While city leaders take summer recess, neighborhood concerns over I-75 Brent Spence widening go unanswered

Unanswered questions

While Cincinnati’s mayor and City Council got an early start last week on a six-week summer vacation, residents and families living in communities alongside I-75 are left looking for answers as crews begin the long, arduous haul of the Brent Spence corridor highway expansion project.

With the latest round of long-term ramp closures and resulting detours put in place this past weekend, residents, shop owners and workers in West End, Camp Washington and CUF — along with their neighbors across the river in Covington — have already begun feeling the impacts on their commutes and their neighborhood streets. Recent reporting has shown how these traffic disruptions are already causing real, tangible and immediate detriment to these communities and their occupants’ livelihoods. 

Traffic is just the short-term problem

When it comes to the project’s even longer-term impacts on human health and our region’s natural environment and resources, the states’ transportation agencies, ODOT and KYTC, have been tight-lipped if not downright evasive. While they’ve remained fixated on the (impossible) task of alleviating this project’s massive traffic disruptions, these agencies aren’t talking about the even longer-term impacts this project will have on nearby neighborhoods’ health and environment.

That’s, at least in part, because they don’t know the full extent of those impacts. Despite two of its own prior assessments (in 2012 and an update in 2024) identifying numerous potential environmental impacts, the U.S. Department of Transportation never provided a full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the Brent Spence Corridor expansion. An EIS identifies environmental impacts of a proposed project and requires that alternatives be studied, as well. The National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (NEPA) requires one for all federal projects that can affect human health and the environment. 

We have already seen how the Brent Spence project is affecting human health and our environment (not to mention the existing highway's well-documented health impacts on surrounding neighborhoods). An EIS will require the government to take a closer look at those effects, as well as alternatives like congestion pricing or public transit investments, to lessen their impact. As of now, the states have yet to present any consideration of such alternatives for the Brent Spence.

Join us in demanding answers

CTSD – whose membership consists, in part, of hundreds of folks who live and work in these impacted communities – is organizing to demand that their city leaders insist the states follow the law and produce a full and current EIS before even more ground is (prematurely and irreparably) broken for this massive investment of taxpayer dollars.

Over the month of July, CTSD is engaging in a community council blitz to educate local leaders on the project’s scope (some we’ve already spoken with didn’t realize it goes beyond a bridge to include expanding the highway) and request their support for a full environmental impact statement.

CTSD invites anyone who lives, works or cares about any of these communities along the I-75/Brent Spence corridor to join us for their local community council meeting in July or when we present our concerns to the Cincinnati City Council on August 5… when they’re back from vacation.