October 2, 2015: The beginning of IA 333 as seen from an I-29 offramp. The entire route, along with the town of Hamburg, was underwater in the spring of 2019.
The Great Decommissioning of 1980 was the end result of a process for “functional classification” of all roads in Iowa. Primary roads that didn’t reach a certain level were eligible for being turned over, and a handful that were higher in rank went to the state.
And then there is IA 333, whose history got weird one more time, because it managed to fall under both categories.
An agreement in 1976 resulted in 333 being paved in Page County the second half of 1980 and decommissioned when that project was completed. At the same time that was going on, the part of 333 that had been dropped upon paving in Fremont County in 1964 was on its way back up.
On June 16, 1980, an appeals board in Ames ruled that the DOT had to keep IA 184 and IA 145 but could drop IA 42. The board deadlocked on County Road J64 running from I-29 to US 59, meaning that a lower appeals board ruling stood and the DOT had to take the road.
So it sounds cut-and-dried, right? BZZT. The state had been OK with taking a new road from I-29 to US 275, but east of Hamburg, not so much.
At the October 29 Fremont County Board of Supervisors meeting, whose minutes were printed in the Hamburg Reporter in November, a resolution was passed. Paraphrased summary: “Whereas, the DOT is supposed to take J64 once the county fixed two things on it, and whereas, the county finished those by October 9, the road is [was!] the DOT’s responsibility on October 10, 1980.” I’m not quite sure how a retroactive commissioning from a county works, but that’s what the resolution said.
So in the fall of 1980, we had 333 in Page County that the state was going to drop, and a disconnected 333 in Fremont County that the state didn’t want to add. (Technically, I suppose there’s no reason it had to be 333, but there was no need to add more confusion.) Unfortunately, without contemporary photographs there’s no way to tell the status of signage at the beginning of 1981, and the map… uh…
Donde está trescientos treinta y tres?
However what went where, the route across the base of Fremont County was 333 until the Second Great Decommissioning of 2003, when through legislative action the DOT was able to unload its remaining spur routes and a handful of significant portions of low-traveled routes.
Today, IA 333, running between I-29 and US 275 in Hamburg, is the shortest Iowa highway east of the Missouri River.