Ketchum is vying for a $3.33 million grant to fund an expansion of state Highway 75 to three lanes from River Street to Serenade Lane.
If the city is awarded the grant, City Engineer Steven Yearsley said, it would extend two lanes south with one running north. After Serenade Lane, those two southbound lanes would merge, as they currently do at River Street but a half mile farther south. He said the intent is to push rush-hour traffic out of town in the afternoons because traffic "funnels into a bottleneck" at the River Street intersection.
"We'd be pushing that bottleneck farther south out of town," he said.
Yearsley said the problem doesn't seem to persist in the mornings when workers drive into town from the south. The Trail Creek Bridge would also be expanded into three lanes. Yearsley said the project wouldn't require any land purchases.
The grant comes from the Idaho Transportation Department and is part of a federal aid incentive program designed for local highway jurisdictions. It requires the city to pay a match of $244,642. But, Yearsley said, applying for the grant at this time doesn't bind the city to pay that amount. He said the city would have the choice of moving forward if it is selected. And that should be by June or July.
City Administrator Gary Marks said the city should do all it can to win the grant.
"If the state and feds are willing to give $3 million to solve our problem on Main Street, we should stand on our heads to find a way," Marks said to the City Council at Tuesday's meeting, when the council unanimously voted in favor of applying for the grant.
South of the project, Highway 75 would remain as two lanes until reaching the Elkhorn Road intersection, where it opens to four lanes. But that bottleneck should also be expanded sometime in the future under ITD's plan to widen Highway 75 along a 27-mile stretch from Timmerman Junction south of Bellevue to Saddle Road in northern Ketchum. The project includes the half-mile section targeted by the grant, but Yearsley pointed out that ITD doesn't yet have funding for the bigger project.
That project has been in the planning stages for about 10 years. ITD is hesitant to say when the entire project might be finished because only about $29 million of the estimated $250 million needed for completion has been secured.
Most of that money is slated for expanding 3.25 miles of the highway to four lanes between Timber Way, north of East Fork Road, to the Big Wood River Bridge near St. Luke's Wood River Medical Center.
This grant would enable Ketchum to take a small portion of the project into its own hands.
Trevon Milliard: tmilliard@mtexpress.com
Ketchum traffic traveling south on Highway 75 must merge from two lanes to one at the River Street intersection, often causing an afternoon bottleneck like this one. Photo by Mountain Express
