Transportation chief vows help (Winston Salem Journal)
State wants to work to get the Northern Beltway going but money is an issue, Conti says
The N.C. Department of Transportation wants to work with local elected officials and business leaders to find ways to get construction started on the Northern Beltway, but the state still won’t have any money to pay for project until 2020.
That’s the message that Transportation Secretary Gene Conti delivered to about 70 people last night at a meeting about transportation issues in Forsyth County. The Winston-Salem Chamber of Commerce sponsored the meeting of elected officials and business people. It was held in the law firm of Womble Carlyle Sandridge and Rice on West Fourth Street.
“We are going to work with you,” Conti told the audience. “We are committed to get these issues resolved.”
Before Conti spoke, Stan Polanis, the city’s director of transportation, discussed the delays in building the proposed Northern Beltway, an urban highway loop around most of Winston-Salem. The entire project would cost $1.3 billion, with the eastern leg costing $840 million.
The beltway has been stalled since 1999, when opponents filed a lawsuit claiming that the state had failed to do a proper environmental study of the highway’s western leg. State and local officials later made the eastern leg the higher priority. Opponents sued again in 2008 after the state completed a new environmental review.
A judge dismissed both lawsuits in May, but state officials said that there was no money for the beltway. The state’s proposed list of urban-loop projects ranked the beltway’s eastern leg last among a number of projects, although local officials are trying to get that reversed.
Seven landowners also have filed a lawsuit, asking a court to force the DOT to buy hundreds of properties along the beltway route.
Polanis said that local officials must work with the DOT to handle issues of the affected property owners, develop a way to keep the project’s environmental documents from expiring in March 2011, and maintain the area’s existing highways and roads to handle the traffic until the beltway is completed.
Conti said that those factors are important, and he mentioned ways that other cities in North Carolina have used to pay in part for highway loops around their cities.
Officials in Raleigh, Wilmington and Fayetteville will use tolls to pay for sections of their urban loops, Conti said. However, the DOT is still using state money to pay for the remainder of these projects’ costs.
Don Flow, the owner of Flow Automotives Cos., asked Conti if the state could charge tolls for drivers to use the Interstate-40 bypass in Forsyth County and use that money to help pay to build Interstate 74, which would include the beltway’s eastern leg.
State transportation officials would need permission from federal highway officials to enact such a plan, Conti said.
“We are interested in that if you are interested in us looking at that,” Conti said. “I don’t know if we can sell that or not, but we can try.”
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By JOHN HINTON, JOHN HINTON | JOURNAL REPORTER
Published: September 29, 2010
