The newest development along Cincinnati-Dayton Road is a new rehabilitation center at Hendrickson Road. The $13 million, 93-bed facility, known as Covenant Village of Middletown, will bring an estimated 150 to 175 new jobs to the city and provide this stretch of road with “a facelift,” Economic Development Director Denise Hamet said.
Middletown Planning Director Marty Kohler said businesses are attracted to Cincinnati-Dayton Road because of its access to Ohio 122 and Ohio 63, which directly connect to Interstate 75.
“It’s just minutes from the interstate, so for businesses that have a customer base in both the Cincinnati and Dayton areas, that area of Cincinnati-Dayton Road is prime,” Kohler said.
It’s a road that is divided into chuncks, Kohler said. To the south, Cincinnati-Dayton Road caters to commercial and light industrial businesses, and to the north, the road caters to retail and single-family homes. But the road, that was improved and widened just a few years ago, has the potential to grow.
“We really don’t have a specific plan for improvement for the road,” Hamet said. “We would like to improve the image and connect the different facilities more.”
The proposed Covenant Village of Middletown, a transitional facility for patients who undergo surgical procedures like knee and hip replacements, can be a project that will only help expand the city’s growing health care industry, Hamet said.
“We’re hoping that it will sort of spark that area and other medical offices, office complexes and other retail will join in the area,” said Greg Miller, executive vice president of operation for Health Care Management Group, the company that operates The Covenant Village.
The new facility will be Health Care Management Group’s seventh location. Company officials said they chose the site because of the easy access and the road’s ability to accommodate traffic flow.
The Chamber of Commerce Serving Middletown, Monroe and Trenton President and CEO Rick Pearce said the familiarity with Cincinnati-Dayton Road, which is also U.S. 25 and about a century old, is why “that area does not need much managing.”
“It’s a major artery to Monroe that’s below us and to Franklin above us, and everybody knows where it is,” he said. “It’s old and there’s a lot of potential.”
Newer roads, and business parks along newer roads need time and money invested to let people where they are, Pearce said.
“When MADE Industrial Park opened 50 years ago, they had to market it,” said Pearce of the chamber-founded industrial park. “But now we don’t because people know where it is.”
Cincinnati-Dayton Road was widened — at the cost of nearly $2 million using state, county and local funding — in 2007 to five lanes to the south and three lanes to the north. Middletown Public Works and Utilities Director Scott Tadych said the road will be able to accommodate pretty much anything in the future.
“It should be set up for the next 20 to 25 years,” he said. “I would expect, unless something unforeseen comes in, I couldn’t imagine it needing any more capacity.”
The road has about 16,000 vehicles traveling a day, but it has a capacity to accommodate 35,000 vehicles a day, Tadych said.
If that capacity does double, it could be due to the development of the scores of acres available for development for light industrial businesses, said Hamet. She said the Greentree Industrial Park can still support 100,000 square feet of light industrial space, and scores of new jobs could be added to the corridor in that park alone.
“It’s an important thoroughfare for traffic circulation but it also has a good mix of uses and it really can accommodate all kinds of uses,” said Hamet. “I see (in the future) new development and redevelopment occurring along Cincinnati-Dayton Road.”
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