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The CEO of Kosciusko County’s largest employer, a cornerstone of northeastern Indiana’s orthopedics industry, said the company can’t make a long-term commitment to stay in the region if U.S. 30 isn’t improved.
“I’ll be meeting with the governor again. We won’t be talking about taxes. We won’t be talking about regulatory changes. We’re not going to be talking about anything other than U.S. 30,” Zimmer Biomet CEO Ivan Tornos said Wednesday. “We want to be in Warsaw, Indiana, for the next 100 years, but we cannot make the commitment to be here long term if we don’t resolve this.”
Tornos’ comments came during the U.S. 30 Summit in Warsaw, an event designed to discuss the safety and economic implications of not modernizing the 155-mile stretch of U.S. 30 between Fort Wayne and Valparaiso.
The gathering was organized by U.S. 30 Coalition, an advocacy group that has been pushing since 2013 to upgrade U.S. 30 to a freeway from Valparaiso to the Ohio line.
Tornos, whose company employs 20,000 employees in the region and does business in 125 countries worldwide, wasn’t the only business leader sounding the economic alarm for the region if it doesn’t win access to better transportation.
Chris Graham, vice president at Fort Wayne-based Steel Dynamics revealed that his company recently passed Indiana over for additional investment and expansion because of the road infrastructure.
“Steel Dynamics recently committed almost $3 billion to a facility in Columbus, Mississippi, for an aluminum plant,” Graham said. “We did not consider this area. We look at infrastructure. We look at transportation. We look at power. Safety is hugely important. We have at least two [employees] who have been in life altering accidents, where they were in a wheelchair for a couple of years, at County Road 800 and U.S. 30.”
Graham added that Steel Dynamics supports turning U.S. 30 into a freeway because the benefits outweigh the cost tremendously.
“Steel Dynamics isn’t going to be able to invest much more here until we get some things right,” Graham said.
Bill Konyha, president of the Regional Chamber of Northeast Indiana, said upgrading U.S. 30 is crucial to the region’s economic future.
“Our businesses have a supply chain extending throughout Indiana into Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, and U.S. 30 is critical to the success of our supply chain,” Konyha said. “It is critical even for agriculture. It’s critical for our workforce, and it’s essential to the delivery system.”
Bill Konyha talked about the importance of improving the infrastructure on U.S. 30 for area businesses.
Prompted largely by prodding from the U.S. 30 Coalition, the Indiana Department of Transportation launched its Planning and Environment Linkages studies, known as ProPEL U.S. 30 and ProPEL U.S. 31, in 2022 to evaluate the transportation needs of those corridors.
The next phase of the studies will include evaluating segments of the U.S. 30 corridor and designing possible alternatives.
Konyha said improvements on the U.S. 30 corridor should be a priority for state government because northeast Indiana employs almost 400,000 people in the manufacturing industry, generating $8.5 billion in wages and over $260 million in state income taxes each year.
“I ran an agency for the state of Indiana and we hop to the orders of the executive branch,” Konyha said. “Unless the executive branch identifies something as a priority, it will linger forever as a non-priority or a priority only in the minds of those who think it’s a priority.”
At the summit, elected officials and business leaders also recounted personal experiences of knowing someone whose life had been tragically affected by accidents on U.S. 30.
Studies have shown that improving U.S. 30 would reduce accidents by 323 per year and save 18,000 hours of delay per day.
“U.S. 30 is the main conduit our employees travel daily,” Tornos said. “We put their lives at risk. We’ve got to get this resolved.”
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US 30 carries about 16,000 cars west of Warsaw and between 20-25,000 east of there. While it may makes sense to build interchanges at select points on that route, I don’t think is justifies being upgraded to a freeway.
For comparison, US 37 carries 40,000 cars per day north of 146th St. Keystone Ave in Carmel carries over 60,000 cars just north of 96th St. Rockville Rd. carries 30-40,000 people per day. 146th St. carries 30,000 per day at Hazeldell. US 31 carries a bit over 30,000 per day at 236th St.
Hamilton County local governments have been forced to pay a major share of upgrading Keystone and SR 37 to freeways – and this for much heavier traveled routes. I estimate that converting Keystone Ave in Carmel to a freeway cost about $175-180 million total, of which the state only paid $90 million – half the price. Local governments are also shouldering a large of the burden on SR 37.
Given what the state forced local governments to chip in on much more heavily traveled routes, how much will the local governments along US 30 be expected to pay towards the cost of this proposed upgrade?