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Though work on the Kansas Highway 7/Interstate 70 interchange is expected to begin somewhat out of order, it is finally expected to begin.

And that will be sooner rather than later, said Tim Ross, senior vice president with George Butler Associates during a public meeting and open house Wednesday night in the Bonner Springs High School cafeteria. GBA is the engineering firm that, along with the Kansas Department of Transportation, is responsible for the project design of the interchange.

Currently, he said, funding had been identified not for phase one of the 10-phase project, but only for phase two, during which new bridges along Riverview Avenue and 118th Street will be built over I-70.

According to an information booklet handed out to everyone who showed up to the meeting, construction is expected to begin on phase 2 in 2012, with phase one construction expected to begin sometime after that.

“So instead of building it phase one, two, three, the current thought is (we’ll build in the order of) phase two, one, three,” Ross said. “We’re doing that just for fun, just to make sure everybody’s paying attention.”

Ross said skipping over phase one for now was not to say that first phase, where additional on- and off-ramps will be added around Canaan Center Drive to reduce the ever-present bottleneck in that area, didn’t weigh heavily on the importance scale of the entire project.

“That doesn’t mean we’re not just as interested in building phase one as we’ve always been, because phase one is the real helper to get rid of all that congestion up there at (Canaan Center),” Ross said.

• More of this story, including a public reaction to the project updates, can be found in the Sept. 2 issue of The Chieftain.

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