By Paul Gattis
Huntsville continues to move toward building a new road connector into Redstone Arsenal with the aim of reducing traffic congestion at the base’s main entrance and accommodate growth.
Such a roadway is years away from being finalized, much less being built, but the city council on Thursday took another step toward that new connector by approving a nearly $1 million corridor study to help identify the best route to link I-565 to the arsenal’s Gate 10 on Patton Road.
The study will be conducted by Volkert Inc. for “planning and environmental linkages and corridor study for Arsenal East Connector,” according to the resolution approved by the council. The cost is not to exceed $955,752.
Davis said the federal government will cover 80 percent of the corridor study cost, leaving the city of Huntsville responsible for the final 20 percent – which is $191,850.
“This is a new project and the first step is to get a corridor laid out and go through the environmental documents,” Shane Davis, the city’s urban and economic director, told the council.
Once the corridor study is completed, the project will have almost $4 million invested in both municipal and federal funds. In 2019, the city council approved an engineering study for the connector at a cost of about $2.8 million.
The connector will be 2½ miles in length and the study will identify five possible routes where the connector could be built. It will also address unknowns such as will the connector be a surface road or elevated and how much it will cost to build it.
Prior to the COVID pandemic, arsenal leaders expected a daily workforce approaching 50,000 people. More than 40,000 people worked daily on the arsenal prior to the pandemic.
Even if work habits change in the aftermath of the pandemic, the arsenal is still looking at bringing more people on base. The FBI is expected to eventually have more than 4,000 people working at its sprawling campus that’s now under construction. And U.S. Space Command is expected to be operating from the arsenal by the end of the decade.
It also shifts traffic flow to one of the arsenal’s lesser-used gates, Davis said.
“We need to maximize and utilize the access points onto and off post,” he said.
The larger vision for the connector is for it to be the first segment of a “southern bypass” – providing a rapid link from I-565 to the south end of the city near the Tennessee River, which would reduce traffic on Memorial Parkway.
Davis said the corridor study will take up to 18 months to complete and will include public meetings to solicit feedback from citizens. The study will complete 30 percent of the plans for the connector.
The next steps will be the process of acquiring rights of way and preserving the corridor for construction.
“This is a big step in the right direction,” Davis said.