Wilmington residents recommended ambitious changes for a planned I-95 repair project at a recent community meeting. DelDOT officials say they are not seeking recommendations.
DelDOT plans to start repairs on 19 bridges, 11 on- and off-ramps, as well as surfacing and signage on the Wilmington corridor of I-95 in 2021.
DelDOT’s community engagement for the project consists primarily of a Community Advisory Council made of officials, businesses and community leaders.
Sarah Lester of community development corporation Cornerstone West is on DelDOT’s Community Advisory Council for the project.
She organized the recent community meeting in Wilmington. She says the goal was to help residents find out how construction will affect them— and express ideas for improvement.
“Since we’re a few years out from the start, what can we ask that DelDOT, the city, the federal government does to mitigate those impacts and leave our communities better than when they started?”
Several Wilmington residents said they want DelDOT to ‘cap’ the highway—or put a land bridge over it.
“Now might be the time to correct some of the detrimental unanticipated consequences that running I-95 through the middle of the city did,” said Wilmington resident Jerry Velazquez. “And we could do that by creating partial block-wide covers over I-95. It would also help to knit back the city.”
“This is not a new conversation, the idea that I-95 historically divided our communities,” said Lester the day after the meeting. “How do we think of that connectivity piece?”
But DelDOT engineer Jason Hastings says the idea is far outside of the project’s scope.
“To cap I-95 would be a very large cost and it would be a very intense study and design process, and it would be a project that would be bigger than just DelDOT,” said Hastings.
Some Wilmington resident felt left out of the process.
“We felt like it was kind of already decided. And we really feel like the community needs to have more of a say in what’s happening,” said Fran Livingston at the recent community meeting.
Hastings says for this repair project, DelDOT wants to tell residents about the coming traffic impacts—not gather new ideas.
“Our focus is strictly maintaining what we’ve got,” he said. “So we’re not necessarily seeking input. Now what we are seeking input on is if we have a phase of construction that’s severely going to impact a business or a residential area, we want to know so that if there’s something we can do to mitigate that, we’re going to do it.”
DelDOT says the roughly $200 million project will extend the life of the bridges by at least 30 years.
Some residents at the community meeting worried this means they will not have a chance to ask for changes again for another three decades.
Hastings says this repair project does not preclude more ambitious projects, like capping part of the highway, that could come in the future.
