As rumors swirl about the anticipated deadline for completion of I-69 construction near Bloomington, state and city officials have provided conflicting information, placing Bloomington in what one city official called an “information void.”
While a spokesperson for one state agency said the old deadline of October 2017 remains, Bloomington officials maintained a new delay is in place, as stated in a closed meeting Tuesday by a representative for the project’s lead contractor.
Mayor John Hamilton’s office said a new completion date for interstate project’s fifth section — which stretches from Bloomington to Martinsville — has been set for August 2018, the Herald-Times first reported Tuesday. Mary Catherine Carmichael, the city’s communications director, confirmed the city’s statement in an interview Wednesday with the Indiana Daily Student.
During the meeting — one of a regular series bringing together representatives from the city; the state Department of Transportation; the Indiana Finance Authority; I-69 Developing Partners; and Spanish company Isolux Corsan, which has led the project’s contracting — an Isolux Corsan representative gave a new functional completion date of August 2018.
The project was originally scheduled to be finished last October before being pushed back to summer 2017 and most recently October 2017. That another 10 months may be tacked onto the deadline came as no surprise to the city, Carmichael said.
“It’s a small town. Many of us know each other,” she said. “We had been told that October of 2017 was not a reasonable deadline. Three months ago we started asking, ‘What’s a better deadline?’ People want to know things.”
Miscommunication has been a hallmark of the project since its beginning, she said. She cited an incident last summer when a subcontractor walked off the job because of missed payments.
Stephanie McFarland, the spokesperson for the IFA, both rejected the new delay and denied prior miscommunication. The Isolux Corsan representative in the meeting misspoke, and the new date was shot down during the meeting, she said.
“People in the room corrected that,” she said. “The proper authorities corrected that ... The date is still October 2017.”
Someone gave the mayor’s office bad information, she said, and she believes the miscommunication to be a first-time occurrence.
“I’ve been on the project for a couple of years, and this is the first time we’ve had anything like this,” she said.
Bloomington Transportation and Traffic Engineer Andrew Cibor is one of the city’s two representatives at the I-69 meetings. He was actually in the room when the new deadline was announced, he said.
The announcement did come from an Isolux Corsan representative, he said. The representative said the deadline wasn’t official because contracts are being worked out in conjunction with the delay, but the company is now working toward a functional completion date in August 2018.
Nobody in the room contradicted the representative, Cibor said.
“It was clear that Isolux Corsan was the one making the comment,” he said. “The other people didn’t really react. They didn’t try to correct or change that comment.”
Still, no official public announcement as to whether there is or is not a new deadline has been released.
“We don’t know what to believe,” Carmichael said. “It’s just kind of an information void.”
