The Bottom-Up Revolution
A small Indiana city took on a 54‑mile, $3.4 billion highway with yard signs, town halls, and hard numbers. Mark Nowotarski traces six years of grassroots organizing against the MidStates Corridor, from local resistance in Dubois County to growing pressure at the State House. Along the way, Jasper’s story shows how a community can push back when a mega‑project threatens its future and quality of life.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hi there, and welcome to Bottom Up Short. I'm Norm with Strong Towns, and part of my work is connecting with Strong Towns members all across North America and in other parts of the world. We're seeing more and more interest in Strong Towns ideas and principles in more and more places around the world. I'm really excited to be able to talk today with one of the key architects of Jasper, Indiana's successful run in the Strongest Town contest a couple of years ago, as well as a very capable advocate for pushing back on highway expansion across Indiana — a project that is impacting his community, as well as more broadly affecting the conditions for so many people across the interstate area where this corridor project is being proposed. Mark Nowotarski is with me today. Welcome, Mark.
Thank you. Excited to be here.
It's great. Let's do this in two parts. First, do you want to talk briefly about the Strongest Town contest and Jasper being put on the map in the Strong Towns world as the contest winner? Can you share a little bit about that experience?
Sure. I previously lived in Jasper. I'd moved there in 1990 and worked there through 2004, then moved away. After I retired, I was actually living in Maumee, Ohio — another Strong Towns contest winner. When I moved back after I retired in 2020, I started getting involved with the community and understanding everything going on. I was really excited about a lot of the improvements they had made and were working on.
Shortly after — about a year later in 2021 — I'd become a member of Strong Towns a few years prior, so I kept following activity and learning a lot. In 2021, for some reason, I heard about the Strong Towns contest for the first time. I started looking at it and thought, everything that the city of Jasper's doing, I felt very strongly that I wanted to enter Jasper in the Strongest Town contest.
A little bit of background: when I entered it and we got nominated as one of the 16 to go forward, it was only then that I decided I better tell the mayor and tell the Jasper development people what I'd done. We got together, got full support for running it, and ultimately won the 2022 contest. The timing was perfect — Strong Towns featured Jasper as the 2022 Strongest Town contest winner, starting with "a place where things get done," which really leads to the heart of it.
Before I came back to live here, they had put together a comprehensive plan for the city and really used it as their guide. Every project was prioritized and looked at from a financial stability standpoint. I started looking into the comprehensive plan to understand what was on the books and why, and had meetings with the mayor to better understand what the city was doing. It made sense, and I liked the direction.
One of the last big items in that comprehensive plan was the revitalization of the downtown square. The infrastructure underneath — the sewer lines, water lines, everything — was 100 years old. They needed to be replaced, and the city knew they were going to have to tear things up anyway. So in accordance with the comprehensive plan, it was a perfect time to look at what else needed to be done to really vitalize and grow the downtown. It was a very successful venture.
Right now, we're in the middle of developing our next comprehensive plan for the city. What's been impressive about that process is the engagement from the community — what's important, what's spoken. We've looked at all different things, and I'm pleased that the majority of the focus is on quality of life: the things that bring and maintain our quality of life.
When I saw the Strong Towns Facebook post giving a little background, I decided it was a perfect time to write a letter to the editor. I repeated the exact verbiage from the Strong Towns post. As we go forward with a new comprehensive plan, I think it's important for the people and businesses of the community to focus our efforts on quality of life. We have a very vibrant community that has grown — but not to the point where it's unmanageable, which is actually a good thing.
Through these task forces, groups, and public meetings, we've developed what I think are five different pillars, and all of them seem to be meshing really well. That brings me to one of the focuses on the MidStates Corridor highway project.
I, like many people here, have been fighting against this 54-mile new-terrain highway. There's really no cost-benefit analysis backing it, and a lot of it doesn't make sense. It's being pushed by some private entities that want it for freight trucks. But it's really devastating to the community as a whole — a community that had no voice when the study was put together.
As more information came out from the study, more of the community found out that while it might make it easier for freight trucks to bypass Jasper and a couple other towns to gain a little time — really an almost insignificant amount of time — it cuts through county roads where people live. We're a rural community. A lot of people work in Jasper, so they're going to have to cross over this highway. It really becomes a burden. Several county roads are identified as being dead-ended. Other county roads have no access to the highway, so to get onto or past it, people would have to reroute — in some cases three or four miles — which creates another problem: potential issues with emergency services.
When all those factors came out, people really started understanding that this is not a good expansion project, and not good for the future of not only Jasper, but the Dubois County community as a whole. The cost is astronomical — estimated right now at about $3.4 billion for the entire 54-mile project, and that doesn't include land acquisition and everything else it destroys. We've made a lot of progress. We haven't stopped it yet, but we've made a lot of progress.
What has helped elevate it is that about three weeks ago, the Indiana Department of Transportation came out with a press release stating that because of lack of state funding, they are permanently postponing or canceling over 340 projects that have already been on the books. These are projects like repairing bridges and improving road surfaces in all 92 counties. At the same time, they're trying to elevate the MidStates Corridor.
Once legislators found out, they said, wait a minute — you're eliminating projects scheduled for my counties and my district, and yet you're trying to put this highly controversial highway in southern Indiana that 81% of people have identified through a poll that they don't want. That's just Dubois County.
It was unfortunate that we had to go to that extent, but we decided to pool our money together, hire a legitimate polling firm, and conduct Public Policy Polling to survey residents in Dubois County. We always said: if we're wrong, if 50% or 60% of the people say they need this highway for our future, we might reconsider. But it didn't come out that way. 81% said no.
That caught the attention of legislators at the State House, along with the INDOT announcement. We followed it up this past week with a statewide poll, because we know that up north, people don't know about this highway in southern Indiana. We were surprised at how much media coverage and visibility this has gotten, and the fact that people are understanding they're losing repairs on roads that are badly needed in their communities. The result — I think it was 74% — said this highway should not be built, and that the money would be better spent fixing roads throughout the state.
That's a really interesting tactic — to say that because this project is so consuming, the rest of the state is going to be suffering. Bringing in people who are impacted by that seems to me a very prudent alliance-building strategy. Do you have any other tips or suggestions you'd offer?
I'll go back a little bit. I've been a founding member of the Coalition Against MidStates Corridor for well over six years now. We're a grassroots group. We did the typical things: yard signs, letters to the editor, any communications and exposure we could get, and town hall meetings.
We reached out to another project called Link 101, down in southeast Indiana. It was a major project, and it got stopped. It got stopped because the people banded together. They got the council to understand this wasn't a good thing. Their state senator who represents the district came down and met with the people opposed to it, met with the INDOT people proposing it, and came to the conclusion that it was not good for the community. She went back and — this was a couple of years ago — really sat down with the governor and got it canceled.
We've talked with them quite a bit to find out: what's the process you used? That's one of the great things with Strong Towns members too — the group communicates, and you can reach out to people in similar situations to get advice and ideas. That works really well.
Unfortunately for us right now, the governor of our state, Mike Braun, is from Jasper. He is one of the original powerful business owners here who advocated for this and really started it going. So we have a bit of a different situation, but we still feel very positive about the efforts we've made here.
One of the other things we did — and I know this can apply even with highway expansions within cities when they're trying to add lanes — was go out to the community. Back in the fall of 2025, we did an eight-day Town Hall Blitz. We went out to the small towns that would be impacted because roads would be closed — towns like Dubois, St. Anthony, and Hayesville — and held town hall meetings to educate people on everything going on. It wasn't just about us presenting things; we wanted to give the facts and the knowledge and then answer any questions.
In small towns like these, we had an average of 100 people show up at each meeting — 800 people total. That had a big impact on energizing more people and helping them understand: I didn't know this road was going to do this. I didn't know this highway was going to cost this much. We can't afford this. Those are some of the things we did.
It highlights two core things: one, that strong communities can really generate greater opportunities to address bigger issues. The reminder too is that throughout human history, even uphill battles have been won. Even if the odds feel stacked against us in our communities and the efforts we're trying to take on — including with entrenched powers and very significant interest in moving ahead with this MidStates Corridor — when it's put in its proper context, all of a sudden it doesn't look so shiny or lustrous, and it becomes something we take a second, third, or fourth look at.
Mark, it's been wonderful to connect with you. I definitely want to encourage people to drop into Jasper, Indiana. Also check out the Strongest Town contest at strongesttown.com — that's where you can learn about how to vote in the contest for this year to crown a new winner. This is not a place that has everything right, but it is a community working together to seek to do so. Mark, thanks so much for being on Bottom Up Shorts today.
Thank you. It was great talking with you.
Great to connect. Thanks everyone for listening — take care, and take care of your places. This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.