People living near a data center under construction in Independence's Little Blue Valley say a seven-month closure of Bly Road has turned a routine drive into a safety concern as colder weather approaches.
Residents once relied on the road to head south into town, but it has been shut down since April 1 while it is rerouted to make room for the Nebius hyperscale AI data factory, a project neighbors have opposed for nearly a year, including through a lawsuit seeking to stop it.
The northern end of North Bly Road dead ends at East Bundschu Road at the bottom of a steep hill. With the southern route blocked, that hill is now the only way in and out when conditions turn bad, and freezes in Missouri are common in November.
"It's not fun because when you get to the bottom of the hill, you either have to go left or right, and if you're sliding, you have no control of where you're going," said Bly Road resident Howard Hoff.
Neighbor Daniel Moorehead said the closure is both inconvenient and, at times, treacherous. He said it has "added another five or eight minutes to my commute every morning as I go north to go south," and noted the route becomes dangerous in heavy rain, heavy fog, snow or ice.
Hoff said the southern exit must reopen because residents need it for work and doctor's appointments, and emergency vehicles need it too if the north hill turns slick. Moorehead said trouble on the hill is a "known quantity," citing residents who have stories of vehicles going off the road or sliding across Bundschu into the ditch.
NorthPoint Development, which is handling the Bly Road project, told residents in a letter that its contractor, Superior Bowen, expected to reopen the road by early August. Two months past that target, the road closed signs are still up, and neither company responded to multiple requests for information about the delay or a reopening timeline.
The old Bly Road cut through the property where the Nebius facility is rising and ended at Missouri 78. The rerouted road will instead end at a new stoplight along Little Blue Parkway. Asphalt has been laid, and sidewalks and a parking lot for an adjacent new dog park appear to be poured, but street lights do not yet seem to be installed.
Residents also complain about construction trucks that rumble past a security post at the north end almost daily, sometimes in the middle of the night. "You can't imagine it unless you live here," Hoff said. Moorehead worries the road will become a thoroughfare for misguided trucks even after it reopens, since an entrance to the job site now sits along it.
The city, which has received multiple complaints about Bly Road according to a Sunshine Law request filed by KSHB 41 News, said in a statement that it "understands residents' concerns" and "has been working with the developer to encourage progress and reopen the roadway as soon as possible." The city noted the steep northern portion of the road is an existing roadway and not part of the reconstruction, while the flatter southern portion is being rebuilt as part of NorthPoint's privately managed project. For now, residents simply hope they will not be stuck navigating the north end once winter sets in.
