Your Voice: Reader raises concerns over proposed truck stop

By Jim Newman

Recent devel­op­ments in Winchester have served to improve our com­mu­ni­ty, with more occu­pied store­fronts down­town, new restau­rants and shops, and an excit­ing con­struc­tion project to make the “high side” more acces­si­ble and attrac­tive. This all serves to help us enjoy our quaint and attrac­tive home­town. Great job!

In the mean­time, a new devel­op­ment planned for the north side of town threat­ens many of us. Just north of the inter­sec­tion of I‑64 and KY-627, a major devel­op­ment — a large truck stop — has been pro­posed. To bet­ter under­stand the poten­tial impact, one must vis­it the Love’s Truck Stop at the inter­sec­tion of I‑75 and KY-627 near Richmond. The traf­fic there has been sig­nif­i­cant, and mil­lions of dol­lars have been spent try­ing to make the traf­fic flow work for trucks & cars exit­ing or enter­ing I‑75. On my last dri­ve, the con­struc­tion con­tin­ues, and there’s no end in sight. Note that the Love’s Truck Stop has around 50 truck park­ing slots. The truck stop planned for Winchester would have approx­i­mate­ly 160 park­ing slots.

This new planned facil­i­ty is at a point where KY-627 nar­rows from four lanes to two lanes, and is very close to the entry point to the Industrial Park, where traf­fic is already intense at rush hour, and where a major fire & res­cue sta­tion is locat­ed. Of course, things can change, but the cur­rent plan is most con­cern­ing for the fol­low­ing shortcomings:

• There are no turn lanes for truck entry, and there isn’t room.
• No traf­fic impact study has been done, which many think is or should be a require­ment for a devel­op­ment of this type.
• No study has been done of noise or light pol­lu­tion (24 hours per day), poten­tial envi­ron­men­tal pol­lu­tion (lots of gaso­line, oil, diesel, propane) along a water con­ser­van­cy area.
• No obvi­ous steps are planned to shield or absorb noise from such a sig­nif­i­cant activity.
• There is no real way to even eval­u­ate the poten­tial impact of crime, drugs, or traf­fick­ing, all of which are said to fol­low large truck stops.
• There is no hard data con­cern­ing the impact on home val­ues. There are three neigh­bor­hoods with­in the noise radius of this site, con­tain­ing some 200 homes, and some stud­ies indi­cate that val­ues drop between 5% and 15% in neigh­bor­hoods with­in 1.5 miles of a large truck stop.

The pro­posed devel­op­er request­ed a zon­ing change from A‑1 (Agriculture) to PD (planned devel­op­ment), and attached a plan for the antic­i­pat­ed truck stop. At the Fiscal Court meet­ing last week, all Magistrates vot­ed at the first read­ing to make this zon­ing change except one (Steve Craycraft, who took time to inves­ti­gate and dis­cuss con­cerns with neighbors). 

Rationale for approval cen­tered around the fol­low­ing viewpoints:

• The coun­ty needs the tax income. This is cer­tain­ly a valid point.
• Planning & Zoning can­not tell prop­er­ty own­ers how to use their prop­er­ty. Isn’t that pre­cise­ly what Planning & Zoning is usu­al­ly cre­at­ed for?
• We can’t tell the small farmer and his fam­i­ly that they can­not sell for this rea­son. Certainly, a prop­er­ty own­er can sell to whomev­er, when­ev­er; that doesn’t relieve Planning & Zoning from address­ing usage and zoning.
• When this area began devel­op­ing in 1997, we knew we’d even­tu­al­ly have a high­way stop and would have to rezone the prop­er­ty. And you didn’t think that plan might need mod­i­fi­ca­tion 28 years later?

Why should you care if you don’t live in this area? I sub­mit that you should care for sev­er­al reasons:

• If you dri­ve in this area, you’ll expe­ri­ence the traf­fic, which might even extend back onto the interstate.
• If there hap­pens to be a long line of trucks dur­ing an emer­gency, traf­fic could impact fire and emer­gency response time. One of our major response sta­tions is at the clos­est inter­sec­tion to this truck stop.
• If you pay prop­er­ty or oth­er tax­es in Winchester or Clark County, you might expect to con­tribute when the high­way infra­struc­ture has to be mod­i­fied sig­nif­i­cant­ly. Reworking that inter­sec­tion would like­ly cost mil­lions of dollars.
• There are planned bonds & oth­er finan­cial incen­tives used for the devel­op­ment; cit­i­zens will end up pay­ing part of the devel­op­ment cost for this project.
• If you have tak­en solace all these years that a view or an emp­ty lot near your home is “safe” because it’s zoned a cer­tain way, you might want to rethink that feel­ing of safe­ty. Yes, your home may be your most sig­nif­i­cant asset, but some­one may have an inter­est in con­vert­ing that near­by lot into some­thing that you won’t like for an instant prof­it. You could go to sleep one day and wake up with a major prob­lem the next day. What would you do then?
• Most like­ly, folks weren’t think­ing of this type issue when cre­at­ing zon­ing reg­u­la­tions years ago; shouldn’t our cur­rent zon­ing reg­u­la­tions and ordi­nances rec­og­nize and address these type issues?

Really, folks, is this how we pre­fer Winchester to grow? I’m dis­ap­point­ed that our offi­cials and plan­ners think this is acceptable.