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Indianapolis Star  John McCall and his wife Anna held a portrait of his father and grandmother as they stood on their farm. The planned I-69 extension would cut the farm in half.

INDIANAPOLIS — The route approved recently for the Interstate 69 extension is the same one that has been backed for years by a nonprofit group that received more than $150,000 in taxpayer money.

Opponents of the route, which will connect Indianapolis and Evansville, think the situation shows officials had, in essence, already chosen the route that cuts through farmland and undeveloped property.

"To me it shows this whole process was rigged," said Andy Knott, air and energy policy director of the Hoosier Environmental Council. "I think we have to go back and look at how can this process be objective, when the same government doing the study is giving taxpayer money to lobbyists who are pushing for this route. It can't be an objective study."

James Newland, longtime friend of the late Gov. Frank O'Bannon and executive director of the I-69 Mid-Continent Highway Coalition, said receiving tax dollars does not show the choice of a route was preordained. The state and local officials involved in sending him the money agree.

"We did get some funding from the Department of Commerce during those years," Newland said. "I saw nothing wrong with that. I solicited their help in trying to get this done. It was for the route that would finally be decided by the state."

The I-69 Mid-Continent Highway Coalition was incorporated in 1993 after a meeting between a handful of transportation heavyweights representing seven states, from Indiana to Texas. I-69 eventually will pass through each of those states, stretching from Canada to Mexico.

As early as 1999, Newland wrote editorial pieces advocating the "straight-line" route, the same route eventually chosen by O'Bannon and approved by federal regulators.

"We felt it was proper as citizens of this state to express our opinion on where it ought to go, and we did," Newland said. "We're taxpayers, too, you know."

Newland and O'Bannon shared a similar vision for I-69.

"I met with Frank shortly before he died," Newland said. "He told me then, `Look, this road simply has to serve Bloomington. It has to serve the Crane naval base and on down to Evansville.'"

From 1996 to 2001, the coalition received $97,000 in grants — taxpayer money — from the Indiana Department of Commerce.

In addition, from 2000 to 2003, the city of Indianapolis paid the coalition a total of $60,000 to inform city officials of the latest developments concerning I-69.

Tim Monger, executive director of the Department of Commerce, defends the funding, saying that what began as an initiative to study an I-69 extension naturally evolved into a tighter focus.

"When you look at the time the coalition came to the Department of Commerce, it was a multistate initiative simply advocating and pushing for the establishment of I-69, period," he said. "As time goes by, you have to narrow the focus down to a specific location. Otherwise, it would probably never get built.

"I really think of (the coalition) as a grass-roots coalition. Having been involved in economic development over the years, one thing you want to do is have grass-roots involvement to let the legislators know what the preference is."

Knott would disagree.

"Not with our tax dollars," he said. "That's the scandal in this thing — that our money went to someone who was advocating one side of this thing."

That distinction isn't lost on 80-year-old John McCall. Since 1867, his family has farmed in Daviess County.

And now his 440-acre farm will be sliced in half by I-69.

"I'm all for progress," McCall said, "but the way (the state) is going about this stinks. They have a very high-handed attitude that the people down in southwest Indiana are a bunch of peons that hardly know how to make their way to the bathroom."

Newland insists his coalition took an objective approach.

"We supported the studies that were made that determined this," he said. "If the studies that had been made had recommended another route, then we would have supported that.

"Every study that I have seen tells me the same thing — this is the route that must be taken to solve Indiana's transportation problem."

One of those alternate routes was to use Interstate 70 and U.S. 41, a choice touted by the Terre Haute Chamber of Commerce because it would take the highway through Terre Haute.

But in the mid-1990s, after meeting with Newland, the chamber was dissuaded from seeking funding from the Department of Commerce to advocate the I-70 route.

Rod Henry, president of Terre Haute's chamber, said funding was not possible because the chamber was advocating a particular route.

"Mr. Newland was very much in the opinion that there was only one route," Henry said. "Basically, he said the coalition was only looking at one route and advocating one route.

"The route was ordained years and years ago."

What the coalition has to show for the money also is in question.

The coalition's grant agreement with the state stipulated that it was required to submit a quarterly progress report. A public records search revealed one report was an environmental study performed by HNTB Corp., an architectural and engineering firm.

Also in the public documents was a letter sent to the U.S. Department of Transportation and a speech given to the coalition board of directors by its congressional consultant — all labeled as quarterly reports.

"It costs money to operate a coalition," Newland said. "There's travel, studies, all the other work."

The city also signed a similar agreement with the coalition.

"We presume all the agreements we enter into are worthwhile or we would terminate them at some point," said Jim Garrard, director of the city's Department of Public Works. "We got benefit out of it, or we wouldn't have kept the contract."

Garrard said the department received "a stack of materials" from the coalition, but that it never advocated one route.

But public documents show the coalition provided only its own newsletters and clippings from area newspapers.

J. Bryan Nicol, commissioner of the Indiana Department of Transportation, said equal weight has been given to both sides of the issue.

The coalition's comment "was given equal weight with every other comment we received. We did not give any one comment preference over any other."

As the opinions continue, the approach toward building I-69 long will be the subject of debate.

"From the days of the Founding Fathers, there's been a question of whether citizens should be compelled to furnish funds for causes they disagree with," said Pete Sepp, spokesman for the National Taxpayers Union, a nonpartisan citizens group. "Unfortunately, the answer seems to be, `Well, grin and bear it and get out your wallet.'"

If you came here from the CARR website, our URL is: http://www.i69tour.org/

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