CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Cleveland's new Inner Belt Bridges, first the westbound span, and now its eastbound sister under construction, held title to being the most expensive projects ever undertaken by the Ohio Department of Transportation until this spring.

With orange barrel season underway, ODOT has embarked on something even bigger -- a $429 million, 16-mile bypass that will wind through the sparsely populated Appalachian foothills of Scioto County.

The Portsmouth Bypass is not only ODOT's all-time mega-project. It's also the agency's first-ever public-private partnership. P3s have private companies --- in Scioto County a consortium called the Portsmouth Gateway Group -- build and pay for transportation projects, with the state repaying them over time.

Despite its pioneering possibility, the Portsmouth Bypass got a tepid review when ODOT's influential Transportation Review Advisory Council was deciding whether it should be funded. TRAC members rated the bypass lower than any proposals across Ohio in 2011 and 2012 except for another bypass, in next-door Lawrence County, and interchanges in Licking and Fairfield counties.

Nonetheless, ODOT says the Portsmouth Bypass will not only shave travel time and ease congestion in Portsmouth, it also will fan economic development in a struggling part of Ohio where the unemployment rate is almost 9 percent.

The U.S. Department of Transportation announced a $209.3 million Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act loan for the highway last week. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said the construction "will benefit the entire community by reducing the number of trucks in the city and opening up the area for economic development."

ODOT spokesman Steve Faulker explained that TRAC scores for the bypass and other state road projects are but one factor the agency weighs in choosing major infrastructure investments.

Here's a look at some of the other variables and how they shake out for the bypass and for the three biggest ODOT projects in Northeast Ohio -- the Inner Belt Bridges, Opportunity Corridor and the overhaul of the West Shoreway.

The Portsmouth Bypass will relieve a traffic bottleneck by routing cars and semitrucks around the city, allowing drivers to avoid 26 miles of Ohio 23 and 52 and a series of stoplights, saving about 16 minutes of travel time, ODOT said.

Yet some fear the loop around Portsmouth, population 20,300, could have a drawback: Hurting local businesses because drivers won't stop and buy gas or food in the city.

Others question investing hundreds of millions in new highways at a time when population growth in Ohio is flat.

Northeast Ohio transportation leaders have pushed ODOT to devote more money to fixing potholed roads and crumbling bridges. The chief of the metropolitan planning organization in Cleveland, Grace Gallucci, declined comment on the Portsmouth Bypass, but said she would like to see Ohio law changed to allow TRAC dollars to be used for road maintenance. Her counterpart in Akron, Jason Segedy, also supports a fix-it first approach.

ODOT stresses the Scioto County highway isn't only about travel. It will make large tracts of land on the outskirts of Portsmouth available to development, ODOT said. However, agency officials said they didn't have projections or an analysis on what the business growth might be. The highway itself is expected to create 400 to 500 temporary construction jobs and a small number of permanent jobs from its developers during the 35 years they operate the road.

An aerial view of the planned Portsmouth Bypass, which will avoid about 26 miles of highway and a series of stoplights in Portsmouth by swinging around the city on a 16-mile divided highway. The bypass will cost more than any other project in the history of the Ohio Department of Transportation.

For Scioto County, where nearly one in four residents lives below the poverty level, residents say the potential for business growth outside town is tantalizing but unclear.

"I live in that county, so I would like to know myself," said Kim Reynolds, who works in nearby Pike County as the planning and development director for the 12-county Ohio Valley Regional Development Commission.

John Lintz, a Scioto County program administrator, said a highway running past "400 acres of field" holds tremendous hope. "My personal opinion is it's going to be very positive. It's going to open up new areas."

Innovative way to pay



Governor John Kasich says public-private partnerships, or P3s, will speed up highway and bridge work that otherwise would be delayed for years because of insufficient government funding.

Portsmouth Gateway will build the Scioto bypass and ODOT will pay for it over the life of a 35-year contract. ODOT likened the arrangement to buying a house with a mortgage and gradually repaying the lender.

The total tab to taxpayers for the bypass isn't pinned down yet. ODOT awarded the prime contract but hasn't finalized financing.

Besides the loan from the U.S. Department of Transportation, the project has $81.5 million from the Appalachian Regional Commission, an initiative launched in 1963 by President John F. Kennedy to help bring federal dollars to Appalachia. A main goal has been adding roads in a region that missed out on connections to interstate highways because of the cost of building in its rugged terrain.

The bypass will complete the missing Ohio link of the Appalachian Development Highway System, which runs from Mississippi to New York, ODOT says.

TRAC scores for the project -- a certain number of points out of a possible 100 -- were just one element the state considered in pushing the Portsmouth Bypass forward after years of planning, ODOT's Faulkner said. The nine-member TRAC, chaired by ODOT Director Jerry Wray, identifies the most deficient parts of Ohio's highway system so that public dollars go to the areas with the most need and generate the greatest possible return.

Faulkner said ODOT also decides on major road projects by factoring in rankings by local metropolitan planning organizations (the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency in our region); and information presented at public hearings by local "sponsors" (such as district offices of ODOT) that can't be shoehorned into the TRAC scoring formula.

The bypass is scheduled to be done in four years, decades earlier than it would have been without creative financing, ODOT says.

The agency had planned to use a public-private partnership in Cleveland to pay for demolishing the old Inner Belt Bridge over the Cuyahoga River and building a new bridge when it looked like a lack of funding would delay completing the eastbound partner to the westbound span until 2019.

But another novel funding change promoted by Kasich -- using money raised from bonds against future Ohio Turnpike toll collections -- paid for the eastbound bridge.

That made Ohio's flagship P3 project the Portsmouth Bypass.