If it sounds pretty damn boring to sit through a six-hour meeting, called by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in conjunction with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, held in a Virginia Department of Transportation conference room, all in order to satisfy Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act… well, you’re not going to find me vehemently denying it.
But I went anyway. After all, what is six hours compared to the bureaucratic ice age that the Meadowcreek Parkway has so far endured?
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Particularly when the drama over the two-mile, two-lane road project has picked up as it nears its finale. A recently formed group called the Coalition to Preserve McIntire Park has filed suit against the City of Charlottesville as well as VDOT, claiming the city violated the state constitution when it sold construction easements to the state transportation authority. A circuit court judge will make a ruling after a May 19 hearing.
Meanwhile, Parkway opponents are preparing for another potential lawsuit. And their efforts to do so were what peppered last week’s otherwise tedious regulatory meeting with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
To boil the next possible lawsuit to its essentials: Over its 40 year conceptual lifetime, the Meadowcreek Parkway has been chopped into three projects—a county portion of the road from Rio to Melbourne roads (called the Meadowcreek Parkway), a city portion of the road that cuts through McIntire Park (called McIntire Extended), and a new overpass where the road would bisect the 250 Bypass (called the 250 Interchange). Federal law requires that federally funded projects go through extensive environmental review, particularly if they involve publicly owned parks like McIntire—that invokes a gnarly regulatory review called Section 4(f). Federal law also requires that federal projects have rational endpoints.
But McIntire Extended neatly dodges Section 4(f) because it is state-funded. The interchange, however, is federal, and MCP opponents argue that the McIntire Extended project was deliberately split from the interchange project to avoid the federal regulatory burdens.
Yet that won’t be easy to prove in court. To support their case, activists are trying to get some official agency to admit that the two projects are really one. Such efforts came up short during an October meeting about the interchange, but Rich Collins, Peter Kleeman, Daniel Bluestone and others tried again at the April 7 meeting.
Ostensibly, last week’s meeting was about how to mitigate the impacts of McIntire Extended on the cultural resources in and around McIntire Park, such as the nine-hole golf course and the adjacent Rock Hill gardens. A number of suggestions were thrown out, such as putting up historical signs, adding new holes to make up for the three or more that will be lost, and screening the Parkway with trees to reduce the view of the road from the park.
But the first five-and-a-half hours of the gathering revolved around efforts to make the U.S. Army Corps or VDOT acknowledge the artificiality of the division between the two projects—an effort Collins frankly acknowledged.
“I think most of us know why we’re grappling around this,” said Collins, mentioning the desire to trigger Section 4(f). “That’s why we’re doing all this dancing around, we’re trying to define our way from it. I think everybody knows that, and I don’t know why we don’t just simply acknowledge it, but that’s the important fact here. …We believe that this segmentation is so artificial, legally and otherwise, that we are trying to exploit what you call the federal handbook.”
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WAYS TO KILL THE MCP 1. Prevail in first lawsuit regarding city’s sale of land to VDOT: Judge Jay Swett will hear arguments May 19. 2. Change City Council’s mind: Dave Norris and Holly Edwards have usually voted against the Parkway when it’s come up. Some MCP opponents think that Julian Taliaferro could switch sides. 3. Prevail in second lawsuit regarding segmentation: This suit still hasn’t been filed, though letters have been traded between the MCP opponents’ attorney and the Federal Highway Administration. |
The room broke into laughter at the baldness of Collin’s statement. “I appreciate the fact that you’re admitting that you’re trying to go outside the purpose of this hearing,” replied Bob Hodous, there to represent the local Chamber of Commerce—a group that says the Parkway is its No. 1 priority. In the end, neither the Army Corps nor VDOT gave much fodder to opponents.
Afterwards, Hodous described the meeting as “long, drawn-out and about what I expected,” but he wasn’t completely dour. “I think there’s some real opportunities for providing some of the enhancement [to McIntire Park], but I think it needs to go hand in hand with having the road completed.”
So the $64,000 question: Will the road get completed? At the meeting, the VDOT project manager said that the agency would start advertising for bids this summer for the McIntire Extended project. Whether that happens depends largely on how quickly the U.S. Army Corps, the Department of Historic Resources and VDOT come to terms on a memorandum of agreement about what will mitigate the impacts to the park.
Of course, all that could change with a successful lawsuit. So, as of course you probably anticipated, the fight about the Meadowcreek Parkway ain’t over yet.
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