Traffic will soon flow on first section of new Fremont beltway

Weather permitting, Nebraska Department of Transportation engineers will open up the first section of the new Fremont Southeast Beltway. When it fully opens in July, the 3.2-mile stretch of road will connect U.S. 275 to U.S. 77, which bisects Fremont from north to south. It’s expected to carry 11,000 vehicles per day.

The new road will open up access to a large industrial zone along the city’s southeast border that is anchored by Lincoln Premium Poultry, the large supplier of chicken to Costco stores.

“It’s a great project for Fremont,” said Mayor Joey Spellerberg. “I’m excited to be able to cut the ribbon and open it.”

Spellerberg was still a student at Fremont’s Archbishop Bergan High School in 2006, when city officials first pitched the idea of a southeast beltway to NDOT and the State Legislature.

It took a full decade for the beltway to win funding in the second round of Build Nebraska Act expressway projects, first funded in 2011 with a ¼-cent surcharge in the state sales tax. Transportation planners scheduled the project for construction in 2024, with local city and county officials required to come up with $20 million of the projected $43 million cost of the project.

The beltway got fast-tracked in 2018, after Costco decided to locate its large chicken plant along the route. The $450 million campus was slated to employ 800 workers and process about 100 million chickens a year, enough to supply about one-third of Costco’s demand for fresh and roasted chicken.

“It’s been in the books for awhile as a ‘wish-we-had’ sort of thing,” Barbara Gerbino-Bevins, NDOT’s district traffic engineer, said of the project. “I believe the construction of the chicken plant pushed it over the line.”

The cost also jumped, to more than $60 million, including an additional local match of $10 million on top of $20 million already raised locally. The City of Fremont, Dodge County and several local businesses chipped in to keep the project on track, Spellerberg said. Construction began in 2020.

“It was a public-private partnership to get to this point,” he said.

For the city, a major goal was to move truck traffic off of Broad Street, Fremont’s main north-south thoroughfare running through the heart of its commercial district. Within the city limits, it also is designated as U.S. 77.

That designation will now move to the new beltway, and the city will take over control and maintenance of one of its major avenues.

“We’ll be able to go into Broad Street and make a lot of improvements,” Spellerberg said.

The beltway will have no traffic lights, but it will have two circular roundabouts at Downing Street and Main Street near the Platte River bridge, as well as “teardrop” roundabouts at U.S. 275.

It is the eastern half of the beltway — from U.S. 275 to Downing — that will open Friday. The opening was delayed from last week to avoid a conflict with a series of lane and ramp closures along U.S. 275 in Fremont, Gerbino-Bevins said.

The middle section will open next, and the western tie-in with U.S. 77 last. The formal ribbon-cutting is scheduled for July 6.

For Spellerberg, the opening can’t happen quickly enough. It dovetails with the announcement in February that 1,500 acres along the route was designated as the state’s first Inland Port Authority because of its proximity to transportation networks.

“It’s going to be a hub for industrial development,” Spellerberg said. “The infrastructure around our area is a huge plus. Fremont’s becoming a desirable place to locate.”