State ready to go to bid with East Sunshine Street median project

A project intended to improve safety on East Sunshine Street – in part by constructing medians that will limit left turns – is scheduled to go out for bid in August, despite objections by business owners along the route.

The intention to move ahead on the project was confirmed by a spokesperson for the Missouri Department of Transportation in an email to Springfield Business Journal on June 9.

In a December 2025 Springfield City Council meeting, Mayor Jeff Schrag clarified that council has no direct role in the decision of whether to complete the project.

“MoDOT has asked us for a gut-check,” he said at the time. “They don’t need our permission.”

In advance of a June 3 meeting of the Missouri Highways and Transportation Commission, Springfield City Manager David Cameron wrote a letter to commissioners to offer that gut-check, expressing a desire for the project to move forward.

“I provided a letter of support,” Cameron said in an interview with SBJ.

Cameron said he conferred with staff and examined all feedback, and with that information in mind, he encouraged the state to move the project forward. He said he shared the letter with staff, the mayor and City Council, and he heard no opposition.

The original plan proposed by MoDOT in 2022 would have installed 8-inch raised medians on much of the route extending from Blackman Road, just east of U.S. Route 65, west to Glenstone Avenue. The medians restrict the ability of drivers to make left turns, cutting off access to some businesses on the route for people traveling on the opposite side of the street. The revised plan includes the medians in only four locations, totaling 3/4 of a mile or 18% of the corridor, according to past SBJ reporting.

Cameron said he copied Sunshine Street business owners on the letter of support he wrote to MHTC, and as a result, many who opposed the project turned out to provide public comment to the MHTC. The item was not on the agenda of the meeting, which was held in Springfield for the body that rotates among Missouri cities to conduct business.

“We wanted to demonstrate – we believe in it, and we’re asking you to proceed,” Cameron said.

Safety and capacity
During the meeting, city officials, business leaders and other stakeholders went on the record with their views in comments to the Missouri Highways and Transportation Commission, which has the authority to make the final call about the proposed medians and other changes to the state-owned section of the route.

Matt Morrow, president and CEO of the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce, said MoDOT had taken a thoughtful approach to the proposal, and he stressed the importance of safety and capacity for the corridor.

“Having a safe corridor on East Sunshine and being able to do the investments necessary to keep it safe and build capacity so that more traffic can be on that passageway is good for business, and we want to see that happen as well,” he said. 

During the meeting, Cameron also voiced his support as he repeated points he made in his letter.

He said that during in the last three years as the plan has been evaluated, serious crashes and fatalities in the corridor have doubled.

“This is a material opportunity and situation that from a public safety and transportation perspective that we have to take very seriously,” he said.

He also highlighted similar changes planned for the section of Sunshine Street owned by the city of Springfield. That corridor extends from Glenstone Avenue on the east to Kansas Expressway on the west and has had four fatalities and over 1,000 accidents in the past four years. In comparison, he noted the East Sunshine portion averages 130 accidents per year.

“This is not one isolated end of a street,” he said. “This is something that’s got to go all the way through, even to the city of Republic.”

Community input provided in public meetings showed overwhelming support for medians with streetscapes in the city-owned portion, Cameron said.

In an interview, Cameron said the corridor has a crash rate 2.5 times higher than the city average.

“It’s very important to understand, it’s not getting better, and the time to act is now,” he said.

While Cameron said he understands the concerns expressed by the business community, for him, the issue comes down to safety.

“This is what I believe is in the best interest of public health and safety,” he said.

Business view
Tom Fowler III, senior vice president of State Bank of Southwest Missouri at 3310 E. Sunshine St., said two of the four areas targeted in the project have dangers related to line of sight, and those will not be fixed by medians.

He listed a number of businesses all along the route, from Walmart to Wendy’s to Rapid Robert’s, that object to the changes.

“These are your average people – your people that use it, that work there and use it day in and day out. They’re not your engineers and people that decide all of this,” Fowler said. “Ninety-four businesses have said no, and that’s in that short little area.”

He requested that MoDOT back off on doing the median, noting that improvements that have already been made and technology to come may do the job that is desired.

“Why don’t we not build a wall down the middle of the street?” he said.

Neil Stenger of Murney Associates, Realtors also testified.

“Our existing process has a certain weakness,” he said.

OTO, city and county officials and MoDOT all emphasize safety and moving the volume of traffic along the roadway. It’s a perspective that is best suited for interstates and nonurban roads, he said.

“Our problem with East Sunshine is it’s an urban street, and at that point the factor of economic damage becomes very important to the local community,” he said.

Stenger said MoDOT measures crashes and deaths, but it does not measure the economic impact of a project.

“The local business owners and operators can give you that feedback, if they will listen to the business community involved in each project,” he said. “The effect of having people who prioritize safety and volume of traffic making the decision on which factor is economically important I think is a fallacy.”

OTO weighs in
Sara Fields, executive director of the Ozarks Transportation Organization, described to commission members a grant attained by OTO in 2022 for its Destination Safe Streets safety action plan. High-crash corridors included stated-owned routes Sunshine Street, Chestnut Expressway, Kearney Street, Missouri Route 14 in Nixa and Ozark and U.S. Route 60 in Republic. Locally owned routes were Grant, National, Glenstone and South Campbell avenues and Division, Battlefield, Sunshine and Republic streets.

Characteristics of high-risk arterials included narrow shoulders, lack of divisions or medians, multimodal activity, urban placement and presence of expressway or five-lane sections, Fields said.

She said Missouri has invested in state-owned roadways to address safety through access modification and pedestrian improvements.

In his testimony to the commission, Springfield City Councilmember Brandon Jenson said corridor improvements are a priority of Forward SGF. Additionally, the OTO, composed of elected officials and administrative staff from throughout the region, adopted a safety action plan that includes the city-owned portion of Sunshine, and it includes the same strategies that are proposed for the state-owned portion of East Sunshine Street. OTO members from throughout the region voted in favor of the safety plan, he said.

“You’re not doing this work alone, and it’s being done in full view of the local decision-makers,” he said.

He said Forward SGF directs the city to use a data-driven approach to proactively address transportation deficiencies.

“Corridor efficiency, as was noted, is also economic development. Folks are choosing not to travel along Sunshine Street because they know the congestion that they’re going to face,” he said. “I hope you focus first on protecting our people and note that you will not be alone in the effort of improving this corridor.”

He added that the proposal has been scaled back to cover only 18% of East Sunshine, focusing on four areas with the highest accident rates.

Lawmaker opposition
Missouri District 131 Rep. Bill Owen, R-Springfield, said the route has a left-turn lane along almost its entirety that serves drivers well.

“When there’s a large number of people wanting to turn on a particular street, they have all the room in the world to get over in the left lane. We don’t have a median that only allows so many cars to get there,” he said.

He also raised concerns about semi-trucks having either to go into residential neighborhoods or take a long route to turn around to reach the businesses they serve.

District 20 Missouri Sen. Curtis Trent, R-Springfield, said adding a median to the corridor would be a harmful move.

Trent expressed his concern about what the proposed project would mean for commerce and regional impact.

“We’ve seen in other parts of the state where economic corridors have for whatever reason lost their desirability,” he said.

Businesses and residents leave when that happens, he said, making those places hard to sustain. The city continues to have fixed expenses but does not have revenue to support it, as growth sprawls out to surrounding county or counties with wasteful and disruptive duplication of services.

“You’re going to see permanent, tangible harm done to that economic corridor, which will have unintended side effects that will be negative for the whole region,” he said.

Springfield City Councilmember Bruce Adib-Yazdi said traffic is already increasing and changing driving habits on the route. If customers are inconvenienced by a median, he said, they will change driving habits to accommodate.

“We have to take a longer view here,” he said. “We need to be looking not tomorrow and not at next week … but 20 years out.”