Muskingum Avenue and Putnam Hill Park Make Progress and Hosts a Press Conference

Since 2019, Muskingum Avenue has been closed for safety concerns, causing traffic complications in the surrounding area, but Wednesday marks progress for the road to re-open.

A press conference was held with FEMA, local officials from Zanesville, and the Ohio EMA to showcase how the project is going, along with showing the power of collaboration between municipal, state, and federal government agencies.

“Events like today shows that the federal government and the state and local government also care about what the people need, what their needs are and what needs to be done in the area to meet those needs,” said Todd Ware, Councilman for the City’s 3rd Ward.

Thanks to the collaboration of these agencies, the road is expected to be re-opened in early 2025 with Putnam Hill Park seeing a nearly 3 acre expansion. FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program helped fund the project, which FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell hopes will showcase that disaster mitigation projects help just as much as disaster response.

“I am out here this month, which is National Resilience Month to lift that up, but we also dedicated the entire year to helping communities understand the type of work that FEMA has and the type of resources we have for this. You know, when you think of FEMA you probably immediately think of work that we do to respond and do the immediate recovery but we’ve always had this resilience arm. We’ve always had this preparedness and mitigation work and I want more people to understand the resources that are there that we can pool with maybe other state funding or other federal agency money to be able to come together and make a community stronger and more resilient,” said Criswell.

When Muskingum Avenue re-opens, it will improve emergency response in the area by around 5 minutes and simplify traffic routes.