SAGLE — Bottle Bay Road was finally uncorked on Friday.

“The road is now open,” Bonner County Road & Bridge Director Steve Klatt said.

The road’s intersection with U.S. Highway 95 was closed for four months while it was widened and a bike and pedestrian path was installed beneath the route, which forced Bottle Bay, Comeback Bay and Fry Creek residents to rely on detour routes on Lignite and Sagle roads.

The added drive time for those residents was an immediate and ongoing source of consternation.

“It’s been pretty tough on the people that live over there. I have empathized with them all summer long because it has really has disrupted people’s lives,” said Klatt.

But the work at the Bottle Bay Road also became a vessel for dissatisfaction by other residents who commute on pitted county roads or have to white-knuckle their through dangerous and congested highway intersections, such as motorists who rely on Lakeshore Drive.

The work spawned a misinformation campaign which basically used the intersection as a poster child for tax dollars wasted by inept bureaucrats. A ginned-up version of the tale holds that Bonner County wasted millions of dollars to cravenly cater to cyclists, while turning a blind eye to obvious problems on other county roads.

“If they’re on a road that’s not getting attention while another road is getting attention, they definitely resent it and there certainly was an element of that on Lakeshore Drive,” said Klatt.

However, the truth of the Bottle Bay Road matter is not as sexy as the theories surrounding it.

“What in fact we had is a safety grant through the state of Idaho. Bonner County’s total cost on this project was about $150,000 of nearly a million-dollar project,” Klatt said.

A safety audit funded through an Idaho Local Highway Technical Assistance Council recommended that the intersection be widened and the bike path laced beneath the road, which led to $750,000 in LTHAC funding to bankroll the project.

A project to improve Lakeshore Drive’s connection with the highway, meanwhile, has been a decades-long problem.

“Lakeshore is a holy mess without an answer,” Klatt said bluntly.

While a county commissioner in the mid-1980s, Klatt and the county’s former Road & Bridge director developed a plan to create an overpass to address the Lakeshore Drive dilemma and began working with ITD to see it through.

However, those plans evaporated when Bonner County voters opted for county commissioners who were more conservative and averse to spending tax dollars. Increased development along the highway also ate up right of way that would have been needed for such a project, Klatt added.

Longtime Idaho Sen. Shawn Keough said the Lakeshore dilemma surfaced in planning for the Sand Creek Byway, although it fell by the wayside out of concern that it would hinder the U.S. 95 rerouting project. Keough said ITD’s current position on the matter is that there aren’t enough collisions or deaths at the intersection to justify an improvement project.

“That just doesn’t make any sense to me,” said Keough.

However, Keough said a campaign by residents and political pressure by county commissioners could persuade ITD to revisit the question of Lakeshore Drive sooner rather than later.

“I really truly believe if county commissioners turned up the heat on ITD they’d get some sort of reaction because there’s some political momentum there,” said Keough.

Keith Kinnaird can be reached by email at kkinnaird@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow him on Twitter @KeithDailyBee.