Road gets tad more open for I-73 plans

Aug 21, 2009 (The Roanoke Times - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- RNDOF | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- A federal judge's recent decisions remove one barrier to plans to build Interstate 73, but neither critics nor transportation officials expect to see construction crews anytime soon.

"This is merely Round One," said Andrea Ferster, the attorney who represented Virginians for Appropriate Roads and other plaintiffs in their federal court challenge to the planning for I-73.

Ferster said Thursday that her clients have not decided whether to appeal U.S. District Court Judge James Turk's two orders, issued July 20 and Aug. 11, that ended its lawsuit. The plaintiffs have 60 days from Turk's second ruling.

And there will be more opportunities besides the lawsuit to affect road plans, Ferster said.

Proposed in 1991, when Congress declared a high-priority need for a new link between Detroit and Charleston, S.C., I-73 is to enter Virginia from West Virginia and follow the U.S. 460 corridor to Blacksburg and Christiansburg, where it will join I-81 to Roanoke.

In the city, the new interstate would track I-581, then run on a new path east of U.S. 220 from near Clearbrook to the North Carolina line.

Of the Virginia part of I-73, only the stretch from Roanoke to North Carolina is approved for planning, including the environmental study that was questioned by Virginians for Appropriate Roads.

In a lawsuit filed in October 2007, the group -- along with fellow plaintiffs Virginia Forest Watch, Kristin Peckman and Bernard Goehring -- raised a number of objections, including that planners had studied the new interstate's environmental effects as if it were going to be constructed all at once, rather than in a years-long series of stages.

"It makes no sense for them to be proceeding with approval of a project that is probably decades away" from construction, Ferster said.

Virginians for Appropriate Roads favors improving U.S. 220 so that it could become the new highway.

Heidi Underwood and Jason Bond, spokespeople for the Virginia Department of Transportation, agreed that road-building is still far off.

Underwood said Turk's decision will let VDOT resume planning with the Federal Highway Administration. This had been suspended while the lawsuit was undecided.

Also waiting on the lawsuit are questions about I-73's path through Henry County. In November 2007, county supervisors asked the state to consider a road that would better serve the Patriot Centre, Martinsville Industrial Park and Martinsville Speedway.

It's a different route than what was examined in the environmental study and would require new study and be subject to new legal challenges, Bond said.

The next step would be construction planning, which VDOT estimated in 2006 would cost $330 million. So far, $13.3 million has been allocated for the project, Bond said.

The price tag for actually building the road was estimated at more than $4 billion.

"At the end of the day there's no money to do any of that," Bond said.

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