July 20, 2011
By DAVE CALDWELL - Staff Writer (dcaldwell@minotdailynews.com) , Minot Daily News
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Ward County Highway Engineer Dana Larsen went to Tuesday morning's regularly scheduled meeting of the Ward County Board of Commissioners expecting to get the signature of board chair Jerome Gruenberg on contracts to officially begin construction of the multimillion-dollar Northeast Bypass and 55th Street Overpass project.
Instead, he discovered that on the eve of a project that shows promise of finally having a feel-good story for area infrastructure on the heels of flooding destruction, the entire project has spiraled headlong into the muck of doubt.
In the course of a not-so-unusual court filing to attempt to gain what the landowner considers a fair price for his land as the government purchases right-of-way to make space for construction of the overpass and bypass projects, Gregory Baumgarten, who owns the Trading Post, a used auto parts retailer, also filed a request for the court to grant an injunction prohibiting any further action on the project while matters are pending.
Compounding problems is the fact that the project survived by the skin of its teeth on at least one previous occasion when its $14.2 million federal TIGER II grant funding was threatened by federal spending cutbacks because it had not yet made enough progress.
Due to the flooding situation in the area, a 30-day extension was granted to relax a June 20 deadline, meaning that today, on July 20, those funds could be very much in peril once again. Without those federal dollars - especially considering massive flooding damage amounts facing local and state resources - the project will likely die.
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