(Arnolds Park)– A reminder: a detour for through traffic on Highway 71 through the Iowa Great Lakes Corridor goes into effect today (Mon.), weather permitting. The detour will utilize Iowa Highways 9 and 86. Officials emphasize that access will still be available to businesses along the corridor. Dakun Schultz, a Transportation Planner with the Iowa Department of Transportation’s District 3 office in Sioux City, says the detour is the result of consultations they had with the cities of Arnolds Park and Okoboji…
“We talked about detouring traffic, moving one lane over to 9, 86; we talked about would you like it if we closed and run traffic around; how would you like to do it and they each had their own approach and we tried to work with that as best we could. We also looked at trying to make a good project for a contractor as well. Because it doesn’t work if you, you could put all the restrictions you want on a project and a contractor may or may not bid on it. We let this project in the spring of last year and we had one bid so we had to turn around and work with the communities a little bit, look at some staging issues, take a look at the comments we received, and had to re-tool a little bit. Still meeting the character of what the cities wanted and providing something that contractors thought they could assemble as a good project.”
The detour will remain in place until May 25th, when the first phase of construction is suspended for the summer season. The work will then resume this fall.
