, I have 32 years of experience doing multi-million dollar projects. All of that work involved engineering plans and drawings from initial stages to completion. From that experience, I find it impossible to believe that the city was able to obtain $680,000 from CORPO as well as $2 million from the Ohio Department of Transportation with nothing more than the extremely poor representation of an explanation as to the layout planned for Phase 1 of the Edgewood Road Project. Additionally now you are asking council to
approve resolution 2024-23 seeking another 3.1 million dollars with nothing more than what you provided in the Edgewood phase I SOW document, that's 5.8 million dollars with no details. So, I ask, where are the plans that had to be submitted to get the money? If Council has seen them, why can't they be made public now? If Council has not seen them, it should reject Resolution 2024-23 until it and the public has seen and had the opportunity to review and comment on them.
Before city council considers moving Resolution 2024-23 forward, I believe the public and City Council deserve a good deal more information and especially significantly better interpretation of exactly how Edgewood Road and the other affected streets and driveways might look, if the
proposed alteration is implemented.
By the way, Mr. Mayor, when you lived across the street from me on East Chestnut Street, you told me on numerous occasions that widening Edgewood Road and putting it through to Coshocton Avenue was the worst thing the city could do. You stood on your front porch with a
sound meter and measured the noise the traffic made going up and down Chestnut Street and said the city needed to do something about all the noise and traffic in a residential area. Once you moved away and became a member of city council, your opinion totally changed. The
neighborhood is still Rl. Nothing about the neighborhood has changed, but you have.
Respectively submitted,
Dennis Swingle
March 6, 2024
