Contentious Boston Road interchange mandate repealed; residents rejoice, traffic plan moves ahead
COLUMBUS, Ohio (WJW) — With enactment of the state's new transportation budget, a contentious proposal to build a new interchange between Brunswick and Strongsville appears to have stalled out.
Gov. Mike DeWine on Monday signed into law House Bill 54, the state's two-year transportation budget. It repealed a provision in the state's last biennial transportation budget specifically designed to bring a new interchange to Interstate 71, between exits 225 and 231, intended to relieve traffic congestion in the area.
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State Sen. Tom Patton, R-Strongsville, who's been working on the new interchange plan for years — and installed it in the last transportation budget bill in 2022 — said he was 'disappointed and confused' by its reversal.
But across the Medina County line, residents rejoiced. The plan would have razed dozens of occupied homes in Brunswick's Boston Road area through eminent domain, turning a 'dense' residential area into a commercial corridor, said Nicholas Hanek, Brunswick City Council president.
He said he thinks it was the dogged opposition from hundreds of residents, including a grassroots group that appeared at city council meetings in both Brunswick and Strongsville and testified before the legislature, that 'turned of the tide' toward the plan's undoing.
'There were people who got to sleep last night and not be afraid of losing their home for the first time in two years,' Hanek said.
'This is a really remarkable thing to have happened. … This is a situation where government worked.'
The interstate's six-mile span between Brunswick and Strongsville is the largest distance in the entire interstate system between two urban areas, Patton told FOX 8 News in 2023. The congestion sometimes causes I-71 to back up to the turnpike exit.
The interstate's state Route 82 ramp also has one of the highest accident rates in the region, Patton said. The project would have been partially funded with state highway safety money. After several years in the works, it was added to the transportation budget in order to expedite it, he said.
But were it to have gone ahead, Brunswick would have been on the hook for widening the area around Boston Road to six lanes — which would have disturbed a jet fuel pipeline running along the roadway — and the safety of what would essentially be a new commercial area in the city, Hanek said.
He said the interchange plan wouldn't have solved traffic congestion on state Route 82 — since the proposed interchange was too far south — and may have actually caused more slowdowns on I-71.
It also wouldn't have covered Brunswick's costs.
'By all accounts, and even a conservative financial projection, it would have ruined the entire budget of the city of Brunswick,' he said.
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The latest state transportation budget instead mandates a traffic study in that same area — along I-71, bounded by U.S. Route 42 to the north and west, state Route 303 to the south and West 130th Street to the east — to find ways to make traffic smoother.
That study started in 2024 and must be completed by the end of 2026, under the new law.
Patton said the traffic congestion isn't exclusive to Brunswick. Since the interchange plan's defeat, more complaints to his office have come from residents of Brunswick than Strongsville, he said.
He said he now plans to shift his focus to other issues in his district.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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