Roosevelt
Blvd.is a better connector between Beltline and 99, it
serves northwest Eugene neighborhoods better than WEP could. Some
local traffic would use Roosevelt, regional through traffic would bypass
on Belt Line.
transfer WEP money to finish Beltline,
fix Roosevelt / 99 intersection two options for completing Beltline: (1) if Peak Oil is here,
(2) if Peak Oil is not yet here. The larger option could convert
Beltline to an interstate highway - perhaps I-605?
transfer ODOT / City lands for WEP to BLM's
West Eugene Wetlands Project
new roads:
First - 99 - Second Connector, Barger Road Extended & Trainsong
Connector (to NW Expressway)
fix West
11th intersections (would cost about $2 million, the cost
to complete WEP study), other road repairs
bicycle paths and lanes, pedestrian safety enhanced by road test for
drivers license renewals
land use shifts to coordinate transit and development, mixed use centers,
co-housing neighborhoods
"Saving Oil in a Hurry" - practical steps
toward coping with sudden energy shortages, road safety, speed limits
upgrade Amtrak to enable high speed trains to Seattle
Second and Garfield: ideal location for Eugene's
new hospital (central
& accessible)
Peak Oil and climate change are "new circumstances" that requires reopening
the NEPA process
City of Eugene Adopted Growth Management Policies
violated by WEP
Endangered
Species Act: a "license to kill" - Road Kill: Fender's
Blue Butterfly and Car Fenders
controlled burning for wet prairie restoration incompatible with WEP
environmental
justice: WEP traffic dumped onto 6th and 7th would severely impact
Whiteaker neighborhood
plants of the West Eugene Wetlands - photos by Linda Swisher
Endangered
Species Act: a "license to kill" - Road Kill: Fender's
Blue Butterfly and Car Fenders
controlled burning for wet prairie restoration incompatible with WEP
Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglass
- a letter that protected a
park from a parkway
sand
and gravel - impacts of an elevated WEP in the wetlands
Rob Zako's Incomplete History
of the WEP
This webpage analyzes an article by written by Rob Zako, the "Transportation
Advocate" for 1000 Friends of Oregon. It carefully sidesteps any
mention of the 1996 legal victory over the WEP (the reason there was a
Supplemental EIS in 1997), avoids any discussion of the WEP alternative(s),
and makes strategic errors in describing the history of the project. It
is very good for some of the fine details (although it misses some of
the most crucial points) while avoiding the big picture in several ways.
Mr. Zako was the primary promoter of the Crandall-Arambula proposal in the summer of 2002 that offered the community a WEP version
that would be significantly worse than the ODOT proposals. The State wants
to build about 6 miles of highway, the Crandall Arambula plan proposed
over 10 miles of highway. If this alleged alternative was used in a federal
court to challenge the WEP, this proposal would negate most of the federal
legal objections to the WEP.
Crandall Arambula made "sense" if you wanted to build a new
highway and thought that only one spot in west Eugene deserved protection.
However, most of the route has unique natural features that are worthy
of conservation, and the alternative consensed upon at the June 2001 West
Eugene Charette (which Mr. Zako was at) is a much better place to start
an alternatives discussion. Furthermore, the poor quality of the C&A
report led to absurdities such as proposing to shift the highway through
the Royal Blue Organics blueberry farm (owned by a friend of one of the
promoters of C&A) and the private home of a citizen who was a co-plaintiff
with Friends of Eugene on the State Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA) challenge
of the 2002 TransPlan amendments. If one made up this sort of thing it
would be hard to believe -- and the ODOT officials privately expressed
amazement that this was actually seriously proposed. (Proposing a parkway
through your co-plaintiff's home is not a good way to maintain plaintiff
solidarity.) A draft of the C&A even proposed converting a cemetary
into a mixed-use commercial development as part of a land use shift to
build dense transit-only development around proposed bus stops in the
wetlands, which is proof that the consultants and their supporters did
not bother to consult a map and were not familiar with the area that they
were redesigning.
One of the most illegal acts that ODOT has done in recent years with
WEP was to re-scope a new range of alternatives in 2003 and 2004 without
any public notification or participation from the "Cooperating Agencies"
(who are required to participate in developing a range of alternatives).
These new road designs ranged from full scale interstate type highway
designs (grade separated interchanges without any traffic lights on WEP)
to scaled back modest WEP designs. Some of the options would exceed $200
million -- even without considering the future extension to Veneta (four
lane Oregon 126 from WEP to Territorial Highway) and the upgrade of 6th
and 7th Avenues from Garfield to I-105. The only official, publicly available
report that disclosed this new redesign of the project was the Fall 2004
"Re-Evaluation" of the EIS -- which received no public notification
that it was available. This is not how NEPA requires new expressways to
be developed ... and is one of many flaws in the process that an impartial
judge would conclude violates decades of legal precedent.
In the 1990s, the LUTRAQ (Land Use, Transportation, Air Quality) alternative
to the Portland Western Bypass showed how a combination of approaches
could outperform a highway "solution." LUTRAQ included a new
light rail line, land use zoning changes, and some small road fixes and
connectors -- it was NOT an "alternative route" for the Bypass.
Similarly, the WETLANDS alternative includes more transit, zoning changes,
road fixes and new connectors -- it is NOT a new route for the WEP (and
would not construct any part of the parkway). This is one of the most
important considerations when examining the WETLANDS alternative and any
proposals from governments, corporate interests or non-governmental organizations
for WEP alternatives.
www.registerguard.com/news/2003/11/18/d1.cr.transprojex.1118.html
Rob Zako of Eugene, a transportation funding watchdog with 1000 Friends
of Oregon, said his group chose not to speak out against the funding
for the Belt Line interchange or the $17.7 million for the West Eugene
Parkway.
The group hasn't dropped its opposition, but felt it couldn't persuade
the state commission to make last-minute changes in a funding package
that had been years in the works, Zako said. He didn't rule out future
legal action to try to halt or change the projects.
It is worth noting that numerous environmentalists in Eugene reported
around the time of this Register Guard story that they had been assured
by 1000 Friends in recent months that the WEP issue was over (since it
was being dropped) -- even while ODOT spent a half million of our tax
dollars to redesign and expand the highway project. Dead highways don't
spend our money on engineering consultants.
Even when the environmental side loses, to stay quiet is to be acquiescent.
SILENCE IS CONSENT.
"imposed silence about any area of our lives is a tool for separation
and powerlessness .... your silence will not protect you."
- Audre Lorde
If you go to 1000 Friends's website (www.friends.org), you will find
a link to "Design Damascus." It's been on their main homepage
for many months (if not longer). This refers to what is probably the largest
Urban Growth Boundary expansion in the history of land use planning in
Oregon. Damascus is south east of Portland, and that UGB expansion threatens
the Clackamas river, farmland, and will be an enormous sprawl appendage
to the Portland metro area. Having some "smart growth" rhetoric
added onto it will not prevent water and air pollution, the loss of farm
soils, increased traffic and other negative consquences of increased suburbanization.
Worst of all, the Damascus UGB expansion includes the proposed Sunrise
Freeway, a new highway from I-205 to US 26 (near Boring, Oregon - that's
a town name), an Outer Beltway segment for Portland that is about twice
as long as the WEP. Considering that 1000 Friends is probably most famous
nationally for doing great work to prevent the Western Bypass freeway
through Portland's western suburbs, it is hard to understand why they
would promote "Design Damascus," since that would require an
Eastern Bypass freeway around Portland's eastern suburbs. (The staff person
who worked for 1000 Friends to defeat the Western Bypass no longer works
for them. However, Ruth Bascom, the former pro-WEP mayor of Eugene, is
on 1000 Friends's board of directors.)
WETLANDS's comments are in RED.
Understanding the November 2001 Vote:
A Brief History of the West Eugene Parkway from August 1997 to Present
November 17, 2005
Note: The author strived to ensure the following history is accurate
and includes all the major developments around the West Eugene Parkway
during the period covered. Please notify the author if you discover
any errors or omissions.
August 1997–December 2000: TransPlan-ning the Future
Two actions set the stage for the November 2001 vote on the West Eugene
Parkway (WEP):
1) Publication of the August 1997 Supplemental Draft Environmental
Impact Statement (SDEIS); and
2) Publication of the May 1999 Revised Draft Eugene-Springfield Transportation
System Plan (TransPlan).
The SDEIS divided the WEP into four phases (“units”) and
TransPlan provided estimated costs for each phase of the $88-million
project:
• Unit 1-A: from Seneca to Beltline, four lanes, $17 million;
• Unit 1-B: from Hwy. 99 near Garfield to Seneca, four lanes,
$34 million;
• Unit 2-A: from Beltline to Hwy. 126 near Fisher Rd., first
two lanes, $31 million; and
• Unit 2-B: from Beltline to Hwy. 126 near Fisher Rd., last
two lanes, $6 million.
TransPlan included only Unit 1-A in the “financially constrained”
list of projects, i.e., projects planned for construction during the
20-year planning period. Indeed, construction of Unit 1-A has been funded
in the State Transportation Improvement Program (STIP) since 1994—even
if the project has not been ready for construction. The Oregon Department
of Transportation (ODOT) keeps rolling this funding over from one funding
cycle to the next, waiting for the project to be ready for construction.
The allocated funding for Unit 1-A is the $17 million that people talk
about “saving.”
A technical analysis by Lane Council of Governments (LCOG) staff ranked
the three unfunded units of the WEP as lower-priority projects and recommended
that these be excluded from TransPlan’s financially constrained
list of projects. Under federal regulations, only projects in the financially
constrained list can receive funding for construction.
In brief, local officials deemed the WEP overall to be lower priority
during the development of TransPlan, as it was just too expensive given
the limited amount of funding anticipated to be available for major
highway projects during the 20-year planning period.
(Note: Eugene, Springfield, Lane County and the Lane Transit District
didn’t adopt the May 1999 Revised Draft TransPlan until September
2001.)
WETLANDS note: this history downplays how
the WEP promoters were hoping to segment the project by building a key
component (Beltline to Seneca), then building the westernmost part and
waiting to the end to complete the Seneca to 99 segment (forcing its completion
by waiting until the end to build the busiest part).
December 2000–August 2001: Making Hard Funding Choices
After the release of the May 1999 Revised Draft TransPlan, which explicitly
excluded three of the four units of the WEP, a series of memos between
the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), Bureau of Land Management
(BLM) and Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) culminated in a
December 1, 2000 memo from ODOT Area Manager Bob Pirrie to Eugene Mayor
Jim Torrey and the Eugene City Council. This memo indicated that in
order to “move forward” with the WEP, the City of Eugene
(and its local partners) needed to take three actions:
1) Amend the West Eugene Wetlands Plan (WEWP) to designate the “Modified
Project alignment” (i.e., north of the railroad tracks as opposed
to south of the railroad tracks as was the case in the prior 1990
Final EIS) as a transportation corridor;
2) Amend the Eugene-Springfield Metropolitan Area General Plan (Metro
Plan) and the Lane County Rural Comprehensive Plan to take exceptions
to Statewide Planning Goal 3 (Agricultural Lands), Goal 4 (Forest
Lands), Goal 11 (Public Facilities and Services) and Goal 14 (Urbanization)
for a transportation facility on rural lands; and
3) Amend TransPlan to include the other three units of the WEP in
the financially constrained list of projects, in order to comply with
federal “segmentation” requirements.
The last requirement was especially problematic, as adding the lower-priority
units of the WEP into TransPlan would necessitate taking out higher-priority
projects, such as improvements along West 11th Avenue and Beltline Road.
Note that in Bob Pirrie’s memo, ODOT did not offer additional
funds to build the WEP, but rather forced Eugene to choose to not build
the WEP or not build other projects during the 20-year planning period
of TransPlan. (Thus statements during the November 2001 campaign that
“the money is there” and the “state will pay for it”
were somewhat misleading, as the state was not offering to build the
WEP in addition to higher-priority projects.)
Subsequently, there were many votes by the Eugene City Council back
and forth. These culminated in the June 2001 West Eugene Transportation
Charette, organized by ODOT and facilitated by Judge Michael Hogan and
Bill Blosser. Roughly 30 stakeholders participated in this 2-day event.
The primary outcome was a decision by ODOT to go to “No
Build” for the WEP, as local officials were unwilling to shift
money away from other projects to the WEP and ODOT was unwilling to
build the “half a WEP” suggested by Mayor Jim Torrey and
others.
WETLANDS: Stakeholder is a term from casinos
that refers to those who hold the "stakes" of gamblers. In the
1990s, public relations companies working for destructive projects added
a new meaning to claim that "stakeholder" really means different
groups of citizens, but perhaps it really means those who gamble that
democracy, fairness and common sense will be listened to.
Judge Hogan was asked by this writer at
the Charette if he thought it was a conflict for him to preside over the
event considering that the case could come before his court. He replied
that if that happened he would recuse himself.
The "half a WEP" is a form of
illegal segmentation that was dismissed in the 1997 SDEIS because there
is ample precedent that this strategy is extremely illegal (the Brackenridge
Park case in San Antonio is a good example of this precedent).
August 2001–November 2001: Vote of the People
But at the 11th hour, Eugene City Councilor Gary Papé called
for a vote by the people. There was much argument over the exact form
of the measure(s) before the voters, eventually resulting in the confusing
Ballot Measures 20-53 (“Alternatives”) and 20-54 (“WEP”).
Ballot Measure 20-54 asked:
“Shall City pursue funding and transportation and land use
approvals to facilitate construction of the West Eugene Parkway?”
While not explicitly spelled out, Ballot Measure 20-54 was asking
if the City of Eugene should take the three actions requested by ODOT
in Bob Pirrie’s December 1, 2000 memo.
The official informational flyer on “West Eugene Transportation
Measures” published by the City of Eugene claimed:
“The estimated cost of the [WEP] is $88.5 million in 1999
dollars.”
[Fact: While the cost of the four units of the WEP was $88.5 million,
two months prior ODOT staff had given the cost of the total WEP system
as $139.2 million, including the costs of the Terry Street Connector
at $2.2 million, improvements to West 11th Avenue between Greenhill
and Danebo at $4.5 million, and Beltline Road Stage 3 at $17 million.]
WETLANDS: In Spring 2002, Mr. Zako criticized
me for not using the $88 million figure in public outreach material. At
that point, it had become obvious, using ODOT's figures, that the true
cost of the highway was at least $150 million. The current official price
tag is $169 million, and some private, official estimates exceed $200
million. None of those figures include the future extensions to Veneta
or I-105.
A series of pro-WEP campaign ads featuring photos of Jim Torrey, Bobby
Green, Randy Papé and Bob Ackerman claimed:
“The state has the money to fund the West Eugene Parkway and
is committed to pay for it—all of it.” —Jim Torrey
[Fact: The state would not necessarily build both the WEP and higher-priority
projects.]
“The state has done everything it can to get this project ready
for construction.
Passing 20-54 gives the go-ahead to begin building the West Eugene
Parkway.”
—Randy Papé
[Fact: As the subsequent history shows, the WEP was nowhere near ready
for construction at the time of the vote.]
“It’s thoroughly planned and ready to go!”
[Fact: As the subsequent history shows, ODOT still had—and has—much
to do before the WEP was thoroughly planned and ready to go.]
“The state will build and maintain the Parkway. The Parkway
will not be the city of Eugene’s responsibility.”
[Fact: The memorandum of understanding subsequently signed by City
Manager Dennis Taylor explicitly acknowledged the intent of ODOT to
make the eastern portion of the WEP the responsibility of the City
of Eugene.]
After WEP supporters outspent opponents 3-to-1 ($120,000 to $40,000),
in part on ads containing the misleading information quoted above, Ballot
Measure 20-54 passed 51% to 49% with a margin of roughly 600 votes.
November 2001–July 2002: Local Jurisdictions Move WEP
Forward...
After the November 2001 vote, the three actions requested by ODOT
went to the planning commissions and then to the elected officials.
Notably, the Eugene Planning Commission recommended overwhelmingly against
taking the requested actions, as the money wasn’t there and ODOT
had not yet demonstrated how it planned to protect the wetlands.
In July 2002, the three actions requested by ODOT were approved by
four jurisdictions: Eugene City Council 5-3, Lane County Commissioners
3-2, Springfield City Council 4-2, and LTD Board of Directors unanimously.
During this time, there was much discussion about the “will
of the voters” and whether the vote was binding. Technically,
the vote was advisory. Some planning commissioners and elected officials
gave much weight to the vote as a statement of advice or intent from
the voters.
WETLANDS: Very few people mention that
the WEP would be a FEDERAL decision, not subject to local government approval.
After years of complaints, the Register-Guard finally mentioned this fact
in their March 2006 story announcing the selection of The Osprey Group
facilitation company to study "collaboration"
on the WEP. Hopefully, Osprey will not do to Eugene what they did to Lawrence,
Kansas (where they were part of an effort to undo environmentalist and
Native American objections to a highway through wetlands, rare butterfly
habitat and sacred sites).
Nevertheless, they concluded that they should vote against the actions
if they were not in the community’s best interests, in particular,
because building the WEP would take money away from more critical projects
and because there was not evidence that the wetlands would be adequately
protected.
In any case, with its actions in July 2002, the Eugene City Council
could be considered to have fulfilled its obligations to the voters
by doing all that ODOT had said was needed to begin construction of
the WEP.
In particular, TransPlan was amended to postpone for at least 20 years
(“future”) five major projects in order to add the missing
three units of the WEP into TransPlan’s financially constrained
list of projects. These five projects cost roughly $45 million in total
and included:
• Beltline Road Stage 3 between West 11th and Roosevelt, $17
million;
• West 11th Avenue between Terry Street and Green Hill Road,
$5 million;
• Beltline Road between River Road and Delta Highway, $13 million;
• Washington-Jefferson Bridge, extra southbound land, $4 million;
and
• Jasper Road between South 42nd and the Jasper Road Extension,
$5 million.
Inexplicably, the first two “futured” projects were actually
considered by ODOT to be essential parts of the $139-million WEP system.
Beltline Road Stage 3 would cross the WEP and include the interchange
between the WEP and Beltline. A third element of the WEP system, the
Terry Street Connector, wasn’t in TransPlan to begin with and
wasn’t added with the July 2002 amendments. Thus while the amendments
to TransPlan were nominally aimed to avoid “segmentation”
by including all of the WEP system in TransPlan, the amendments actually
failed to do so. But this defect wasn’t recognized for a couple
more years. (Not until December 2004 did the Metropolitan Policy Committee
amend the transportation plan to include all portions of the WEP, as
is necessary to gain federal approval for the project.)
WETLANDS: Actually, there are still parts
of the WEP that are still not part of the regional TransPlan, even after
the December 2004 changes.
...But Other Approvals Are Still Needed
Construction of the WEP didn’t begin after the July 2002 actions.
Instead, ODOT acknowledged some additional requirements it needed to
meet—and others emerged that ODOT failed to acknowledge:
1) Because the WEP wasn’t really “thoroughly planned
and ready to go,” ODOT needed to do additional planning.
2) Because the August 1997 SDEIS was more than three years old,
ODOT needed to submit a “Re-Evaluation Report” to FHWA
to determine if there had been “significant” changes necessitating
a new Supplemental Draft EIS.
3) ODOT needed to address concerns for wetlands from “cooperating
agencies” BLM and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) before
those agencies could sign off on a Supplemental Final EIS (SFEIS).
WETLANDS: Legally, ODOT needs to have the
"cooperating agencies"
participate in the Scoping of Alternatives, the Draft EIS and the Final
EIS. ODOT is only letting these agencies participate at the end of the
process, which is not legal. BLM and Army Corps cannot use the SFEIS to
justify their decisions on the WEP, they will need to create their own
public processes or ensure that the ODOT / FHWA approval process follow
the law regarding cooperating agencies responsibilities to participate
at all stages of the EIS (Scoping through Final EIS). There is also no
mention of ODOT's secret effort to remove Section 4(f) from the BLM nature
preserves in 1999 -- perhaps because the author is personally not fond
of Mark Robinowitz (who exposed ODOT's efforts on this issue).
4) ODOT needed to get a waiver from the U.S. Department of Interior,
with at least the tacit approval of Congress, to waive its policy
that lands purchased with Land and
Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) monies be protected in perpetuity.
The WEP would pass through lands purchased by the BLM with LWCF dollars
secured by Congressman DeFazio for the purposes of protecting those
wetlands.
5) ODOT needed to obtain a “Section 404” wetlands fill
permit from the USACE under the Clean Water Act (CWA). The Section
404 process is similar to but distinct from the EIS process.
6) The Oregon Department of State Lands (DSL) and BLM needed to
acknowledge or adopt the West Eugene Wetland Plan amendments adopted
in July 2002 by the local jurisdictions.
7) As noted above, local jurisdictions needed to amend TransPlan
to include all of the WEP system. The July 2002 amendments to TransPlan
were inadequate, as they failed to include the whole system.
July 2002–Present: Redesign and Re-Evaluation
ODOT hired the consulting firm URS, who in turn hired consultant Leon
Skiles, to redesign and re-evaluate the WEP. At the recent Eugene City
Council meeting, Leon Skiles reported he has been doing this additional
planning work for 2-1/2 years—and ODOT still isn’t finished
planning and designing the WEP. ODOT continues to change the design
of the WEP, adding or removing grade-separated interchanges, changing
the alignment of the WEP, and otherwise trying to improve the performance
of the facility and/or reduce its impacts and cost. ODOT has spent millions
of dollars since the November 2001 vote to redesign and re-evaluate
the WEP.
WETLANDS: ODOT issued a contract to complete
the EIS to URS for about $1.7 million, roughly the amount of money that
would be needed to fix intersections on West 11th (a critical part of
the WEP alternative - and needed even if WEP is built).
As a result of the redesign and re-evaluation of the WEP, ODOT concluded
that the WEP east of Beltline Road would not actually meet ODOT’s
standards for traffic flow on a state highway, but could be designed
to meet the City of Eugene’s lesser standards. Thus ODOT asked
the City of Eugene and/or Lane County to enter into a memorandum of
understanding (MOU) that they would accept ownership of (and responsibility
for) the eastern half of the WEP after it was constructed by ODOT. In
August 2004, the Lane County Board of Commissioners declined to sign
an MOU, saying the WEP should be Eugene’s responsibility. In September
2004, Eugene City Manager Dennis Taylor signed the MOU, stating that
previous council actions (in July 2002) demonstrated support for the
WEP and that he had the authority to sign the MOU without further action
by the Council.
WETLANDS: The City of Eugene, despite the
change of position on the WEP in October 2005, has continued the MOU with
ODOT.
Despite the changes to the design and ultimate ownership of the WEP
and concerns voiced by BLM and USACE, FHWA concluded that there have
not been significant changes to the project since August 1997 and authorized
ODOT to continue work towards a Supplemental Final EIS (SFEIS). Currently,
ODOT is stating that the SFEIS could be completed by spring 2006.
July 2002–Present: Continuing Concerns for Wetlands
In summer 2004, both BLM and USACE sent memos to ODOT and FHWA signaling
that ODOT was not providing the information they would need to fulfill
their regulatory obligations, in particular, in regards to wetlands.
ODOT is still developing information around wetlands. ODOT has not yet
begun to address the LWCF issues.
A September 9, 2005 memo from Teena Monical of USACE to ODOT indicated
that the USACE’s “regulations require [USACE] in all cases
to exercise independent judgment in defining the purpose and need for
the project from both [ODOT’s] and the public’s perspective.”
Under the Clean Water Act, USACE can issue a wetland fill permit only
if there are no “practicable alternatives” to construction
in wetlands that meet the purpose and need as defined by USACE. While
ODOT may have already concluded there is no acceptable alternative to
the WEP, there is no guarantee that USACE’s independent review
of the project will conclude there are no practicable alternatives to
the WEP and issue the wetlands fill permit ODOT requires to begin construction.
Neither DSL nor BLM have taken steps to acknowledge or adopt the July
2002 amendments to the West Eugene Wetlands Plan. The City of Eugene
has not yet initiated the process of seeking the required state acknowledgement
of the July 2002 amendments to the West Eugene Wetlands Plan, a process
that typically takes from 12 to 18 months.
December 2004: Amending TransPlan Again
On December 9, 2004, the Metropolitan Policy Committee (MPC) adopted
the newly created Central Lane Regional Transportation Plan (RTP), which
was essentially an amended version of the July 2002 TransPlan, for the
purposes of meeting federal transportation planning requirements and
preserving federal transportation funding. MPC rejected a motion by
Eugene City Councilor Bonny Bettman that the WEP in the RTP should be
substantially the same as the WEP approved by voters in November 2001.
Instead, the amendments combined Units 2-A and 2-B of the WEP into a
single unit and modified the estimated costs of the units:
• Unit 1-A: from Seneca to Beltline, four lanes, $18 million;
• Unit 1-B: from Hwy. 99 near Garfield to Seneca, four lanes,
$36 million; and
• Unit 2: from Beltline to Hwy. 126 near Fisher Rd., four lanes,
$60 million.
The amendments also added portions of the WEP system that had been
inexplicably excluded from the July 2002 TransPlan:
• Beltline Road at WEP (formerly Beltline Road Stage 3), $45
million; and
• Terry Street Connector at WEP, $10 million.
Between the July 2002 TransPlan and the December 2004 RTP, the cost
of the WEP had grown from $88 million to $169 million because 1) the
July 2002 amendments left out needed pieces of the WEP, 2) the redesign
of the WEP resulted in the need for an interchange at WEP and Beltline,
thereby increasing costs, and 3) inflation.
WETLANDS: In 1986, the Eugene City Council
passed a resolution urging ODOT to include an interchange at Beltline
as part of the project. The 1995 Beltline Environmental Assessment included
a WEP / Beltline interchange as part of the Beltline widening project.
The 1997 WEP SDEIS documented in several ways how an interchange was an
inseparable part of the project (and that the WEP would lack "independent
utility" without the interchange). The 2003 and 2004 redesigns did
not change these facts. $88 million was never an accurate figure for the
WEP.
Future: Projected Timeline
And that brings us up to the October 2005 vote by the Eugene City
Council.
Four years after the November 2001 vote, the WEP is still not “thoroughly
planned and ready to go” and it is still far from fully funded.
Conservatively, taking into account required approvals (not to mention
possible lawsuits), it might be another 5 years before construction
of the WEP could begin, and then only the eastern portion. It might
be 10 years before the rest of the $169 million could be obtained and
enough of the WEP completed to serve as an east-west bypass.
Postscript: Legal Challenges
Lastly, appeals against decisions supporting the WEP since August
1997 are not mentioned above. There have been appeals, but these have
generally not further delayed ODOT from obtaining required approvals
for the WEP. The delays in the project are primarily a result of the
complexity of the project and the inherent difficulty of trying to build
a highway through the middle of nationally recognized wetlands purchased,
in part, with federal dollars intended to protect those wetlands in
perpetuity.
The July 2002 actions by the City of Eugene and other local jurisdictions
were appealed to the Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA), which generally
affirmed the actions. (LUBA’s ruling was further appealed to the
Court of Appeals, which upheld the lower court’s ruling without
opinion.) The December 2004 amendments to the RTP by MPC were appealed
to LUBA, who dismissed the appeal, ruling that the amendments were not
land use decisions and thus not within their jurisdiction.
On the other hand, a lawsuit originally unrelated to the WEP is resulting
in the designation of “critical habitats” for threatened
and endangered species in the wetlands. Such designations will better
protect the wetlands and may further frustrate efforts to construct
the WEP, which is planned to cut through some of those critical habitats.
Credits
The information above is provided as a public service by:
Rob Zako Transportation Advocate, 1000 Friends of Oregon rob@friends.org
Additional Information
ODOT: History of the West Eugene Parkway
http://www.oregon.gov/ODOT/HWY/REGION2/wep.shtml#Project_History
ODOT: West Eugene Parkway
http://www.oregon.gov/ODOT/HWY/REGION2/wep.shtml
City of Eugene: West Eugene Parkway
http://www.eugene-or.gov/portal/server.pt?space=CommunityPage&cached=true&
parentname=CommunityPage&parentid=1&in_hi_userid=2&control=SetCommunity&
CommunityID=664&PageID=1445
City of Eugene: Natural Resources
http://www.eugene-or.gov/portal/server.pt?space=CommunityPage&cached=true&
parentname=CommunityPage&parentid=0&in_hi_userid=2&control=SetCommunity&
CommunityID=217&PageID=1358
Note: This website (the only non-governmental
website about WEP history) was deliberately excluded from this report
even though it has a tremendous amount of background information on it.
It is sad that there is so little sense of community solidarity by some
activists, since cooperation usually results in a more successful outcome.
