"The City of Wichita is beginning work this year on the next phase of the freeway, which will make travel in West Wichita safer and faster for tens of thousands of people everyday. The project will extend the Kellogg Freeway through Tyler and Maize Roads. When it is finished, that stretch of Kellogg will be six lanes and there will be full interchanges at both Tyler and Maize Roads. Motorists will no longer face long delays and dangerous traffic jams.

The West Kellogg Project is estimated to cost $81 million. We are confident and fully anticipate the State of Kansas to be a major partner in the project, contributing $61 million toward the construction. The City of Wichita will contribute $10 million and, in a very exciting cooperative effort, Sedgwick County Commissioners are agreeing to contribute $10 million toward the freeway construction.

This project is an example of teamwork and cooperation between City, County and State officials which will benefit the more than 30 million motorists a year who travel through those two intersections. In my book, this is the way things should work: government at all levels coming together and making good things happen for the people we represent.

This year we will begin purchasing right-of-way and moving utilities. Construction on freeway and interchanges will begin in the Fall of 2001 and we expect the entire project to be finished and ready for motorists in the Fall of 2004.

This news by itself would be important enough for a news conference, but there is more. Progress is also being made on the Kellogg Freeway in East Wichita.

The road is almost clear for continued construction on the freeway from near Edgemoor to almost Rock Road. This project will continue Kellogg as a six-lane controlled access freeway with a grade separation at Edgemoor and a full interchange at Woodlawn.

This long-awaited portion of the freeway construction will benefit nearly 40 million motorists a year who drive the section of East Kellogg from Edgemoor to Governour. That number sounds almost unbelievable, (unless of course you’ve been stuck in a traffic jam out there, which most of us have), but it breaks down to almost 107 thousand cars a day passing through the intersections of Kellogg and Edgemoor and Kellogg and Woodlawn.

The cost of this project is estimated to be $60 million and we again anticipate the State of Kansas will be a major partner, paying for a just over half the total cost. The City of Wichita will pay the remaining cost, about $29 million, from local sales tax dollars. The City Council will discuss and decide on specific design alternatives next Tuesday so final design drawings can be finalized.

Getting to this point has not been easy. But projects like this are never easy because the very nature of them disrupts people’s lives. First, we had to ask parishioners at Church of the Magdelen to move. We had to make sure they were treated fairly. We accomplished that goal last spring.

Second, we had to work very closely with the automobile dealers located along Kellogg to come up with design concepts which would allow the freeway to work without shutting off access to the dealerships. We have accomplished this goal.

The final step, and we are almost there, is working out an agreement with our neighbors in Eastborough for the right-of-way needed on the north side of Kellogg. These negotiations have been intense and long, but are coming to a productive end. Representatives for the City of Eastborough are supportive of the Kellogg Freeway Project and are working in a spirit of cooperation with the City of Wichita to reach an agreement which will allow the Freeway construction to continue. The details of the agreement are being finalized and I am confident they will be discussed and approved by the Eastborough City Council soon.

I know the Eastborough City Council and the citizens of Eastborough want to be good neighbors and help us get this phase of the Kellogg Freeway Project moving. After all, they drive Kellogg too. And we want to be good neighbors by making sure the residents and the City of Eastborough are treated fairly. We want to soften the impact of this project as much as we possibly can. I believe we have and I will anxiously await word of the Eastborough City Council’s consent and agreement in the next couple of weeks.

Fifteen years ago, the citizens of Wichita and Sedgwick County voted to pay a one-cent local sales tax to help fund major highway and road projects such as the Kellogg Freeway. That civic-minded decision gave the greenlight for work on Kellogg to proceed. When you include the cost of the two phases we are announcing today, the cost of the Kellogg Freeway will total $320 million. Finishing the entire freeway will probably cost an additional $300 million. That’s more than a half billion dollars worth of freeway. Wichita residents have paid the lion’s share of that...totaling nearly 70%...out of local sales tax dollars. That is a massive local commitment for any city.

And I pledge the City of Wichita will work tirelessly to complete these projects. We are pushing as fast and as hard as we can to finish this monumental community project."