Section of K-96 to be renamed – for sixth time

The path to naming K-96 through northeast Wichita has been longer and more winding than the road itself.

In a ceremony Thursday to be led by Gov. Sam Brownback, that section of K-96 will get its sixth name in about the past 25 years – now to be called the George Ablah Memorial Expressway in honor of the late Wichita developer and philanthropist.

The strip of four-lane freeway has been variously known as the Northeast Bypass, the Northeast Circumferential and the Northeast Expressway, as well as the Bob Brown Memorial Highway and the Bonnie Huy Memorial Highway.

The Ablah Expressway will run from I-135 to Rock Road.

The road was last named last year in honor of the late Huy, a state representative who represented east Wichita. Her name will remain on the segment east of Rock Road, according to the Kansas Department of Transportation.

The naming of K-96 has a tortured history tied to bitter political disputes of the past, with battles over property rights and even allegations of racism.

The city celebrated in 1994 when the bypass was completed, creating a full freeway route from I-135 in north Wichita to Kellogg and the interchange with the Kansas Turnpike.

Built with about $90 million of state and local tax money, the freeway was constructed on land donated by Ablah and Koch Industries. It opened the way for development of tony subdivisions and upscale commercial areas that are now a fixture of the far northeast section of the city.

But naming the road has been a stop-and-start affair since the beginning.

During planning and construction, the road was generally referred to as either the Northeast Bypass or the Northeast Circumferential.

Shortly after it opened, the name Northeast Expressway gained some public favor, although traffic engineers groused that it really was a misnomer because it’s actually a freeway.

Then, around 1995, things started getting a little chippy politically.

The city government decided to name the freeway in honor of the late Bob Brown, a former city commissioner and two-term mayor. They put up signs saying Bob Brown Expressway.

The state told the city to back up, because the naming of state highways is the purview of the state Legislature.

So the city took a bill to Topeka, but that got roadblocked by then-Rep. (now Senate President) Susan Wagle, R-Wichita.

Wagle blocked the Brown bill mostly because she and other conservative Republicans apparently were miffed that the city had approved a plan to convert an abandoned railroad right-of-way into a nature trail.

That, she said, usurped the property rights of landowners along the trail who could have otherwise claimed the abandoned right-of-way as their own.

Democratic Rep. Ruby Gilbert helped Wagle detour the Bob Brown name. Her gripe was that her constituents in traditionally black northeast Wichita found it offensive and racist that “Northeast” was being excised from the name. They thought that dropping Northeast signaled a stigma on their neighborhoods.

The Brown effort died in July 1995, when Mayor Bob Knight recommended the city quit fighting the state over naming the freeway.

“Bob (Brown) would probably be laughing over this whole circumstance,” Knight said at the time. He suggested that the city forget the state and name something of its own after Brown instead.

And that’s how the Bob Brown Expo Hall at the Century II Convention Center got its name.

This story was originally published July 1, 2015 at 6:15 PM with the headline "Section of K-96 to be renamed – for sixth time."