If you live in Scott Depot and you've been following the Teays Valley Road project, you probably think you're still watching a fight play out. Roundabouts or a turn lane. Four intersections or a straight center median. Residents packing meetings, signing petitions, showing up with banners. It feels live, like something that could still go either way.
It can't. The choice was made back in early 2025. What's happened since then, the petitions, the alternate designs, the packed transportation meetings, has been residents arguing after the decision, not before it. And now that construction is finally lining up for this fall, the businesses standing in the roundabouts' path still don't have clear answers about what happens to their buildings, their parking lots, or their front doors.
The Two Options, And Why One Was Already Chosen
The project covers a mile and a half of Teays Valley Road, from Great Teays Boulevard down to Apple Lane near Scott-Teays Elementary. The West Virginia Division of Highways put two designs on the table back in February 2025. One was a center turn lane with sidewalks and a bike path, a straightforward widening job. The other, the option DOH called its preferred alternative from the start, was four single-lane roundabouts at Great Teays Boulevard, Erskine Lane, Hidden Valley Drive, and Scott Lane.
Here's what most residents didn't hear until later: DOH had already been meeting with homeowners' associations, local schools, and first responders since the summer before that first public meeting, and those stakeholders had already signed off on the roundabout concept. The general public got its first look at the plan in February 2025, well after the direction had effectively been set.
The numbers DOH used to justify that choice are worth sitting with. The turn-lane option, by the agency's own estimate, improves safety over doing nothing by just 1 percent. The roundabout option improves it by 25 percent. That gap is why DOH kept calling roundabouts the preferred alternative even as public comment ran heavily against it.
The two options also trade off differently in terms of what gets taken. The turn-lane design, wider at 66 feet across, would require buying out 23 homes and 8 businesses. The roundabout design, narrower at 62 feet with room for landscaping and drainage in the median, would take 18 homes and 6 businesses. Fewer buyouts, but a different kind of disruption for anyone who lives along the corridor and needs to turn left out of their driveway.
| Turn-Lane Option | Roundabout Option (Preferred) | |
|---|---|---|
| Road width | 66 feet | 62 feet |
| Homes bought out | 23 | 18 |
| Businesses bought out | 8 | 6 |
| Safety improvement over no-build | 1% | 25% |
| Left turns from side streets | Preserved | Routed through roundabouts |
The Businesses Standing In The Roundabouts' Path
The corridor runs from Anna's Alterations near Apple Lane down to the Kroger intersection at Great Teays Boulevard, and a handful of long-running local businesses sit directly in the design footprint.
The Scott Depot Dairy Queen is the clearest example. Owner Heath Diehl said early on that the roundabout option would take all of his property outright, while the turn-lane option might at least leave enough room to rebuild farther back on the same lot. The most recent update from Putnam County Commissioner Brian Ellis, in May 2026, closed that door: the Dairy Queen will have to relocate under either design.
Sprout Salon is a different kind of loss. Owner Rebecca Stratton has run the salon out of the same building where she raised her daughter, and either design option would displace not just her but seven hairdressers and a tattooist who work there. That's not a business relocating. That's a home and a small staff of established professionals losing their address at the same time.
Crede's Lawn and Landscaping, run by Zach Crede, has taken a more pointed position: if DOH won't adopt a narrower compromise design, leave the road as it is rather than force a choice that still costs businesses their footprint. Teays Valley Hardware, further down the corridor near the Kroger intersection, has come up in county commission reports as one of the stretches where road conditions are already an ongoing problem, widening project or not.
None of these business owners are opposed to safety improvements. What they've consistently asked for is clarity on what happens to their buildings and when, and that clarity has been slow to arrive even as the project moves into its final phase.
What The Public Fight Actually Changed
The organized pushback did produce something. Cheryl Manypenny Thrift, a retired DOH project designer and Scott Depot resident, formed the Committee for Common Sense in Widening Teays Valley Road sometime after that February 2025 meeting. By May 2025, the group had already gathered 1,500 signatures on a petition against the roundabouts. At a transportation meeting that same month, roughly 200 people showed up and, by show of hands, most opposed the four-roundabout plan. For a few hours that week, DOH officials indicated the project might be paused. By the afternoon, the agency clarified that it was still moving through the federal environmental review process required for a project of this size, and that nothing about the public reaction had slowed it down.
By September 2025, the committee had gone further, presenting DOH and Putnam County Commissioner Brian Ellis with a specific alternative: a 52-foot design with a single roundabout at the busy Kroger intersection and a straightforward center turn lane for the rest of the corridor, trimming the impact to homes and businesses while still adding the sidewalk and bike path residents had asked for.
That's the part of this story that hasn't fully landed with residents. The public comment period on the two options closed back on March 27, 2025. Everything since then, the petition, the compromise design, the packed meetings, has happened after the design was already locked into DOH's preferred alternative. The debate residents think they're still having is really a debate over whether DOH will reconsider a decision it made more than a year ago. So far, it hasn't.
What Fall 2026 Actually Means For Your Commute
According to the project's own timeline, final design work and right-of-way acquisition were slated to wrap between spring 2025 and summer 2026, with construction anticipated to begin this fall. That puts Scott Depot at the start of a multi-year build on one of its busiest daily routes, the same stretch that connects the Kroger anchor at Great Teays Boulevard to the neighborhoods and schools along Apple Lane.
If you drive this corridor to get your kids to Scott-Teays Elementary, to reach the Kroger for groceries, or just to get onto Route 34 toward Winfield or Hurricane, expect this fall and the seasons after it to come with detours, lane closures, and the kind of construction friction that doesn't show up on a map until you're sitting in it. DOH has said dates are subject to change, which in practice has meant slippage before. But the direction is set. This is happening, on the design DOH chose, not the one the petition asked for.
None of this makes Scott Depot a worse place to live. Growing corridors get congested, and congested corridors eventually get fixed. What it does mean is that anyone with a stake in this stretch of road, whether you're a homeowner along it, a regular at the Dairy Queen, or a client of Sprout Salon, is better served by watching the project's actual milestones than by assuming the public comment fight is still open. It isn't. The next chapter here is construction, not another vote.
If you're weighing what this kind of infrastructure shift means for a home you already own on this corridor, or you're trying to figure out how road projects like this typically affect property values and timelines in Putnam County, that's exactly the kind of question Jan Ramey fields regularly from Scott Depot neighbors. Let's Connect if you want to talk through what it means for your specific address.
