Thanks to some links sent to me I did some historical research on this bridge.
There have been several bills in the Indiana Legislature to fund the remediation of this bridge or to buy it outright since the 1960's.
Many of those bills never got out of committee, but the few that did and actually got onto the floor were always blocked by a political contingent led by Indianapolis.
When SW Indiana legislators would get a infrastructure bill on the floor, anything that included the New Harmony Bridge was immediately blocked.
Because of this and all of the delays in getting a better highway built between Indy and Evansville, it has fostered this posture by those who live in the area that there is some kind of grudge against economic development in SW Indiana.
Yes, they got the Toyota plant in Princeton, but it took this herculean effort by Mitch Daniels to "get it done" on I-69. There were people still trying to block it way back when.
This and New Harmony just sends a vibe that people in the area just don't get the same level of importance to the greater whole of Indiana.
IDOT who now owns the "Cannonball Bridge" between St Francisville and Indiana, gets immediate cooperation from Indiana when looking at a replacement to that 1 lane former railroad bridge.
But when it comes to the New Harmony Bridge, Indiana doesn't want to have anything to do with it legislatively. It's an interesting irony.
There is absolutely the vibe that this area doesn't get the same level of importance as the rest of the state. Honestly, from my view it's like INDOT assigns their most junior engineers to work on projects in this area based on nothing more than traffic counts and theories from an office in Indianapolis. It's painfully obvious none of them drive any of these roads on any basis, because it's clear they don't understand how the traffic is actually flowing on them. All you really have to do is look at INDOTs "improvement" history in this area.
One of the more recent examples is the Lloyd/41 interchange. INDOT's initial plan to eliminate the two stoplights on the Lloyd was to literally rotate the intersection 90 degrees so the two stoplights were on 41, making four stoplights in a 0.5 mile stretch of 41. It was one of the most asinine and honestly insulting plans I've ever seen. Thankfully, our mayor was awake and apparently threw enough of a fit to get it changed to a full cloverleaf like any intersection of two six-lane, divided, major arterials should be.
A less egregious example includes the Lloyd/Fulton interchange, where the westbound on-ramp dumps two merged lanes worth of traffic onto the Lloyd with one of the shortest and most awkward acceleration/merging lanes I've ever seen. There's really no option there but to hope traffic in the far right lane of the Lloyd moves over, or else you have to pretty much gun it and recklessly shoot a gap between cars. That project also closed the westbound on-ramp at Mary St, leaving two miles between on-ramps for westbound traffic.
When Diamond Ave/SR 66 was reconstructed, for some reason INDOT didn't think it was necessary to put any type of barrier wall, cabling, or even grass inbetween Pigeon Creek and Mesker Park Dr. That always struck me as odd and I've never seen a "median" on a "divided" highway like that anywhere else before.
Then you look at what they're planning on doing to the Lloyd now. Instead of grade-separating Lloyd/Burkhardt and creating an interchange a la Lloyd/Green River, INDOT is going to make one of the busiest intersections in the entire city (during shopping season with unfamiliar, out-of-town, rural-accustomed drivers no less) their testing ground for displaced left turns. As if that wasn't enough, they're going to hammer the idea home with the same concept at Lloyd/Stockwell, Lloyd/Cross Pointe (potentially fixing a problem that isn't broken by adding a stoplight at the end of the ramp from SB I-69 to WB Lloyd), Lloyd/Red Bank, and Lloyd/Boehne Camp. They're going to completely eliminate left turn movements at Lloyd/Vann and call it a "minor" improvement. And in spending $100 millon and years on this project, they're not going to touch adding a third lane to Lloyd between Barker and University Parkway despite the need to handle the heavy USI traffic (I mean, Jesus Christ have they looked at the accident rates on that stretch of road? Especially west of Boehne Camp? There's injury accidents there nearly every day).
Anyway, I got on a rant, but this new project is just another in a line of examples of INDOT half-assing anything they try in this region. There's no way a project like this would be acceptable in Marion or Hamilton Counties, and that's pretty much what this region's opinion of INDOT (and the entire state administration for that matter) boils down to.
