APPLETON, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – Outagamie County officials believe a stretch of highway in the Fox Cities would become safer and less congested if they get their way.
Monday, the Highway & Solid Waste Committee voted to ask for an expansion.
Over the past five years, there have been about 450 crashes a year on Interstate 41 between Breezewood Lane in Neenah and Highway 441 in Appleton.
Outagamie County Executive Tom Nelson tells FOX 11one way to make that stretch safer is to expand the highway.
“This has been a huge problem for several years. We have been beating the drum, asking for the state to give serious consideration and to expand this.”
Highway Commissioner Dean Steingraber has been leading an effort to have the highway expanded, and now other county leaders are joining in.
Monday morning, the committee voted to write a resolution, asking the state to expand I-41 to six lanes between Highways 15 and 441.
Nelson says the resolution would also ask for more law enforcement resources from the state.
“It is local law enforcement from Little Chute, to Appleton, Grand Chute that is predominant…¦as well as Outagamie County Sheriff’s Department…that are responding to these crashes, and it’s an interstate.”
One big concern the county executive has is that other highway projects, such as those in Racine County near Foxconn, have overshadowed others in the state that he said need more attention.
“Politics is about who pays and who gains, and right now it’s communities like Outagamie County that are paying, while other parts of the state are gaining, and I think, fundamentally, that’s just not right,” Nelson said.
State Rep. Dave Murphy, a Republican from Greenville, who said he has seen how dangerous that stretch of highway I-41 is, said other highway projects in the state, Foxconn included, are just as important, and they all need to be done.
He tells FOX 11 he strongly supports the expansion.
“This system ties into that, and so to keep the economic development going, we need them to come back and do this section through Appleton, and I’m going to make a strong push to get that done. We should bring the same kind of intensity to this project…once we get shovels in the ground, we need to keep it going, and get it done quickly.”
After the resolution is written, the committee is expected to vote on the final wording at its meeting next month.
Once approved, the full county board would then vote on it.
